Читать книгу The World and London According to Nick Ferrari - Nick Ferrari - Страница 7

Let’s get one thing absolutely straight about the congestion tax (or ‘charge’ as some people like to call it). It is absolutely, bona fide, fundamentally, one hundred per cent wrong. We’re supposed to have a socialist mayor, but frankly you could well imagine Attila the Hun wreaking horrible violence on his top transport man for suggesting such a measure, on the basis that it might make him appear a little too far to the right.

Here’s the lunacy of it. For the captains of industry, the people who make all the money, eight quid is small change – they throw it in and don’t even notice it; and it doesn’t really matter to them anyway because their companies will probably assume the charge. The same goes for those city whiz kids racing around in their Porsches from one champagne bar to another – they probably spend more than that on their Double Decaff Skinny Macchiato with a Twist every morning, and just don’t feel the pain. The people it affects are the firefighters, and the office cleaners, and the people who have to take their kids to school – all of a sudden it’s them who have to find this money they can hardly afford. How can that be a socialist policy, or one that is acceptable to a socialist mayor? We try to persuade these key workers to come and live in the city, but the moment they get in their car, we hit them with this.

So what are the options if you don’t want to pay congestion tax? Don’t tell me public transport is OK – it’s an absolute disaster. You try to catch a bus: it won’t turn up on time; if you’re very, very, lucky you’ll get a seat, but you’ll probably sit next to some crackhead dope-dealer who is almost certainly going to want to rip you to shreds or try to sell you drugs, and you’ll be lucky to get away with your life. Or you try to catch a train: the windows have all been etched by those kids who carve into the glass with special knives; and the seats are dirty at the best, ripped to shreds at the worst; and let’s face it, you are going to be the person that the mumbling nutter nursing his can of lager decides to come and sit next to. The only time to travel by train is a brief window between 10.30 in the morning (when the office workers are at work) and 2.30 in the afternoon (when the winos wake up); any time other than that and it is absolute Hades. I am utterly convinced that if you tried to transport livestock in those sort of conditions, you’d have the animal-rights activists firebombing your house and eco-warriors living up the trees in your garden. Do you remember the advertising campaign one of the train companies came up with a while back, boasting about the fact that each day they shift more people than took part in the D-Day landings? Why would you think this is a good thing? People died in the D-Day landings. Horribly.

The bottom line is this: people love their cars. And they cost us a lot of money: we spend more on buying them than anyone else in Europe because of all the taxes; we have the most expensive petrol, the most expensive road tax and the most expensive insurance. We’re funding the government on four or five different levels, and then they have the brass neck to say, ‘Oh, by the way, if you want to drive in the city, it’s an extra eight quid.’

Now obviously I’m not saying that London’s roads do not have a deep-seated traffic problem. Indeed, it is ripping into the very fabric of society as we know it, as is illustrated by Nick Ferrari’s Law of Lateness. This states that the deeper the friction in your relationship, the more traffic you’ll be stuck in or the later the train will be. You’ve been promising for the last three weeks that you’ll be home early tonight so that you can all go out for dinner together – a nice cosy evening with your well-adjusted nuclear family. Bugger me if that isn’t the one time they decide to dig up the high street and put in a one-way system that takes you via Aldershot, or some silly sod has thrown himself under a train at Herne Hill and the whole network’s down…

So something clearly needs to be done, but there’s a simple solution to London’s traffic problems: build more roads. Don’t give me any of this green crap about everybody ditching their cars and getting on their bikes. Let’s build a bloody big road right through the middle of Eltham like they wanted to a few years back, and take it right over the river – or even under the river. Let’s have some intelligent thought processes. Let’s do what they do in some American cities and make the bridges one way. And please, let’s stop carving up more and more of our roads and giving them to cyclists! Not only is their ridiculous garb an obvious target for the fashion police, but those green cycle boxes by traffic lights are the final insult to us drivers. They are supposed to give cyclists a good head start, but if anyone can find a cyclist who can travel as quickly as my Mercedes, will somebody please send him an application form for the Tour de France at the double? I’m driving a car, for crying out loud! It’s a fact of life: cars fast, bikes slow – you’re going to have to get out of the way! The only purpose those green boxes serve is allowing me to choose which one of the buggers I’m going to terrorise when it’s time for the off.

There’s nothing worse than a smug cyclist telling you how fit they are and how quickly they got into work on their bike. Fine – at least I don’t smell like a teenage boys’ changing room when I arrive. And my desire to get cyclists off the road even had the support of the scientific community. It has now been conclusively shown that male cyclists who wear those ridiculous tight cycling shorts are far more likely to become impotent. They cut off the flow of blood to their genitals and it sends their potency plummeting. So you see, cyclists of London, it’s not that we hate you – it’s just that we’re trying to protect your knackers. And if Ken Livingstone was to stop making life so hard for us drivers, we’d be free to continue our good work in peace.