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Jeremy Clarkson: Surely God in disguise

Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear program is, without any shadow of a doubt, the finest piece of current broadcasting on British television; I will brook no argument here. It is also the only place on the BBC where, except for the Hutton affair and the related war against Iraq, fierce dissent against the centralising thrust of New Labour’s Euro-loving socialism is both tolerated and welcomed.

I would love to see Jezzer’s contract, the one he signed a couple of years back, to revive the moribund Top Gear franchise. ‘I want a race track,’ he will have said. ‘I want a large garage-cum-showroom for a studio, and I want to make as many closet libertarian and anti-Tony Blair statements as I damn well please.’

The BBC won’t have liked it, but with one of their biggest money-spinners, the Top Gear Magazine, in a probable sales decline, without its matching TV series, and programs like the cunningly titled Fifth Gear picking up multi-million sized audiences on rival terrestrial channels, there was only one option for even the BBC, that car-hating, carrot munching, First Class train riding, pampered elite of Old West London town. Even with the compulsory tithe of the BBC license fee, even they, the chosen ones, have to sometimes make programs which Jonny Englander, at home with his shotguns and his bulldogs, might actually want to watch, to stop them turning off the BBC altogether in favour of such exotic delights as Men and Motors. So the BBC bigwigs will have traipsed up to Jezzer’s Oxfordshire countryside home, taxpayer-funded cap in hand, and begged the frizzy-haired one to do the decent thing and get them out of the hole of their own making, the one they created by taking Jezzer, Doncaster’s finest son, out of the original program several years ago, and then by dropping the program altogether, to meet the delighted wishes of socialist car-haters everywhere.

But as the bus-loving New Labour machine has declined, and the car-loving individual has come back, the new-look Top Gear format has since proved a total delight to watch. Forget the cars, which are good, and forget the acceleration statistics, which are out of this world. As a married man, all I can do is dream, for I know that unless something outrageous pops out of the woodwork, such as my eventual debut novel having its film rights snapped up for £10 million pounds, my next car will be a Ford Galaxy. Yes, it has come to this.

I watch Top Gear, instead, for the sporadic gems falling from the Great Man’s lips. We are simply unworthy. Take two weeks ago, for instance. Jezzer wanted to test out three new sports cars, but he couldn’t do it in Britain, with its antiquated nanny-state driving laws. So he tested them out in the Isle of Man, instead.

‘The head of state is the Queen,’ he said. ‘But Tony Blair isn’t the prime minister, and the Isle of Man isn’t in the EU. But best of all, once you’re outside of the towns, there are no upper speed limits.’ There then followed the TV driving report equivalent of Jezzer sticking two fingers up to every tofu eating, bike riding, nipple piercing New Left pinko in the land, as he careened his Honda love machine around the Isle of Man’s road-based TT tracks. Magnificent.

And then last week he said: ‘Why is it that one government department, the Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority, will sell you a personalised number plate for an extortionate amount of money, so that you can make it look like the word of your choice, and then another government department, the ones who wear big hats and plastic shoes, will arrest you and fine you for doing just exactly that?’ He paused, before answering. ‘We live in the worst country in the world,’ he said. These are the words of a TV-presenting genius.

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 woodentops.

Or, as the Jezzmeister said, we live in the worst country in the world. At least we do for lazy, inefficient, office-bound police, whose response to an extraordinary rise in violent crime is to order more speed cameras. Though at least I can still say this without being arrested. But for how much longer?

Which brings us to an even more important question. Who is fresh Stig, the new one replacing dead Stig? Is it Tiff Needell, who needs to disguise himself for contractual reasons, or is it Damon Hill, who has to disguise himself to avoid being seen working for such low fees?

As an unlucky punk once said to Clint Eastwood, while lying on his back staring up at the barrel of a 44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, I got’s to know.

42 comments to Jeremy Clarkson: Surely God in disguise

  • Johnathan

    Ahem, I wrote the same thing on Clarkson about 4 weeks ago after the drivers had smoked around the Isle of Man singing the praises of high-speed freedom

  • Or, as the Jezzmeister said, we live in the worst country in the world. At least we do for lazy, inefficient, office-bound police, whose response to an extraordinary rise in violent crime is to order more speed cameras.

