Bev Turner: Do you ever see us returning to a time when the individual was deemed responsible for the hourly commitment of staying alive?

Sadiq Khan said yesterday that he has no economic plan B if his ULEZ expansion scheme is overturned in a judicial review being taken by five London councils…why?

Because, above all else, nothing matters except keeping you safe.

Safe from pollution which has – of course - drastically improved in London since the pea-soupers of the 1950s.

Cars, those evil, radical symbols of freedom and privacy, must be policed by secret cameras even on open roads at 5am because driving at 22mph might not keep you safe. And all the new combustion engine cars are banned from sale in the UK from 2030. What do you mean you can’t afford a new car? Tough! You need everyone to be safe!

Meat is off the menu in Scottish schools and care-homes to save future generations from dangerous rising sea levels. Log burners in your home are on

Khan’s hit list too because of all that perilous smoke, regardless of the cheap heat you might generate to keep you warm.

The rise of health and safety; risk assessments and not being able to spill a cup of coffee at work without someone leaping to the rescue with a yellow sign has been long in the making. We now live in a world where a packet of nuts displays the warning, “may contain nuts”….presumably because some nuts can’t work that out for themselves…

But over the last three years the government took this creepy presume-everyone-is-stupid culture and put it on steroids! And I ask, do you ever see us returning to a time when the individual was deemed capable – no, frankly, responsible, for the hourly commitment of staying alive.

I consider myself to be extremely risk-averse. I’m a condom and a seat belt kind of girl – not necessarily at the same time. I don’t ski or cycle on main roads. I don’t smoke. I eat ok and walk when I can. I believe that most people, left to their own devices, are pretty good at maintaining their own pulse without a politician making decisions for them.

The people who statistically suffer from inner-city pollution predominantly live next to busy roads. So plant trees; improve window insulation; provide air-cleaning systems if necessary in these small areas. Help people, yes! But don’t penalize every hard-working person who wants to drive a van to work because improving life expectancy on a data sheet trumps all other considerations.

We need a smaller state who lets us live our lives unless we break the law; takes as little of our income as possible so that we can spend it with other people and uses what they do take more efficiently on great public services. It’s not complicated. Oh – and stop the patrician attitude of keeping me safe…that’s my job. Not the government’s.