If you are English then you doubtless have heard of Jeremy Clarkson. Top Gear presenter extraordinaire and occasional columnist for The Times. He's tall, opinionated and frequently hilariously funny. Even if he can't go 20 minutes without verbally bitch-slapping the Left, watching his shows is always a treat. In particular the brief self-titled chat-show he presided over who's frequent features included "things to put in the microwave" and "how to make a spud-gun".
I was watching Top Gear last night. It would appear that Andy Duncan of Samizdata.net was also fixed to the screen enjoying the 'petro-sexual' car-fest.
Unfortunately upon deciding to write this article I realized I am everything that Jeremy Clarkson rails against on his show. I'm New Labour, I take public transport every day of my life and I love bus lanes. Cars are things of beauty and I'm certain you can derive a great deal of pleasure from driving them but I'm just not inclined to do anything more than be a passenger. No license, no intention of acquiring one. I'm just another one of John Prescott's leftie cyclist bus-riders. Suddenly this article had lost any sort of objectivity it might have laid claim to.
Anyhow I don't mind his constant bitching about Bus Lanes. They interfere with his pleasurable driving so I can understand him getting pissed off.
What I can't bloody understand is what Andy Duncan concerns himself with in his article. Namely Clarkson's rant against speed cameras.
But he topped both of these eloquent outbursts, last night, with a graphical display of the failure of Britain's current fevered rash of police speed cameras. Ten years ago, he reported, there were virtually none of these in the UK. Now there's one outside virtually every other front door in Britain, with ten notable exceptions. You'll find just four speed cameras, in total, on the ten worst roads in Britain, the ten stretches of road with the worst casualty statistics. So what's been the effect of this plague of speed cameras on road accident rates? Absolutely none, said Jezzer, with a four-foot chart to prove it. 'The figures are exactly the same as they were ten years ago.' Oh, and by the way, the police currently take £73 million pounds in annual profit, from speed cameras, with convictions every year rising from a quarter of million, ten years ago, to just over a million now..The nanny state has thus increasingly criminalised those of its heinous taxpayers who've dared to disobey its do-gooding driving directives. For instance, by travelling at 31 miles per hour on the outside lane of a stretch of dual-carriageway in Reading, where I nearly got done the other day because muggle-brain here thought: 'This surely has got to be a 40 zone', until corrected by a more observant passenger, who'd spotted the tiny 30 mph sign right on the lip of the 40 miles per hour roundabout.
And yet police chiefs wonder why they're struggling to get convictions out of juries, these days, even though these juries are full of angry people turned over by speed cameras. Police chief constables really are woodentop
Right so let me get this straight.. People are angry that they're being caught breaking the law and that as a result of (and let me emphasize this as heavily as possible) breaking the law they're having to pay a lot of money to Police Departments.
I'm sorry, these cameras are clearly getting in the way of your god given right to break the law and get away with it.
"So? What are we going to do about them?" Quizzed Clarkson.
Well How's about don't break the frikkin' law?
Dear god.. That's like burglars complaining that people are installing security cameras! Their primary arguments are that they don't alter accident levels and that they make the Police a whole heap of cash.
I noted that the chart his co-presenter used to demonstrate this fact curiously ignored any possible rise in car ownership in this country, I don't know of how much relevance this is but it seems to me that if more people are driving cars and the number of accidents are staying the same then the average number of accidents per car are decreasing. Incidentally I don't very much care if someone presents data which shows the number of cars hasn't increased because this point is totally insignificant as it doesn't demonstrate that the cameras aren't doing their job, which is curiously enough, catching people speeding.
See the problem is that people assume that the cameras are there to improve road safety. Ostensibly this would seem their raison d'etre, however that is simply a goal ancillary to their catching people speeding. There is some hope that people will stop speeding as a result of the fines and that this would reduce accidents but that isn't their primary aim as I've already noted. However according to the moronic logic of the anti-speed camera lobby this negates their worth.