    Worst in the world? Nah. However much I agree with most of what you have to say, I’ve seem much worse.

    Just out of interest, in Australia a couple of weeks ago I did a fair bit of driving. The number of speed cameras there has as a rough guess tripled since I was last there a little under two years ago. Whereas there was previously at least some pretense that the cameras had been placed on dangerous sections of road, virtually all of the new ones are in places like the middle of a straight piece of motorway. Like here, people are really getting angry, and the media is (finally) starting to ask the question as to what is the precise point of this (answer: revenue raising). Like here, there are lots of speed cameras, and essentially no police action being taken against instances of genuinely dangerous driving. It makes you cynical.

    (It’s also interesting that you seldom many fewer complaints about red light cameras, which also exist in increasing numbers. The difference is that unlike driving 5mph over the speed limit, running red actually dangerous, and people are smart enough to realise this).

  • JoeB

    Ahem, to correct your error, the unlucky punk said:
    “I got’s to know”.

    Then Clint pulled the trigger, and all the punk got was a click. Priceless.

  • http://www.whatcomestopass.com

    All this bunkum about them lowering or not lowering traffic accidents is totally immaterial. Kindly demonstrate to me why it is wrong for someone to be punished for breaking the law?

  • Simon Jester

    Partly because it’s a rubbish law, and partly because the propaganda broadcast in favour of traffic cameras always concentrates on the claimed accident reduction benefits.

  • R. C. Dean

    Kindly demonstrate to me why it is wrong for someone to be punished for breaking the law?

    Because it is wrong and deeply corrupting to enforce a law for the purpose of raising revenue. At that point, the state ceases performing a legitimate public safety function and goes into the extortion business.

    In addition, those cameras ain’t free. There is a further question raised by spending government resources in a way that will not increase public safety. At a minimum, spending gazillions of dollars on gadgets that don’t increase safety is a waste of money, and well worth questioning from that angle as well.

  • Tom

    Outrageous. Taking taxpayer money to make television programs? Surely you are disgusted by such an abuse, and don’t watch the show out of principle.

    Or perhaps your silly fundamentalist one-size-fits-all “libertarian” philosophy leaves a little room for indulging in the guilty pleasures of socialism – such as TV shows that would never be produced by the private sector?

  • llamas

    Johnlouis swaine wrote:

    ‘All this bunkum about them lowering or not lowering traffic accidents is totally immaterial. Kindly demonstrate to me why it is wrong for someone to be punished for breaking the law?’

    Oh, I’ll take that one.

    It’s not wrong for someone to be punished for breaking the law, and noone said it is. Strawman.

    The question is one of public policy. I contend that it’s an EXTRAORDINARILY bad idea for law enforcement to have a vested financial interest in the outcomes of their work. Bureaucracies being what they are (interested in institutional growth, for which funds are required), a system which rewards them financially for enforcing some laws but not others, will lead inexorably to their efforts being directed more and more towards enforcing the laws which make them a profit.

    This is, I think, what is being complained of so bitterly – that police efforts are being directed towards the zealous enforcement of civil infractions (in which, generally, there is little societal damage and no victims), while ‘thieves and pimps run free’.

    As I understand it, you are a law student in the UK, a situation in which I once wallowed until I learned better. That being so, perhaps you might consider this in the same light as the question of a barrister’s fee. Should a barrister have a financial interest in the outcome of the case?

    Here in the US, it’s a common jest to speak about how traffic enforcement is performed in certain backwaters – a police officer stops a Yankee motorist for speeding, and hales him off the the local JP (his second cousin) who demands a cash bond. Nothing to do with law enforcement or public safety, of course, merely a convenient mechanism for enriching the coffers of local government. It sounds awfully as though the same kind of thinking has now spread to the UK. If the nation were a crime-free Garden of Eden, there would be less to complain of, but of course, the statistics show that it is fast becoming a festering pit of violent crime, exceeding even the notoriously-violent (!) US in many categories. That being so, there’s something deeply offensive about the police spending so much time and effort chasing relatively-minor civil infractions.

    llater,

    llamas

  • Verity

    I like it that Jeremy Clarkson smokes. It must be driving all the little leftie BBC politically correct self-righteous twerpies mad with impotent rage. Ha ha ha! The only thing that would make it even better is if he had an open bottle of Johnnie Walker on the seat next to him and drove with one hand on the bottle while holding a mobile phone in the other and steering with his knees. But he probably only does that away from the camera.

