SO, I’M ALL right, Darling. In fact, I’d say this day is long overdue. To be quite frank, you lot have been in my way for far too long, with your ten-year-old Mondeos and your lousy little runarounds, taking up space that could be put to far better use for busy people like, well, me. Don’t worry, I’ll stay in touch. I’ll wave cheerily each morning as I pass, but do not be offended if I no longer stop to chat. With half the country now holed up at bus stops, I am expecting to be able to get my toe down, if you know what I mean. Oh yes, I am beginning to warm to this new socialism. Vote Labour. Keep the poor off the roads. Now that’s progress.

In the Soviet Union, luxurious Zil limos once cruised the motorways on lanes reserved for communist party officials. The same elite had access to exclusive hospitals, schools and health resorts. “It is like living in the West, only you’re still here,” an excited comrade told the Christian Science Monitor in 1981. And so it will be for Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, and the other party faithful loyal to the noted socialist Anthony Blair, once this Government has its way on road pricing. For anyone with an expense account, a right few quid, a government car funded by taxes or a criminal record and a set of pliers, happy days are here again. For those with a low-paid job, their own car and a nervous disposition, I think that’s your bus over there. Oh, sorry, it’s cancelled.

Governments are always immune to their worst decisions. Do you think the mess that has been made of education in this country has actually affected one minister, one truly senior politician from any party, in the last century? They work the system, or go outside it. No exceptions. When Labour party policy did not suit Diane Abbott, she ignored it. Try to get your little ray of sunshine a foothold where baby Leo will go to school. The same with health, the same with visa applications, the same with road pricing. It is not a tax for them. It is not a tax for footballers and pop stars with more SUVs than sense. It is a tax for you. Specifically you. You want improvements in public transport (top of every poll as a way of improving traffic congestion since clipboards began); they want to stick you with a debt that ministers will settle with loose change. Those in favour of road pricing claim the monthly invoice will be just like getting a telephone bill. Yes it will. And do you think Tony and Cherie Blair will ever worry about paying one of those?

How many cars owned by high wage-earners have been kept off the road by London’s congestion charge? I’ll tell you to a decimal point. None. Not one person within a certain income bracket gives it a thought. They might moan, they might begrudge, they might feel a childish sensation of victory over Red Ken and the forces of oppression if a sneaky back double saves a fiver, but they still drive wherever they want, whenever they want. Road pricing does nothing to negate the unnecessary journey for a packet of fags by some rich bastard, it just means some poor bastard takes twice as long to get to work on two trains and a bus.

The lack of differentiation is key. Remember when John Prescott used a government car to travel 200 yards during the Labour Party conference in 1999, so that the Bournemouth breeze would not spoil his wife Pauline’s hair? That stupid, vain, self-indulgent little trip would still take place, and the taxpayer would still cover it. But a nurse in Bristol, for instance, whose mum was rushed to hospital in Luton at eight in the morning would pay premium rate all the way down the motorway, for a journey that could, quite literally, be a matter of life and death. That is, if she could afford it. This is not fair. This is not socialist in any sense. This is anti-social, anti-family, anti-community; and anything that makes it harder for people to connect with each other, ultimately reduces the quality of life as surely as exhaust fumes.

Government says that something must be done, of course, because traffic on the M25 orbital motorway around London is projected to continue growing by 6 per cent each year. Yet whose fault is that? Who is planning to put 500,000 new homes in the London-Stansted-Cambridge corridor? Who wants 370,000 houses built in Milton Keynes and the South Midlands when the foot of the M1 is unplayable as it is? The story of London’s motorway network is a litany of bad planning, flawed compromise and a quite astonishing lack of foresight.

The thinking really did not move on much beyond the north and south circular roads plotted by Sir Charles Bressey and Sir Edward Lutyens, who, in 1937, drew their conclusions having “traversed continuously in a 16 HP Austin Light Six touring car”. Wouldn’t you just know it? The M25, circumventing one of the biggest cities in the world and in places dropping down to the same number of lanes used to connect the capital with Clacton-on-Sea, but fewer than the M180 to Scunthorpe, has always had the feel of a road designed by a committee of former public schoolboys who did not anticipate a lot of working-class people owning cars. John Gilbert (ex-Merchant Taylors, former Transport Minister, now Baron Gilbert of Dudley) announced it in 1975 and was no doubt surprised to hear it declared obsolete on the day it was opened in October 1986. Now, three decades on, Alistair Darling (Loretto School, Musselburgh, 20 grand a year, if you’re interested), will return it, and all of Britain’s thoroughfares, to the rightful owners.

Company car drivers, getaway men, Jamiroquai, Rio Ferdinand and Pauline Prescott. So vote Labour. Keep the riff-raff off the roads. You know it makes sense.