According to the Department of Transport’s Norman Baker, the UK will not be banning cars from city centres ‘anymore than we will be having rectangular bananas’.
The unusually forthright language is in response to an idea from European Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas that banning conventionally fuelled cars from city centres by 2050 would help cut emissions by around 60%.
Kallas’ ideas are part of a ‘Single European Transport Area’ with the aim of drastically changing transport patterns in the coming decades.
But Baker’s response is remarkable for two reasons: firstly that its tone harks back to an era where fervent anti-EU utterances were the preserve of the unbending Tory Eurosceptics that felled John Major’s government. (Baker is a Liberal Democrat).
And secondly, that Britain is seemingly at odds with a proposal that would surely benefit the country if ever implemented. Britain is a crowded country and it likes its cars. City centres are regularly gridlocked. Looking at ways of changing the current situation must be a priority.
Admittedly being ‘governed by Brussels’ remains a very unpopular thought in the UK, but like his boss Philip Hammond’s attack on HS2 ‘nimbys’, Norman Baker’s language today suggests something very strange is happening. Can we infer a siege mentality at the Department for Transport?
When part of the EU’s proposals discuss shifting half of middle distance ‘city to city’ journeys from rail to road, perhaps the DfT is being a little quick to pull up the drawbridge to proposals this country, more than most in the EU, needs to consider?
