While it"s not brave...

While it"s not brave enough to publicly admit it, Labour is clearly anti-car, and so are the Lib Dems. Fair enough. At least those of us who sit down and work these things out for ourselves (rather than read the nauseous party manifesto propaganda) know where we stand with these two motorist-bashing political outfits. The Conservatives are slightly different; traditionally, they have tended to be more sympathetic towards the existence of cars and the 50 million people who drive or get driven in them.

And that"s why I"m even more angry with the short-sighted Conservatives than the other two. Howard"s party did well to win a shade more votes than Labour in England - significant as it"s the biggest country in Britain by some margin, with far more voters than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. But over the whole of Britain, the Conservatives didn"t do nearly as well, although they did attract a total of nearly nine million votes against just over nine-and-a-half million for Tony Thatcher"s Labour.

But it could so, so easily, have been very different. All Michael Howard had to do was acknowledge and make several genuine, costed and deliverable commitments to Britain"s forgotten car users. Had he done so, I honestly believe he and the Conservatives would have won not by a few hundred thousand votes, but by several million.

High-profile political issues such as the Iraq War, illegal immigration or even the Health Service are hugely important, but they don"t impact on the lives of most people, most days of the week. Conversely, traffic congestion, rip-off fuel and other motoring taxes, under-investment in road expenditure, unnecessarily dangerous streets and pavements, over-zealous parking regimes and cynical, money-making speed cameras all eat away at the British people, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Not all Brits, mind. Just the 50 million men, women and children who use cars on a regular basis.

Let"s make a conservative (no pun intended) guess and say 34m of that 50m are adults who qualify to vote. Let"s make a further assumption that only half these men and women would vote for a new-look, unashamedly motoring-obsessed Conservative party. That, at a stroke, is 17 million votes for the Car Using Conservative (CUC) party - more than New Labour and the Lib Dems got between them across Britain on 5 May.