The Tories say 15-minute cities are sinister. That’s nonsense – here’s the truth

‘Creating a sustainable economic order will certainly require changes in the everyday lives of most people.’ Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

Following hard on the prime minister’s defence of the drivers who are supposedly victimised by London’s Ulez extension, and Penny Mordaunt’s rubbishing of 20mph speed limits in Wales (currently in force in parts of her own constituency), we now have the transport secretary, Mark Harper, denouncing “sinister … so-called 15-minute cities”.

This dismissal of measures that provide safer, pleasanter and more sustainable urban living is being pressed in the name of “freedom”: the freedom of city-dwellers to live unharassed by meddling environmentalist do-gooders; the freedom, in Sunak’s words, of drivers “to use their cars to do all the things that matter to them” – a liberty supposedly under threat from the “anti-motorist” Labour party.