• COMMENT VOTE GRABBING • For a party which is
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presented as a middle-of-the-road alternative, the SDP/Liberal Alliance's latest pronouncements on road transport hardly get it off the hard shoulder, at least in terms of generating new ideas.
The Alliance wants to spend more money on roads and to improve traffic management. So far so good. It also wants to set up a national heavy lorry roads network. Having done that, however, it wants to use that network to restrict the movement of trucks in residential areas by encouraging local authorities to impose lorry bans.
Even the most politically naive will have grasped that while the Alliance may have difficulty persuading people that more money should be spent on roads, it will have no trouble campaigning on a lorry ban ticket.
Furthermore, if the Alliance ever finds itself holding the balance between Labour and Conservative in a hung Parliament, which part of its transport policy do you think it would be prepared to sacrifice in order to share power? A clue: it would not be lorry bans.