  • mark holland

    There’s an interesting example of the effects of rubbish laws going on at the school my girlfriend teaches at. The new head has come in and has laid down lots of petty rules such as always walking on the right hand side of the corridor. Some of the more bolshie kids (and teachers) resent these intrusions and are repidly losing respect for many of the other more serious rules and consequently there is also very little respect for the head. Remember these kids are under 11 years old! I think it’s great!

    Bad laws are bad for the law!

    BTW I drive and cycle a fair bit and see some truely abusmal driving. I don’t care what happens to the bad drivers, screw them, it’s what happens to their victims I care about. The mobile killers need sorting out. I snapping Andy doing 35 in a 30 limit going to make any difference? No.

  • Andy Duncan

    Jonathan writes:

    Ahem, I wrote the same thing on Clarkson about 4 weeks ago

    Sorry, Jonathan. I was off duty, at the time.

    JoeB writes:

    Ahem, to correct your error, the unlucky punk said:
    “I got’s to know”.

    Nice one, JoeB. Offending article to be corrected ASAP.

    Johnlouis Swaine writes:

    Kindly demonstrate to me why it is wrong for someone to be punished for breaking the law?

    You might want to try reading 1984, online, and get down the bit where O’Brien describes the formulations of law in Oceania. (Search for “In Oceania there is no law”)

    Atlas Shrugged also has some good bits about why the state will always try to construct a legal code in which it is impossible not to break the state’s laws, thereby rendering a population full of guilt, thereby rendering them into a more malleable mass to control more easily.

    This isn’t about law-breaking, this is about several other issues.

    1. The raising of another stealth tax: With the pips squeaking in the Treasury, with all new spending on the UK armed services suspended indefinitely until further notice, despite the increasing insecurity of Britons around the world, every little helps, even a measly 73 million.

    2. It’s about making useless chief constables look as though they’re doing something useful, hitting some ‘vital’ targets, when in fact they are becoming increasingly impotent and useless in the face of real criminals, who have absolutely no respect for their law, and impotent in the face of ever-increasing amounts of ‘Human Rights’ legislation, which has turned police forces, in the UK, into police services, ie. ineffective bureaucratic-bound uniformed social engineering workers.

    3. It is about criminalising people and rubbing in their faces that the state is in control of their lives, and they’d better learn to obey or else.

    4. It is about covering this country in a net of cameras, which will eventually provide a 100% blanket of state control of human movement.

    What is most certainly is not about is road safety, as Mr C. so clearly demonstrated last night. If it were the ten most dangerous roads in Britain would be festooned in hundreds of low-cash raising cameras, and that mobile camera van Thames Valley police have been using with such tremendous financial effect in Reading, and other towns, would be turned into a van for collecting burglars in. Fat chance.

    We have already reached a point in Britain where it is almost impossible to go through an entire day without breaking the law, in one form or another. This is where they want us. They choose not to convict us for most of these misdemeanours (smoking cannabis, filling in tax forms incorrectly, walking on the cracks in the pavement, etc.), but always with the option of cracking down if they really chose to, if we’re too naughty for them.

    When they pass a law to carry ID cards, I will break it until they pick me up and throw away the key (unless they threaten my family first), and when they ban fox-hunting I will seek out the nearest hunt to Henley, book a place on a horse-riding course, buy one of those pink jackets and a horn, and get out there. OK, so hardly revolutionary stuff, but we should all stop being frightened of them. They are nothing other than armed parasites and looters, chancing their arm that we will keep falling for their ancient confidence trick that they own the law.

    Show me where I signed the social contract where I said I would obey the law in return for the munificence of the state? If you can’t, in the meantime I will obey their laws merely because they will put me in jail if I don’t, and for no other reason. Aside from that I will try to follow the moral principle that I should harm no other people, or their property, in my life’s pursuit of my own aims. How I could potentially harm anyone driving at 31mph on a clear road, which I’ve paid for through taxes, on a road which used to be a 50mph road several months ago, which is impossible for anyone to cross because it has iron railings down both sides, is beyond me. That it breaks their laws, I’m sure. That virtually every driver in the UK breaks the law in an identical fashion almost every day, unless they drive a Volvo and wear a hat, is almost equally certain. The law is an ass.

