Leading Article: Well, do we all want cars or not?

ONE OF THE dubious achievements of the Thatcher years (which, thanks to her autobiography, we shall soon be revisiting ad nauseam this autumn) was the erosion of the old moral restraints in British thought, speech and behaviour. People could say - and they did - 'I am rich. So what? It is good to be rich]' People could say - and they did - 'I am greedy. So what? Greed makes the world go round]' It was a kind of liberation. You could acknowledge the worms inside the human heart, and bring them out and have them blessed as the driving forces of national prosperity. This was the era, and it may not be a coincidence, when the business classes became public nuisances as drunks, wild-eyed and loose-tied late at night in railway terminals, unshackled from the old stereotype of a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella on the 5.25 to Dorking. You might argue that in this way Margaret Thatcher abolished the vice of hypocrisy. You might also worry that in this way she killed, or at least wounded, that enabler of virtue which Adam Smith identified as 'the spectator in the breast', the watching spirit that makes us behave better than we might because we crave the respect and affection of others.

That era of bourgeois triumphalism has passed, the pop of champagne is diminuendo, the red braces have been hung at the back of the wardrobe. We now have a Prime Minister who sees himself as Baldwin, striving to put the nation at ease with itself, plucking metaphors from Orwell and cricket, trying to paper over the gulf that Mrs Thatcher opened in the languid flow of English history (not British history, for the metaphors are always from the South). If anything in the Conservative Party amounts to Majorism, this shallow evocation of the national soul is probably it. But Majorism is presentational rather than philosophical. What does the modern Conservative Party actually believe? A clue came last week from John MacGregor, Secretary of State for Transport, when he announced his intention to speed up the Government's road-building programme by reducing 'bureaucratic and time-wasting procedures' during a new road's journey from the drawing board at the Department of Transport to its completion as another piece of crowded tarmac cutting through fields, hillsides and houses. At present the average time taken between a new road's announcement and its completion is 13 years, thanks partly to opposition mounted during public inquiries. Mr MacGregor said he he wanted that cut to 10 years and, later, to eight. Given the apparent unpopularity of road-building programmes - the row at Twyford Down, the victory for the protesters at Oxleas Wood - this announcement might seem like just another small chapter in the inept story of Tory party public relations. But Mr MacGregor reads minds differently. People object to cars only when they are not actually travelling in them, and therefore, as he said on the radio, '99 per cent of people want a bypass if their village or town needs bypassing. They want improved (that is, more) roads because more and more people are using them.'

We know from this, as we have long known, that the Government believes in private transport over public, in roads over railways, in lorries and cars over freight wagons and passenger trains. This is the Government, after all, that wants to create in a 14-line M25 the widest stretch of road outside the United States, and increase the permitted tonnage of lorries with the implausible excuse that it will benefit rail freight (see our report on page seven). But we also know from Mr MacGregor's words that he and his colleagues still believe they have the truest key to the human heart and that thing, beloved of fatalists and cynics, called human nature. Mrs Thatcher knew hypocrisy when she saw it, and so (they trust) do they. On the one hand, Britons would like an improved National Health Service. On the other hand, they do not wish to pay more taxes. On the one hand, they want to preserve pastures filled with cowslips and butterflies. On the other hand, they want to drive cars down unjammed motorways. In each they will act in the self-interest that modern Conservatism has helpfully identified for them. It may be narrow, it may be short-term, but it may also win the next election.

Since 1979 the Tory party has diagnosed this private mood correctly, at least among the large minority of the public that has four times voted it to power. And the truth is that most of us, when it comes to the car, are in a mote and beam situation. How many anti-motorway meetings have been convened in towns and villages where the angry participants have arrived and departed by car? But governments, or good governments, have a duty to the populations they serve that extends beyond the selfish here and now. Already, says a report published by the Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Countryside Commission, 'the tranquillity of the rural South-east (has been) shattered by growth in development, roads, and traffic'. But that in 30 years' time will be the least of it. Today there are about 25 million vehicles in Britain. By 2025, unless political and social attitudes change, there will be between 39 million and 44 million. In London car ownership is predicted to rise by 50 per cent over the next 17 years. The consequent damage to our health, our countryside and our cities should be too well known to need description. The Government, by failing to heed the warnings and stubbornly sticking to its passion for roads and cars, is betraying our future.