IT GOES all the way up to the top, this pious Labourite obsession with driving motorists up the wall.

The apparent reaction in Hyndburn to the salutary lesson which voters gave the council's now-ousted Labour group over its anti-car traffic calming excess has been for the dumped councillors and their supporters to consider that it is the majority, not they, who were wrong.

Now, it is the policy of the country's transport supremo, John Prescott, to ignore the harassed motorists' anger.

In a week when UK petrol prices shot up to an average of £3.33 a gallon - a swingeing £2.79 of which is tax - Deputy Prime Minister Prescott claimed that the actual cost of driving is less than it was in 1980.

The man has already amply demonstrated his qualities as a joke, but he really is playing the political fool if he hopes that car-owners will accept they are on the receiving end of a bargain.

The fact is they are being ripped off in paying for Europe's dearest petrol.

It is rising annually by more than three times the rate of inflation and they are being stung for £30 billion every year in road taxes when just £6 billion is spent on roads.

At the same time that he delivers this insult, we hear of his defiant aim to press on with congestion charges on busy roads and taxes on workplace car parks.

His department also intends to introduce more bus-only lanes on busy motorways and trunk roads in a bid to force people out of their cars and on to the abysmal public transport system over which he presides - from the back seat of his ministerial Jaguar.

Well, John, press on and see where it gets you - out of that luxury limo.

He need only look to the deserved backlash that the anti-car bossy-boots got here in Hyndburn to see where he is heading.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.