Labour’s not declaring a 20mph war on motorists. Maybe it should | Jonn Elledge

It may outrage the right, but reducing speed limits in populated areas makes roads safer for everybody and journeys smoother

Driving is not nearly as nippy a way of getting around a city as the average car ad suggests. In most of the UK, the speed limit in a built-up area is 30mph – but on what the government refers to with the zippy name of “urban classified local ‘A’ roads”, the actually existing average speed in England hovers instead just above the 16mph mark. In central London, it’s 9mph, a figure that’s led the satnav company TomTom to describe the capital as “the world’s slowest city”, as if anyone in their right mind is driving there in the first place. All in all, you might think reducing urban speed limits to 20mph would be a pretty uncontroversial idea.

You would, of course, be wrong: from the response to Welsh Labour’s 2023 moves to make 20mph the standard speed limit in urban Wales, you’d think the party had announced plans to erect signs reading “Monmouthshire: it’s basically England”. Polling from YouGov found that 72% of Welsh voters opposed the plan, 50% strongly.

Jonn Elledge is an author and former assistant editor of the New Statesman

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