Also the Newbury Bypass...countless videos online from those protests.
Not a motorway
I think the Newbury Bypass may have been the last of the major road schemes before Labour took over.
It opened 18 months after Labour took over.
The M60 in east Manchester, M1 east of Leeds, and the M6 Toll were also under construction during the period and so Labour couldn't really lay a finger on these. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1) was the last major transport project to open before New Labour's dislike of infrastructure projects took effect. In 2007.
Labour's first move was to shelf everything and run studies in response to Swampy and co. The intention was always to build the roads eventually, but to also rethink them and look at transit schemes as well.
By the time the studies came in, Alistair Darling was the Transport Secretary, despite hating transport, and Ed Balls was a junior Treasury Minister who hated the idea of infrastructure spending. They stopped almost all of it happening.
When Brown became PM, he managed to shunt his junior minister diagonally (never really liking him) and put Darling in the Treasury, making Andrew Adonis a Lord and Transport Secretary. As part of the deal Adonis demanded several schemes to be guaranteed funding, and Darling had to accept as the promotion was too good to give up. And so ended the decade of ideological transport cuts and almost nothing getting built. George Osborne made infrastructure spending a key part of his recovery plan and recently appointed Lord Adonis to a special transport commission.
Just from reading, since I am a history nut, Britain seemed to lead the world in road protests during the 20th century. Or maybe it was just better documented.
They were at the end of it, which helps. OK, the backlash against urban motorways stuff was 60s and 70s, but the rural stuff was 90s.
The existence of a free press also helped.
Expropriating land in France for an autoroute or a new TGV line, even today, is much easier than in the US or even Britain - see the foot-dragging over HS2 in the UK
What foot dragging? They are still on schedule. OK, it could be a little bit faster, but the plan is moving incredibly quickly for the UK.