Not exactly selling the family silver, but still stupid

The Tories are, once again, demonstrating their blind dogmatic belief that they can solve any problem by simply selling stuff off and ridding themselves of responsibility for it with this news that they're looking into privatising the road network.

No doubt, exactly as with their plans for the NHS, fierce opposition from much better-informed parties will not stop them charging on with their eyes closed and nothing more than a bull-headed belief that they're right to sustain them. The AA, who should know a thing or two about the roads, already think it's a bad idea. But why listen to them when there could be money to be made and more responsibilities discharged into other people's hands? Batter against the door of reason with a thick enough forehead and eventually it will give way.

Look at the disaster that the national rail network sell-off has become. Companies driven exclusively by profit giving rise to increasing fares, increasingly packed trains, increasingly poor service and the various stakeholders simply blaming each other when there's a problem on the network. My own brother used to work maintaining the railway network, and he told me stories of work going undone because the company which maintained the infrastructure would not pay the companies who owned the trains to get their crews to the sites which needed work. You can imagine the ramifications for service and safety something like that had – but it's an almost inevitable consequence of privatisation. Had that sell-off not happened, instead of pushing through an environmentally catastrophic agenda of expanding road capacity (which, as has already been demonstrated in the Smeed report, merely increases traffic levels), the government could pump money into improving public transport. But they can't – they sold it during John Major's administration.

Clearly they've learned nothing from this. We'll end up with a huge increase in road building, cutting a swathe through already damaged green areas of Britain, sticking extra lanes or new roads down for drivers who can barely afford to run their cars now. Just take a look at the different traffic volumes on the M6 toll compared to its free sister road for an indication of how many people are prepared to pay to use a road.

The idea is so stupid that it has in fact, some years ago, already been parodied quite effectively in Ben Elton's Gridlock. That this government is considering measures which have been used as material for jokes before would be funny if it weren't quite so potentially damaging. Not a peep from their Lib-Dem bedfellows yet, of course. Unless the coalition collapses, 7 May 2015, the likely date for the next general election, already cannot come soon enough – one can only hope this bunch of neo-Thatcherite dogmatists are removed from office before they can do too much permanent damage.