The DEPRESSING fact is that travelling anywhere in the UK is now a hellish ordeal

During World War II, an official body called the Railway Executive Committee put up posters which asked the public ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’

It was a time of fuel rationing, troop movements and widespread disruption to transport. For a poster, artist Bert Thomas drew a soldier pointing an accusatory finger at any self-indulgent civilians who were travelling to town simply for a jolly.

Another poster showed an affluent couple at a railway station, the man scratching his chin as he contemplated buying a ticket. Was his journey essential or could he help the national war effort by staying at home?

We are not at war today, thank goodness, but things are reaching such a terrible, bunged up, immobile state on our roads, railways and at many airports that it may be time to revive the Blitz spirit of Bert Thomas and his celebrated posters.

Research shows that Britain’s roads are the most congested in Europe. Shockingly, nearly half the worst bottlenecks and ‘traffic pinchpoints’ in the entire EU are on this island.

This month — with many trains due to be cancelled over Christmas, forcing thousands more cars on to the roads — that is only likely to worsen.

Meanwhile, there are insufferable queues for check-in and immigration controls at our airports. Buses, too, get quickly stuck in the same, exhaust-shrouded jams as other road traffic.

From my own experience, the railways seem more packed and unreliable than ever.

Last Saturday, I took a train from Swindon in Wiltshire to London, foolishly expecting Swindon railway station at the weekend to be a doddle.

I could not have been more wrong. It was far busier than on a weekday. Vast, snaking queues of frustrated people waited to be served by the ticket desks and the (rip-off) ticket machines. On the trains, many people had to stand.

Everything seemed to be running late. Signal problems in the Didcot area, or some such old chestnut. Add in the presence of a few walking sticks, kiddies’ buggies, shouty teenagers and football fans and you may start to picture what a living Hades it all was.

The DEPRESSING fact is that travelling anywhere in the United Kingdom has become a hellish ordeal. Does your heart not sink when you know you have a lengthy journey to make? How long will it take? Will you get a seat? Will you make your connection?

You might as well toss a coin. Imponderables. Uncertainties. Stress. Hassle. Job interviews are missed. Family gatherings ruined. Theatre engagements are lost. We all have our tales of woe.

I was almost late for a speech in Chester the other night after a lorry struck a railway bridge in Birmingham and the dread words ‘diversion via Coventry’ were mumbled down the near-inaudible Virgin Trains PA system.

My wife, too, arrived at the end of a family funeral thanks to late-running, people-packed trains.

Traffic jams have become a way of life in Britain now, so pity the truckers, coach drivers and travelling salesmen

It might not make us quite as angry if the tickets were cheap, but they ain’t. For the amount I paid to get to Chester on Virgin, I could no doubt have flown to some far-flung destination in the Med.

Travel horrors may only be an occasional nightmare for some folk, but what about the poor souls who have to move around for a living?

For drivers of white Ford Transit vans (the sort so snootily scorned by Labour MP Emily Thornberry in her infamous Tweet about one flying a St George’s flag from his house), traffic jams may be not just irksome but also expensive.

If you are a self-employed builder, each hour spent in a snarl-up is another hour of work lost. It must be all the more maddening at this time of year, when daylight is limited and the working day is therefore short.

And you only have to mention the words ‘cycle lanes’ to a London taxi driver to ignite a furious stream of unhappy oaths.

Such lanes are promoted in the cause of environmentalism and healthy living but by slowing traffic, they create worse congestion, making for fuggier city air, and they clearly do nothing for the heart rates of anxious drivers.

Then there are the problems faced by supermarkets which operate on carefully-balanced time schedules that are inevitably upset by traffic delays.

But it can be even worse for small companies. Late-running can mean that perishable goods have to be thrown away. And with internet orders representing a record proportion of the Christmas retail market, any traffic problems can reduce takings and profit margins.

No wonder there are disturbing stories about some couriers breaking the law by speeding and by working far longer shifts than permitted under safety laws.

Before you accuse me of some Southern England moan — and, yes, things are particularly dreadful in the Home Counties, especially leading down to the port of Dover — let it be stressed that this is a nationwide problem.

Bradford in Yorkshire has no fewer than 596 traffic hotspots, according to the research by traffic-monitoring firm Inrix.

Anyone who has tried getting from Manchester to nearby Salford late in the afternoon will know it takes for ever. The M6 at Birmingham is frequently a ribbon of stationary cars and lorries, achieving nothing more than a low belt of smog.

And in our capital, statistics published yesterday included the startling figure that London had 12,776 bottlenecks last year.

The next most jammed city was Rome, with a mere 1,684. The whole of Germany only had 8,517 bottlenecks in the same period.

No wonder there are questions about Britain’s productivity rate. Anyone stuck in a car on the way to a business appointment is not doing a vast amount for the national economic effort.

Hell on Earth: London is a nightmare whether you are travelling by road or rail

Too often, motorway traffic crawls at the speed of a horse and cart. Several of London’s road junctions have become so gridlocked at rush hour, they are barely distinguishable from car parks. On the M25 that ‘rush hour’ in fact lasts for seven-and-a-half hours a day, with six-mile traffic jams now being the average.

So much waste. So much road rage.

The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, seems to have cottoned on to this national paralysis — this appalling, self-defeating, economy-diminishing transportational constipation.

He is talking of renewed efforts to build roads and railways (including the HS2 rail link, though that looks terribly expensive).

Travellers may broadly welcome such ideas but they will not help us get round any faster for at least the next couple of years.

However, what might help is a hefty kick up the rump for officialdom and the leaders of both transport companies and the trades unions.

Typical of their mindset was the idiotic union leader who boasted this week that Fidel Castro would have been proud of his workforce for going on strike, thus making commuters’ lives a misery.

So what can be done?

Hiring a few more immigration officers at our airports might be a start. And someone could make sure all the electronic passport-check gates are open and working.

Is a three-hour hiatus really necessary every time after a lorry bumps into a railway bridge? And how about immediately scrapping rules on bus lanes?

Some experts insist, often with a hint of stubborn adherence to failing political theories, that bus lanes are a democratiser. Hmmm. Outside Gloucester, which I drive into every week, millions of pounds of tax money was spent on a bus lane west of the city.

It was meant to connect to a park-and-ride centre, but that was never built (word has it that the planners forgot to strike a deal with a local farmer and he refused to sell them the land for the car park). Result: an empty bus lane, unused roadway, longer jams, wasted millions.

Utter madness!

To make matters worse, numerous disruptions are planned on the railways towards the end of this month. This is to allow engineering work. Surely it can be carried out at a less busy time of year?

Or are the management jobsworths seizing their chance to create a problem? Paddington station, gateway to the West out of London, is being closed. Ditto London Bridge and Liverpool Street.

Meanwhile, on the London Underground yesterday, numerous lines seemed to be suffering from a nervous breakdown.

A woman on the Tannoy was trying to list all the problems on the capital’s Tube network, but it might have been easier had she simply settled for listing the very few lines which did not have a problem.

With a post-Brexit, independent Britain heading into a free-trade world, efficient transport has never been more necessary. Yet we are stuck, in every sense, with a creaking system on road, rail and air.