Hoot your horn if you love liberty. Thanks to Labour’s £7 billion roadbuilding programme, I will be freer to follow my will and rev my nice shiny polluting VW Polo down the motorways and A-roads of Britain.

Cast your mind back to those dark days when new Labour came to power, armed with all sorts of naive and fanciful, soggy Green ideals. There was a moratorium on all the carefully crafted roadbuilding plans, for no better reason than that they had been devised by gas-guzzling Tories. Instead, a party that thinks in grooves wanted us all to travel along straight iron lines, following a timetable decided on by some Fat Controller, to destinations far from where we wanted to go. The very essence of statism.

Such was the anti-car hysteria that Labour fostered that I suspect the only reason a Motorists’ Register — complete with shaming photos and zero tolerance posters — wasn’t introduced was that it might conflict with the Human Rights Act. Thankfully, Alistair Darling has woken up and smelt the exhaust fumes of a thousand jammed cars.

“I don’t believe that a policy that is designed to drive people off the roads is likely to command much support,” he said earlier this week. At last! Sure, it’s a U-turn. But one politician’s U-turn is another one’s growing up, and if new Labour is doing the right thing at last, who am I to quibble?

So what reasonable person could possibly object? Friends of the Earth, broken down on the intellectual hard shoulder of life, hooted its disappoval. “It’s completely unnecessary and a waste of money. It will have all sorts of effects on people’s health, through the pollution, and on our special sites, our most sacred sites,” chuntered a spokesman.

Sacred? What’s so sacred about some piece of grass that used to be a Saxon pissoir? Unnecessary? Tell that to those poor souls stuck on the M25. A waste of money? So what should the Government be spending our money on? Yet more schools and hospitals (erm, out of town and only accessible by car)?

Expecting FoE to be in favour of roadbuilding is a bit like expecting the Animal Liberation Front to take out a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. One wonders if these weirdoes have ever approved of a new road, power station, housing estate, the smallest stumbling step of human progress.

We have a population of 60 million, so we can’t all just live in the Orkneys and raise organic radishes. No, to become authentic citizens, all capable of realising our potential, we must have freedom of movement. And no one has the right to judge someone else’s journey to be frivolous or unnecessary. The single-issue crazies don’t recognise this. Convinced that global warming will overheat Mother Nature, they just want a drastic curtailment on the liberties of those pesky polluters (aka humans). They would rather we were landbound peasants, stuck in our villages, unaware of anything on the other side of the mountain.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these people who looks at a meadow and sighs: “Ah, if only that could be turned into a multistorey car park.” Some of my best friends are cyclists and I’ve even been known to walk. But let’s get real: these measures don’t go far enough. We’re still way behind the rest of the EU in that we have the fewest miles of motorway per head of population.

But after several decades of cash-grabbing infractions of motorists’ rights — speed limits, seatbelts, breathalyser tests and speed cameras — it is good to see the Government paying some lip- service to freedom. Never forget: those tales of full-throttled self-expression are called road movies, not rail movies.

The author writes the publicinterest.co.uk website