'If life demands that you need to go from A to B in a car then you shouldn't feel guilty ...'

TORCUIL CRICHTON HITS THE ROAD WITH PETER ROBERTS: ROAD WARRIOR

WHATEVER motivates Peter Roberts, anti-road charging campaigner, it cannot be traffic congestion. The drive from Telford Central train station to his suburban home takes less than 10 minutes, through maybe half a dozen relatively traffic-free roundabouts. "They're going to reduce this to a two-lane road, build 3500 houses and replace the roundabouts with traffic lights," sighs Roberts as he slips his dirty, bronze Peugeot 307 estate into third gear. "They call it sustainable development but whoever's in charge of public transport policy in this country has a lot to learn."

There are a lot of "theys" in Peter Roberts's life right now. "They" range from the broad coalition of interests "engineering congestion" on Britain's roads to more specific "theys" that can be identified in context. "They" include transport minister Douglas Alexander, prime minister Tony Blair, politicians in general, road pricing lobbies like Friends of the Earth and the Royal Automobile Club. Peter Roberts, as unlikely a grassroots revolutionary as you could imagine, has turned their pet project, a plan to charge drivers by the mile for using the highway, into so much roadkill.

They, the government, had not counted on Peter Roberts when a bright spark thought it would be a good idea to allow citizens to petition the prime minister on the Downing Street website. Roberts, being of inquiring mind and slightly techie ability, stumbled across the site, put a petition against road charging together and publicised it as best he could. "I put the petition up on November 20 and within eight days it was the biggest one on the site," he explains proudly. "It just went from strength to strength."

From his home computer Roberts has rallied an incredible 1.8 million people to his cause. Now the 46-year-old father of two, who works as an account manager for a company selling rubber door-seals to the car industry, has been hailed as being at the forefront of a campaign nation.

Whether their target is Burberry or Barclays, ordinary people have discovered that the web can be used to quickly form powerful coalitions to effect or prevent change. Instead of marching or taking direct action, these consumer militants use the internet and their collective spending power to fight Tesco planning applications, chase banks for unlawful charges and boycott football clubs over pricey tickets.

In politics, campaigners such as Moveon.org started the bandwagon rolling in the US and websites such as youscotland.

com are trying to repeat the phenomenon albeit on more hubristic terms, over here.

But it's Roberts principally who has sparked a raging ethical debate about e-democracy - whether it makes politicians slaves to the mob or if it is an empty ruse in consultation by cynical governments. What is certain is that, with the click of a mouse, Peter Roberts has turned road-charging from a reasonable-sounding project with green credentials into a political poisoned chalice.

Although he towers at a jowly 6' 5'', the mild-mannered Roberts is more road chef than warrior chief. He wasn't quite prepared to have leadership thrust upon him and he is having a Grand Old Duke Of York moment. "I never expected to take on this mantle," admits the miscast general. "It's a funny place to be and I'm not quite sure what to do now."

His petition, which caused the Downing Street website to crash as it approached the million mark, tapped a deep well of discontent.

"It's about more than road pricing," says Roberts, carefully keeping us within the speed limit. "I think it's an issue that condensed a whole lot of worries and concerns about surveillance, excessive taxation and freedom of speech. It distills all of those things into one protest. It's not just angry drivers it's going to affect."

Roberts has a well-rehearsed three-fold objection to the proposed road-pricing scheme. It is an expensive way to manage congestion that doesn't exist much outside London; it's a regressive stealth tax; and its satellite tracking of vehicles is "an invasion of privacy. With road pricing they'll know that I've come and left work, gone to the railway station to pick someone up and headed home. I don't really want anybody, regardless of who they are, knowing my whereabouts".

We pull in at Roberts's house in a Brookside-style cul de sac. Roberts has clocked up 69,000 miles on his three-year-old Peugeot, a fair average for a sales account manager. The flask in the passenger's door bin, the satnav and the mobile phone cradle, all signal that he is a man at home in his car.

"If you haven't got a car and you live somewhere like here you don't have the freedom of movement you need," he says. "I need it for work, shopping, being taxi dad and to see friends and family. You wouldn't have much of a social life if you could only go a mile from your house."

His is a three-car family. He has a company car, his wife has a Micra and their 18-year-old son travels to college in an old Golf. "It's just that little bit too far to walk and on the one occasion he did cycle he was attacked," says Roberts, while fending off the family spaniel. "If he didn't have the car there's a risk that it will happen again. That's why he uses the car, he's safer."

His philosophy appears to place the combustion engine above trial by jury in a list of constitutional rights. "You shouldn't feel guilty about going about your daily life," he says. "If life demands that you need to go from A to B in a car then you shouldn't feel guilty about that. What to do is try to minimise your output by buying a fuel-efficient car and driving in a fuel-efficient way."

Global warming isn't quite a myth in Roberts's book but Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary, who claims Europe's cows produce more gas than the continent's planes, would be happy in his company. "The temperature has been varying naturally for donkeys' years and the effect that mankind has on the atmosphere is fairly minimal. About 3.5% of the carbon cycle is man-made and only 20% of that is transport," he says with the authority of an environmental guru.

Public transport? "People don't want to use buses, to be honest. You need 15 people per passenger mile to make a bus efficient." He has taken the trouble to find out how the calculation pans out across his local area. "You might get that in London but round here the figures show that each bus carries 1.6 passengers per mile. It's seven times more polluting to go around in a bus than in a car."

You would dismiss all this as saloon bar wisdom except that Roberts has armed himself with a clutch of statistics and, he points out, it has cost me the best part of £100 to get 150 miles from London by train. Well, at least I got to read the Telegraph obituaries on the way.

Fame for a road warrior with a small-knotted brown tie can be ephemeral, he realises. Like every innovation on the internet the pioneers tend to make a big wave, but then attention falls away pretty rapidly.

Roberts himself thinks the government is using the internet cynically, the prime minister's please-all response to his petition being an example. "I think they're trying to use it as a safety valve to vent people's anger and dissipate the issue. These guys signed up to my petition but it's the government that has their e-mails, not me." He responded by setting up his own website and this mild-mannered rebel will try to carry on beyond the initial wave of publicity.

Roberts is a one-man band, with some volunteer help from the Association of British Drivers, an online petrol-head lobby, but it's basically him up against financed, professional lobby groups.

Petitioning, he knows, has its limits but he is proud of what he has already achieved. "What the petition has done is kick the whole issue into the public domain. Before now it was like a juggernaut coming in the distance but now everybody knows what government ministers are doing, and they've been caught with their trousers down."

He thinks participative democracy may be coming back into fashion as a result. "I dare say we could get two million on to the streets to march against this but the only sure way to get change is by using the democratic system, to vote and to write to MPs to get them to do what you want and not what they want.

"At the end of the day it is us who have the power. Stephen Ladyman, the transport minister, only has a majority of 600-and-something. You can guarantee there's more than 600 people in his constituency who have signed the petition so, he's out."