Is it just me or ...

Have those SUVs become a real vote-deciding issue?
Zoe Williams
Saturday October 2, 2004

I remember in the 1997 election, when the Evening Standard came out on the side of Blair because he wasn't going to privatise the tube (ho hum), thinking what a tiny thing travel was in the grand scheme of things. I can't remember the issues I thought were important enough to swing one's vote, but transport wasn't one of them.

Kneejerkly, then, when Charles Kennedy started on about pricing "Chelsea tractors" off the road the other week, I thought "Poor lamb - he can't think of anything else to talk about", when it suddenly dawned on me that I hate those things. I hate them to the point of boiling rage. I hate the gross disregard for our shared atmosphere, I hate the squeeze they put on cyclists, I hate their stupid front-bars whose only purpose is killing children and clearing dead elk, I hate the pompous idiocy of driving these all-terrain monsters around urban streets whose only conceivable hazard will proceed from the fact that SUV drivers, generally, do not understand the Highway Code. (Big does not equal right of way, you hateful, hateful people.)

Anyone who hates them even half as much as I do can have my vote, now and for ever. It's not the kind of pledge you'd go back on. Unlike almost everything else.

You've got my vote Zoe!