Smug activists leave me flat

ACOUPLE of years ago I made the best motoring decision of my life. I traded in my ten-year-old 2.2 litre Mazda 6 with its ludicrous low-profile tyres, twin exhausts and vandal-magnet spoiler and bought something more befitting a chap who was no longer anxious to prove he was in a hurry.

The new motor was a 1.6 litre middle-age-mobile, the kind of car the high-powered Mazda used to gobble for breakfast in the outside lane as I pressed home my advantage on the accelerator pedal.

It offered the driver a seating position quite different to that experienced by the saloon or hatchback owner. This felt more like driving a van, a ponderous, sedate one whose previous owner could have been Postman Pat.

Straight away I reaped the benefits. Due to its lower CO2 emissions, my annual road tax tumbled. I got more miles to the gallon and the suggestive effect of being a ‘van driver’ knocked 10mph off my motorway cruising speed.

Within a couple of months, the debilitating twinge in my lower back which, for five years, had wreaked havoc with my golf swing, vanished and has never returned. Doctors often tell saloon car owners with back complaints and several decades of motoring on the clock to consider reassessing their driving position. Worked wonders for me.

Getting back into the driver’s seat of a ‘standard’ car now feels like climbing into an empty bathtub.

Yes, all in all, the switch to a new shaped motor which was cheaper to run, better for the environment, easier on the nerves and gentler on my back was one of my smarter moves. Or so I have been telling myself.

But an insufferably smug band of vigilante climate activists called Tyre Extinguishers beg to differ.

They tell me my car is a tank, a gas-guzzling abomination, a monument to my overweening vanity and callous disregard for the environment.

They give notice that, if they find my car, they will ‘disarm’ it by letting the tyres down and leave a leaflet on the windscreen lecturing me on my foolish ways.

‘We did this because driving around urban areas in your massive vehicle has huge consequences for others,’ it says.

‘You will have no difficulty getting around without your gas guzzler, with walking, cycling or public transport.’

It is certainly an interesting point in the history of rail travel to be telling people to use public transport but let us return to that in a minute.

First let’s deal with what it is about my car which offends the Tyre Extinguishers.

From what I can gather, it is the wrong shape.

My car’s crime is that it is SUV-shaped.

SUVs, we are given to understand from those on a mission to make it ‘impossible’ to own them, are the devil’s work.

How to spot an SUV? Well, according to Tyre Extinguishers’ handy online guide for would-be disarmers, SUVs are ‘taller than most other cars’.

Arrogant

On Wednesday night a conservative estimate of 100 cars which are taller than most others were attacked in Edinburgh, making it the busiest night yet in Scotland for this achingly arrogant mob of eco-fundamentalists.

They say the true figure is probably much higher than that as ‘not all Tyre Extinguisher groups have been in touch with Tyre Extinguishers HQ to say where and when they have taken action, and Tyre Extinguishers HQ only hear about their actions through angry emails from SUV drivers’.

I dare say some of those waking up to flats on Thursday morning own a car similar to my one, whose make and model, for reasons of air preservation, I am not naming here.

Perhaps their motivation for investing in such a motor was broadly similar too. We can well imagine the tenor of their angry emails. ‘Dear vigilante, you have just immobilised my motor for the crime of being the wrong shape.

‘It is the most climatefriendly car I have ever owned. My GP said the more upright seating position would help my bad back. What is wrong with you people?

‘Incidentally, did you ever stop to consider that some of the biggest gas guzzlers and emissions offenders on the roads are actually smaller than most other cars? Or, in your twisted logic, are Lamborghinis and Ferraris which stand 3ft tall and do 0-60 in 2.9 seconds the pillars of environmental correctitude?

‘Vanity you say? I bought my low-emissions, under-powered SUV because I’m done with vanity, you presumptuous muppet, you righteous, ill-informed, turbo-boosted nincom…’

By this time, of course, Tyre Extinguisher HQ will no longer be reading. It will be happily chalking up another wrong-shaped car in the ‘disarmed’ file.

None of this, of course, is to suggest they should be interfering with any vehicles, be they Chelsea Tractors, supercars or my fuel-thirsty old Mazda. It is merely to reflect the poverty of intellect at work in setting up a campaign to punish gas guzzlers without first doing a little homework on which ones the gas guzzlers are.

My feeling is that meddling with any car which does not belong to you, whatever you think the brand tells you about the owner’s vanity, wallet, taste or attitude to the environment, is a grave act of sabotage on personal property.

It is a grievous assault on freedoms. If these are to be curtailed in the interests of our planet’s climate, then that is a matter for governments, not self-appointed emissions gendarmes with duff gen taking the law into their own hands.

As to the advice section of their leaflet, where motorists are urged to abandon their neutralised car and hop on public transport, the irony is of the ocean-going variety.

Rail services have been slashed to their most meagre in living memory. The level of provision is so appalling that the word ‘service’ is stripped of all meaning.

It is a one-way ticket to travel misery, missed appointments, cancelled visits and empty platforms in the wrong town at the wrong time in the evening where you discover you are stranded.

If ever there were a time to thank your lucky stars you have four wheels and air in your tyres, this is it. And this is the week that Tyre Extinguishers steps up its assault on them.

Vigilantes

I think it’s back to the drawing board, chaps, before someone gets hurt.

I think it’s only a matter of time before the wrong motor is targeted and a hapless ecowarrior learns that vigilantism can turn on the vigilantes.

And I think Tyre Extinguishers are not the only ones who need to think very carefully on that. Where is Police Scotland in all this? ‘Investigating,’ we are told.

And yet, to date, no news of a single arrest despite the fact that three cities – Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee – and hundreds of too-tall cars have been attacked in recent months.

Where, too, is the political condemnation? I have approached the Scottish Greens – power sharers in the Scottish Government, you will remember – twice on this to canvas their view. They wouldn’t give it.

Well, here is mine. These morons are public menaces and a danger to themselves. They should have criminal records spelling that out.