TOM UTLEY: For the primary time ever, I’m cheering on a Labour council now the People’s Republic of Haringey is charging drivers of Chelsea tractors extra to park

For once I heartily applaud a Labour council’s plan to crack down on motorists. Not all motorists, I hasten to say, but only the owners of gigantic Chelsea tractors – Land Rover Discoveries, Audi Q8 quattros and the like – which have become the bane of other drivers’ existence in my neck of the urban jungle.

I’m thinking of this week’s news of the proposal by the People’s Republic of Haringey in north London to join other Left-wing authorities all over the country in introducing higher parking charges for larger cars.

True, the councillors’ motives may not be as pure as they would like us to believe, when they tell us they’re driven solely by pious concern for the environment and the quality of the air.

As with so many similar schemes elsewhere, I reckon they are drawn to the idea chiefly as a means of squeezing yet more cash out of car owners, which they can then waste on diversity and inclusion officers, LGBT+ outreach workshops and other pet enthusiasms of the Left.

Whatever the motives behind them, however, if these higher charges for parking permits persuade even a few SUV owners to swap their monstrosities for sensibly sized cars, suitable for our cities, then surely they deserve our support.

All right, I admit that £100 or so extra on the price of an annual resident parking permit is unlikely to make much difference to people who have the odd £100,000 to spare for a top-of-the-range off-roader with tinted windows. But I’ll settle for anything that even mildly annoys the swine, or pricks their consciences (if they have any).

I write with some feeling, since I seem to spend half my life reversing all the way up the narrow hill that leads from my house to the high street, because some vast tank of a 4X4 is heading towards me, too wide to pass. As often as not, it’s driven by someone too self-important or too incompetent to go backwards for a mere 10 yards to the nearest junction.

Either that, or I’m driving around hunting for a parking space, because the demons with the SUVs are taking up twice their share of the kerbside.

A neat row of townhouses in Muswell Hill, Haringey, which is known for its village feel and breathtaking views of London

Large SUVs, or Chelsea tractors, such as Range Rovers may soon be charged more for parking permits under proposals by Haringey council

Why on earth do city dwellers feel they need vehicles built to transport huge loads across rough terrain in the countryside, just to nip down to the shops or pick up a solitary six-year-old from an urban primary school?

To judge by the pristine state of the chrome and the paintwork, most of these cars never venture farther off-road than the car park at the local Waitrose. And how often do you see them carrying more than a single passenger, if any? Perhaps I ought to confess that I, too, once owned a large people-carrier – an ancient Renault Espace, which was constantly breaking down and belched exhaust fumes that would have reduced Greta Thunberg to apoplexy.

But at least I had the excuse of having four sons who had to be driven several miles to school and back every day, often with the children of neighbours with whom we shared the run. In those days, we needed a big car, and we made full use of its seven seats, at least on those occasions when it wasn’t undergoing fiendishly expensive repairs at the garage.

With only the fewest of exceptions, most owners of Chelsea tractors can make no such claim. They see their cars not as workhorses but as status symbols, seeming to share the aspirations voiced by the immortal Eartha Kitt in her wonderful song, Just An Old Fashioned Girl: ‘I’d like a plain simple car, a cerise Cadillac/ Long enough to have a bowling alley in the back…’

So, no, the owners of these road-hogging monsters needn’t look to me for sympathy if they feel their local councils are picking on them unfairly.

Oh, but if only I could feel the same about other assaults on motorists, championed by politicians at every level of government, local and national: congestion charges, Ultra Low Emissions Zones, 20mph speed limits, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), temporary road closures outside schools, with swingeing fines for failing to notice the warning signs, and crippling charges for parking near the shops.

All these measures, and more, seem calculated either to extort yet more money from those of us who depend absolutely on our cars, or simply to make life more difficult for us, just for the hell of it.

Take that narrow hill I was complaining about earlier. When we first moved into the area, at the end of the 1980s, there were always plenty of empty spaces on both sides of the road, making it easy to pass even the widest delivery lorries or Chelsea tractors. But then our local council, Lambeth, had the bright idea of planting trees on little islands jutting out from the kerb, telling us that this was a ‘road-calming measure’.

The entirely predictable effects, of course, were not only to create bottlenecks, thereby making congestion worse, but to eat up parking spaces on both sides of the road, making it impossible for even small cars to pass each other in opposite directions.

Elsewhere in the borough, meanwhile, a rash of LTNs, intended to reduce congestion, has merely added to congestion nearby. Why can’t local councils grasp the simple idea that when they close one road to traffic, the jams merely move to another?

Now Sir Keir Starmer’s wretched Government has come up with a scheme of its own to make Britain’s urban hellscapes more hellish still, for drivers and pedestrians alike.

This week, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh made the extraordinary announcement that there’s a clear need to legalise private electric scooters on public roads.

At present (not that you’d know it, witnessing the proliferation of these menaces on our pavements and streets), the use of e-scooters is banned, except for those rented under officially approved hire schemes.

But on Wednesday, Ms Haigh told the transport committee that privately owned scooters could prove a ‘really effective part of an integrated transport strategy’. And never mind that 12 people were killed in e-scooter crashes in 2022 alone, while another 1,480, including 50 cyclists, were injured.

With unfortunate timing, her announcement came on the very day when Lime e-bikes were recorded skipping a red traffic light no fewer than 84 times in a single hour at one pedestrian crossing in the capital. Other research has found that 41 per cent of e-scooter riders jump the lights.

God knows, it’s quite lethal enough that so many cyclists think themselves above the law as it applies to other road users. But at least bicycles are comparatively manoeuvrable when evasive action is needed.

Imagine how the risks will multiply if Ms Haigh gets her way, and the plague of murderously unstable e-scooters is allowed to spread further.

Indeed, with every week that passes under this Labour Prime Minister, a Labour Mayor and Labour councils like mine, life in the capital – as in other blighted cities – becomes a little more inconvenient, expensive, unpleasant and dangerous.

I write as one of the few lifelong Londoners still living in the city where I was born and brought up, and used to think I’d never wish to leave. Today I am not so sure.