"Look they're not doing their jobs! Get Rid of Them!" They cry in anxiety as their precious vehicles pose for the camera's loving flash.
OK even if you are correct in your assertion that they aren't changing accident levels, please would you be so kind as to remind me again how this makes it illegal or unjust for them to catch you for breaking the law?
Then Clarkson complains that Police Departments are making a lot of money from this. You what!? Police Forces getting money from people who break the law is a bad thing? Police forces are in need of more government funding from innocent tax-payers at the moment and we're supposed to believe that it's bad that they get money from criminals?
The problem seems to me that there is a genuine movement to obfuscate the same thing I've noted repeatedly in this post. Driving over the speed limit is breaking the law. Do not and I am going to say this again, do not insult my intelligence by suggesting it is somehow wrong for you to be punished for breaking the law.
You can spend 4 hours writing an essay on why the cameras don't solve traffic accident problems but you can't deny that driving over the speed limit is breaking the law and that you ought to be caught when you break the law. This isn't a complex issue Mr. Clarkson. Go back to talking about something funny involving cars, musing about some metaphor for the newest BMW's handling, breaking the law is a crime and you deserve to be caught for committing a crime.
(Yeah I repeated that phrase a lot but it's the only one that matters)
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at November 24, 2003 03:07 PM | TrackBackHi John,
I really do hope I'm not in this country when you get the jackbooted tryanny all you leftist bus-subsidy junkies and do-gooding New Labour control freaks deserve.
You probably hope I'm not too. But then who are you and all your state-working friends then going to loot to pay for all of your subsidised buses and useless comfort-zone state drudge jobs?
The point of the article, and Clarkson's point I'm sure, is that there is an enormous rise in violent crime in this country. So what is the police's response? To target, with increasing vindictiveness, those people who either do now, or who used to, respect the law, thereby taking away their respect for it, and their willingness to convict these other accused violent people when they take jury service.
This is called "getting your priorities all wrong".
If you should ever go mad, and decide to start driving, maybe you might then realise what it's like to be forced to pay through the nose for a useless police service which ignores burglars and muggers, and decides to target you instead, because you're easy meat, and they can make money from you without even leaving the comfort of their lovely warm offices.
Everybody who drives in this country, breaks the speeding laws every day. Even your 80mph motorway coach driver, and all the lorry drivers who get your food, just in time, to the supermarkets you buy it from. Isn't it convenient for you that you get the benefit of all this law-breaking, but don't ever risk any punishment? It's a nice sanctimonious position to be in, I suppose. But it does rather invalidate your position, that you don't actually drive, don't you think? A bit like a homosexual complaining about schoolgirls getting pregnant.
And still New Labour, John? Come on, wake up. New Labour is a dead man walking, without any purpose, without any conviction, and without any ambition beyond plain survival, as all their pie-in-the-sky idiotarian plans run deeper into the sand, as the months go by. Just like all socialist plans for Utopia, in the end, once they've exhausted the capital generated by previous periods of individualism.
When will you people learn?
Posted by: Andy Duncan at November 26, 2003 03:41 PMHou are completely missing the point.
The problem is that government traffic policy is supposed to make roads safer. Instead, this reliance on speed cameras is causing the situation to deteriorate. Convictions for drunken and dangerous driving have plummeted over the last few years, not because people are driving more safely, but because speed cameras are being used instead of traffic patrols. Are dangerous and drunken drivers not criminals?
The objection is not to speed cameras per se, in certain circumstances they can be a useful road safety tool. The objection is to the notion that they are a subsitute for a safety policy.
To preempt any ad Hominem response. I have never been booked for speeding, or stopped by the police, or had any accidents, in all the 23 years I've been driving.
Posted by: Andrew Bent at November 27, 2003 08:26 AMI continued this discussion on the Samizdata blog so I won't clog up this site by mirroring it :)
Posted by: Johnlouis Swaine at November 30, 2003 07:38 PM