Want freedom? You need cars and combustion engines

For anyone outside of the capital, abandoning the car is simply not an option.

There are certain immutable laws of nature. Water, when brought to 100 degrees Celsius, will boil. Two surfaces, when in contact, cause friction. Heat rises.

There are others, though, which while not necessarily 100 per cent reliable, can nevertheless be depended upon most of the time.

One of these concerns the comments section of The Telegraph. If there is an article which is liable to inflame the readership of that once-respected newspaper, its comment section will be closed. If this flammability of the piece is misjudged by the editors, comments may be open a while before being hastily slammed closed.

It is quite clear that the newspaper considers those commenting under its articles as a barely tolerable embarrassment; a bit like an uncle who the well-to-do family don't like to invite over as he is liable to get drunk and talk about immigration. Frightful stuff.

Observe the paper closely enough and you'll catch the gist of it. There was a good example on Tuesday with journalist Tanya Gold telling us all to 'kick our addiction to cars'.

The piece reads much like the writer has stepped outside the M25 only on a few occasions, though she does mention panic buying in Brighton. The seaside town is, however, now effectively just a colony of London, so it hardly counts.

In it, she complains about the length of time it takes to drive from Teddington to Finchley and of people's over-reliance on the automobile. Wouldn't just be much better, she asks, if we could just take public transport?

That the piece stopped accepting new comments after only fifty-five had been posted suggests that the reading public might not agree.

After all, living in the convenient world of London, where even at 3am the booze-addled can find a night bus to stumble onto, our author might indeed believe that to live life without private cars is possible.

However, venture outside the capital and a different story will quickly emerge.

Recently, I drove to Corby (or as we know it, South Aberdeen). It took about forty minutes in the car. Via public transport it would take me over two hours.

Similarly, I had planned on going to Manchester in the not-too-distant future. The £100 train fare quickly changed my mind. Not to mention that if I were to go full-greeny I'd have add a long trek to the railway station itself.

It's all too inconvenient and costly. If you're in a village where the bus rocks up a few times a day, you are at full mercy of the operator's punctuality and a hostage to any timetabling snafus.

More broadly, what the West is doing in the abandonment of fossil-fuel cars is tantamount to insanity. Combustion engines are a technology whose efficiency and reliability has grown massively. We have a whole national infrastructure designed around them. They grant people the freedom to go where they want, when they want.

Attempting to cajole people into electric cars, for which there is neither the requisite number of charging points nor power available on the National Grid, is a policy designed by people with either no knowledge of or no concern for the inconveniences it will cause the dreaded country bumpkins outside of London.

For anyone outside of the capital, abandoning the car is simply not an option. Instead, it is the surest and speediest path to isolation and misery.

No wonder The Telegraph closed the comments quite so quickly.