London Briefing Chris JohnsMargaret Thatcher once famously declared that "there is no such thing as society", arguing that individual responsibility was everything and that any suggestion of the need for collective (i.e. government) action was mere socialist claptrap.

Slogans are cheap, but one of the best expressions of such libertarian doctrine can be found in a well-known US bumper sticker that reads "Deliver my post and defend my shores" - a rather limited definition of the desirable limits of government responsibilities.

As she did so many times, Mrs Thatcher overstated her case; there is plenty of scope for government action, particularly when markets fail or when individual choices produce perverse or bad outcomes. That is why we have a monopolies commission and a police force, both examples of society in action.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the interaction of society with market forces is the compulsory nature of car insurance: left to our own devices, many people would not bother with insuring their car. Society, quite correctly, deems such behaviour to be inappropriate. At the very least, it costs us all an awful lot of money.

There are not too many of them left, but even some dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherites are applauding the latest initiative from government aimed at eliminating the scourge of uninsured driving. Proposals leaked from an independent study commissioned by the government are as welcome as they are hard-hitting: uninsured drivers should have their cars impounded and crushed.

The study's author is a respected academic economist from Nottingham University, Prof David Greenaway. He is reported as arguing that uninsured drivers place a financial burden on everybody by raising the costs of insurance premiums; estimates vary, but in a recent parliamentary answer the government supplied a guess of £30 (€44.80) per policy. Around one in 20 motorists drive while uninsured - that's around 1.25 million drivers.

The insurance association has estimated that every fatal road traffic accident that involves an uninsured driver ends up costing the taxpayer around £1.6 million.

But it's not just about costs: the uninsured, apparently, tend to be inner-city young men with extreme anti-social behaviour problems, including a tendency to crash a lot, causing obvious distress to everybody involved. Aside from the costs of cleaning up road traffic accidents there is the obvious pain and anguish caused by injuries and deaths.

The idea that uninsured cars should be towed away and destroyed is not new. During April and May, 381 vehicles were impounded and crushed in Liverpool under what has appropriately been called the Cube It initiative. Since the pilot programme began in 2002, the number of vehicles destroyed in this manner has risen to more than 1,000.

It doesn't help that the penalties for uninsured driving are ludicrously low: fines of less than £100 are typical and far less than the amount of money these young men would have to find if they wanted to insure their cars.

One obvious suggestion would be to make it more costly, via appropriate fines, not to insure your car. The proposal to crush any offender's vehicle can be seen as a drastic extension of this principle.

Under Greenaway's proposals, fines will go up a lot and you will lose your car. Naturally, the insurance industry will love all of this.

Usually, the road lobby can be relied upon to rise up in arms against any legislation aimed at curbing anything the motorist does. But the anger felt by almost everybody about this issue means that just about every motorist and motoring organisation will welcome a nationwide extension of Liverpool's crushing initiative.

The Automobile Association has already argued that care will have to be taken to distinguish between someone who has forgotten to post their insurance renewal and the juvenile delinquent driving the typical banger which will never be acquainted with anything resembling a tax disc, MOT or insurance policy.

All very sensible of course and, if this is the only objection raised against the proposals, we can be sure they will be implemented.

Uninsured driving imposes all sorts of costs on society. Taking the uninsured driver and his car off the road is a laudable objective and these drastic proposals might just do the trick.

Cities suffering from gridlock might consider introducing a double whammy: a crushing scheme and a congestion charge. The results would be dramatic.

Even Margaret Thatcher might voice some reluctant approval. A solution to Dublin's congestion problem perhaps?