Is there any cheaper way for a politician to gain popular appeal than to bash foreign lorry drivers? The Labour MP Louise Ellman, chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Transport, laid into Polish and Czech hauliers yesterday for bringing menace to our roads, as her commitee published a report that claimed almost half of vehicles examined in Britain and registered overseas were unroadworthy.

Ms Ellman was echoing a long campaign by the freight haulage industry to clamp down on dastardly foreigners who come here to steal jobs from good old British drivers.

And she and the industry are half right. Foreign lorry drivers can be a menace. Almost everyone seems to have a tale of being sideswiped, or seeing someone else sideswiped, by a foreign truck as it slewed into a motorway lane without its driver taking a proper look.

But no one should pretend that British lorries are much less of a menace. The select committee wants the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa) to have more powers to pursue foreign lorries, for instance inspecting them as they arrive in port. Yet Vosa already targets foreign lorries with abandon. Between 2005-06 and 2007-08 the number of checks on them increased by 25 per cent — and the number of checks on British lorries fell by 42 per cent.

Yet there is little to suggest that British lorries are much better. Both had shocking breaches in safety. In the latter period, 33.1 per cent of foreign lorries and 28.6 per cent of British lorries had faults serious enough for them to be banned from the road.

No industry in Britain is better at whining than the haulage business — and no industry has been so heavily indulged. Remember the heroes’ reception that greeted hauliers in September 2000 when they nearly brought the country to a standstill by blockading oil refineries in protest at what they saw as unfair diesel taxes?

At the time the average heavy lorry was paying £25,000 in tax – and costing the taxpayer £28,000 in damage to the roads. Since then taxes have been cut and the gap has grown far wider. According to a study last year by the Metropolitan Transport Research Unit, a planning consultancy, lorries pay in tax only between 36 per cent and 61 per cent of the cost of infrastructural and environmental damage they cause.

Rather than lashing out at foreign lorries, the select committee should address the problem properly. Why aren’t we carrying more freight by rail and waterway? Why are 44-tonne lorries allowed on small lanes? Whether these beasts of the road are British or foreign is less important than whether they should be on the road at all.

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