The failure of politicians and journalists to recognise the public mood about fuel prices can be blamed on the metropolitan cocoon which they inhabit.
The car is now the largest item in the budget of most British households. The average weekly expenditure per household in 1998-99 was ?51.70 on motoring and ?57.20 on housing. But the motoring figure includes the 28 per cent of households which do not have cars. If the expenditure were averaged only over households which do have cars, it would total around ?71.80 per car-using household before the recent rounds of fuel price increases.
The centrality of the car is turning young Britons into Italians. In order to have the money to run a car, they are living at home with their parents until they form a permanent relationship with a partner. Their parents' generation, by contrast, chose to have their own flat before buying a car.
The metropolitan elite has failed to grasp this, because in London things are different. In London just 63 per cent of households have a car. In most other regions of Britain car ownership rates of around 75 per cent are more typical. In London there is a public transport system which works well enough for people to rely on it for work, school and social life. Also, house prices are much higher in London so rent and mortgage payments remain a larger proportion of family budgets.
Outside London, the call for people to use public transport rather than their cars is unrealistic. The lack of public transport in rural areas is now acknowledged. But the situation in many towns and cities is not much better. Public transport is infrequent and not reliable enough for people to use it to go to work. Often the routes run from residential areas to the town centre, whereas employment is increasingly in edge-of-town business parks. Many routes cease to operate after 6pm, which rules them out for people who work outside an 8am to 5pm day. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that employers are reluctant to hire people without their own transport.
So, the car secures the livelihood. This is why petrol price increases throw budgets into disarray. Filling the tank of a family car just once a week at 83p a litre costs about ?10 a week more than filling it at 66p a litre. Politicians and journalists seldom run a car from their own pockets. But a family on average earnings of about ?20,000 a year has to find the extra ?10 from another area of spending.
The fuel duty escalator was designed to reduce fuel consumption. But the inability of ordinary families to function without cars means that it has become a tax on a necessity. It has come to be resented in the same way that the poll tax was resented.
In many other countries (Germany and Sweden, for example) car ownership is higher than in Britain, but car usage is lower. People make more local journeys on foot or cycle. They are more inclined to use public transport to get around their own towns, because it is cheap and reliable. In Britain, public transport is trapped in a vicious circle. Low usage means low revenues, which means a low incentive to improve. If the only alternative is a dirty, irregular bus service, people will not abandon their comfortable and reliable cars. The improvements will have to come first if car usage is to be reduced.
The same metropolitan ignorance about the role that the car plays in family life may lie at the root of the government's other big headache-the Dome. Competition for the project was between a site in Birmingham, with good car parking and a mainline railway station, and a derelict site on the edge of London. The decision to award the project to London was never a popular one outside the capital.
Further, although a London-based family may be happy to travel to the Dome on the underground, a family living in Birmingham or Newcastle would only be likely to go if they could take the car. Once you have a car to get to work, it is much cheaper to use it for social journeys than it is to travel by train. "Cheap" train fares are only generally available for journeys starting after 9.30am. That means only an afternoon at the Dome. If a family of four wanted a full day's visit, they would have to pay to stay in a hotel, or spend a great deal more on travel. A family of four travelling from Birmingham in autumn half-term week would have to pay ?240 for their train tickets. It is much cheaper to drive to Alton Towers or Blackpool for the day. It might even be cheaper to go to Disneyland Paris, once the savings on a boot full of beer are included.
It is unheard of for a new visitor attraction of such a size not to expect at least a quarter of its visitors to come by car. Even where public transport links are good, many visitors will approach from directions that do not readily intersect with the transport services. Moreover, the Dome has no park-and-ride facilities to encourage car-borne families to switch to the excellent tube service for the last stage of their journey.
The public supported the fuel blockaders against the government, not because farmers and hauliers are popular groups or because their plea for a right to earn a decent living has any more merit than that of the miners confronted with pit closures. Rather it is because the protesters were seen to understand, and in some way to embody, the central role of the car in the life of ordinary British people. n
