“ENOUGH is enough,” said Tim Collins, then the Shadow Minister for Transport, at last year’s Conservative Party conference. “We will tell the police and the courts to concentrate not on easy catches but on the really dangerous drivers.”

Exactly what the Tories’ road safety policy will mean in practice became clear yesterday: the “really dangerous drivers” the Tories have in mind don’t really drive at all, they pedal. The party has tabled an amendment to the Road Safety Bill which would make it an offence, punishable by a £60 fine, to ride a bicycle while talking on a mobile phone.

It is an issue on which I have the greatest sympathy with the Conservatives’ former arts spokesman, Boris Johnson, who famously scorned an Islington woman after she ticked him off for using his mobile phone while cycling. If ever there was an easy catch, it is a cyclist on the phone. What chance is there of being caught making a sneaky call when you are behind the tinted windscreen of your BMW? Make a call on a bicycle, on the other hand, and you can be seen 100 yards away. Never mind that a careless motorist is capable of causing far more destruction than an errant cyclist; you can guess who the police would be more successful at apprehending.

The Conservatives are apt to describe any measure designed to improve road safety as an attempt to “penalise and cripple” motorists. They demand that speed cameras be felled and speed humps be flattened. They want to reduce the powers of traffic wardens and they want to raise the motorway speed limit to 80mph.

Yet they then go out of their way to persecute cyclists. There is no fairness or balance in the Tories’ approach to transport; rather they have set themselves up as the political wing of the Motorists’ Liberation Front.

Their target voter is a foul-mouthed yob in a company car who sees it as the right of a freeborn Englishman to drive wherever he likes at whatever speed he chooses, to park on the pavement, to pay no tax himself but expect other people’s taxes to be spent ironing out every last bump in the road and who then screams blue murder whenever pedestrians or cyclists attempt to exercise the smallest degree of freedom.

I’m a motorist myself, but if this is the way the Conservatives are heading, I’ll be quoting Norman Tebbit at my Conservative candidate next May — on yer bike.

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