If all they can think of is road pricing...

If all a political party can think of is national road pricing it shows they are incapable of thinking of anything else. The poverty of ideas that they have for our roads is just amazing.

The problems are:
Taxes on our lorries are so high that it is much cheaper for foreign lorries to drive on our roads ... and they don't pay for that.
In distant rural areas the car is an essential so you don't want to overprice that.

One possibility instead of road pricing is to change the annual tax disc system. We pay for our road tax each year. Split the road tax into two sums: One the annual MOT and insurance check, the other a vignette for using Motorways and dual carriageways. You pay for them together but if you happen to live in a rural area you could opt out of paying the Motorway and dual carriageways vignette. So no real change for almost everyone except its cheaper in rural areas. The big difference however is that all foreign cars and lorries now pay for the use of Motorways and dual carriageways with a vignette that like the Swiss system is a sticker in the window. They get that sticker and pay the fee when they arrive at Dover or any other port.

The big advantage is that it evens out the competition for road hauliers by charging foreign lorries for the roads.
Foreign cars make a contribution for the cost of the damage they are doing to the environment and towards the repair costs of the roads
AND
Its a hell-of-alot simpler to organise and administer than these irresponsible road pricing technological proposals.

There are more alternatives to national road pricing than just this idea but it illustrates how our politicians have shown that they are unwilling to think constructively about the problems.

The dilemma of the House of Lords

Our illustriuos leader (Blair) wishes to change the House of Lords. His motive appears to be to make them more compliant in that they have this annoying habit of disagreeing with the House of Commons.... and thank God that they do! Our current breed of politicians are too dominated by people from the legal profession. They lack the ability to develop practical solutions to anything. Just look at the orchestrated chaos in the health service, IT projects that waste vast sums of money, the mess of our transport system - we need practical people in government.

The dilemma for us is that the House of Lords is at its best, not when it opposes for the sake of opposition but when it seeks to amend and modify for the sake of making proposals workable, fair and practical, even when the House of Commons gets upset by that. It is at its best when it has the authority to make the House of Commons think again.

Nobody in the country - anywhere - ever votes in favour of the whole manifesto of the winning party. The concept that the House of Lords should not be able to oppose the more stupid ideas from the manifesto is untennable.

Thus any replacement House of Lords will work best if the main political parties are effectively excluded. It will be at its worst if it becomes just another elected House with the same political parties vying for our votes.

We have a population of around 60 milion people. Only 3 million of them actually belong to any political party. It may be surprisingly possible to make it a requirement for the House of Lords that those who are considered do not, and have never, belonged to any political party.

I wonder what effect that would have?

Reduce Motorway Congestion

In return for reducing the national speed limit to 60 mph we could easily add an extra lane to every Motorway in the country. So why do you need to drop the speed limit? The ways its done is that as Motorways are repaired you extend the hard shoulder and it becomes an intermittent hard shoulder everywhere (intermittent hard shoulders are normal already - we just extend them) but in some locations the present hard shoulder is already narrow - so to get the extra lane and the space for the armco barrier to protect the item (e.g. a bridge) we need to make the existing lanes narrower - which is why we need to drop the national speed limit to 60 mph to allow narrower motorway lanes.

Doing the work as Motorways are repaired minimises disruption and cost.

The result would be that Motorway traffic would flow more smoothly because of the extra lanes so there would be less hold ups .... meaning less stress .... and, of course, fuel economy would be greatly improved.