    I have no respect for asses.

  • Rob

    It’s an interesting point. While speed cameras are indeed a problem and I hate them, their main effect is to make it obvious that most speed limits are stupid.

    Consider my regular drive up the M3 to London. On some stretches, in good conditions, *every* car is doing *at least* 80mph. For everyone to be breaking the law like this surely invalidates the law.

    I wonder what will happen when eventually speed cameras are installed that average your speed over a distance, so that it will be impossible to speed on the motorway without getting caught. I suspect there will be two results. First, since everyone will be doing 69 – 71 mph, people will drive much closer together and there will be more accidents involving larger numbers of cars. Second, there will be pressure to rationalise the speed limits on motorways and/or abolish the speed camera system.

    In other words, if _everyone_ had to obey the law at all times, including politicians, I don’t think the law would stay the same for long.

    If I had it my way there would be no speed limits at all. I don’t think they make the roads any safer. I wonder what the situation would be in an ideal libertarian society with the roads all privately owned.

  • Malcolm

    I quite agree with Andy’s article. I have got in the habit of watching this first rate entertainment every week. I don’t even have a driving licence, and if asked to describe a car I saw in an RTA I would probably be reduced to saying “it was red”.

  • How does Tom come to the conclusion that “Top Gear” would never be produced by the private sector?

  • llamas

    Tom wrote:

    ‘ . . . such as TV shows that would never be produced by the private sector?’

    I guess that explains the multiplicity of, not just TV shows, but entire cable TV channels, here in the USA, which are devoted to nothing but the pleasures of the automobile, including the pleasures of driving them fast.

    I think SpeedTV is maybe the most common, and it includes shows made under the Car and Driver franchise which are very comparable to the Top Gear that I remember. But plenty of other channels include plenty of coverage of all aspects of driving. Including (heavens to Murgatroyd!) breaking the speed limit. Oh, the horror!

    ‘Never (be) produced by the private sector’? Maybe not.

    llater,

    llamas

  • What I find even more offensive than the licence fee (and trust me, I find that really offensive) is the way in which the laws governing non-BBC television have been written over the decades to protect the BBC by preventing proper competition. By that I mean the artificial scarcity of licences for competing terrestrial channels, and the extreme regulation of the programming of competiting terrestrial channels. We simply do not know what programs the private sector in this country would have produced, because we were not allowed to find out.

    Things are much better now than they used to be, of course. ITV and Channel 5 are now regulated something like normal companies, even if the third commercial station (Channel 4) still has state ownership and weird regulation, and whatever we think of him otherwise, we have Mr Murdoch to thank for providing genuine competition in television in Britain.

    And like Mark, I have no problem whatsoever with people being punished (and harshly) for genuinely dangerous driving. In fact, I am strongly for it. It is the fact that enforcement of traffic laws has strayed so far from doing this that is the problem. There is nothing wrong with enforcing a law if it is a good and morally justifiable law, and preventing pedestrians from being run down by dangerous drivers does qualify. However, just because something is a law doesn’t make it good. And too many bad laws and people lose respect for the good as well as the bad. And I am repeating what other people have said in this comment thread, but what the heck.

  • Dale Amon

    Just a slightly different topic… wasn’t that Toyota incredible? Now I’ve driven a Cherokee down a long flight of stairs, through rivers, stuck in mud to the doors, had a Volkswagen bug squash itself and manage to scratch my rear bumper… but it just doesn’t compare to what Jeremy put that truck through.

    I also suspect Toyotos don’t have that little problem with the rear half axle pin that long time Cherokee owners will know about…

  • R. C. Dean

    Jeremy needs to drive the civilianized Humvee, the H2. A friend of mine put one of these through a workout this weekend, and apparently they are simply unbelievable – virtually indestructible, unstoppable, and very comfy.

    With a kitchen (stove and fridge) in the back.

    Plus, they piss off all the right people!

  • Llamas Wrote

    As I understand it, you are a law student in the UK, a situation in which I once wallowed until I learned better. That being so, perhaps you might consider this in the same light as the question of a barrister’s fee. Should a barrister have a financial interest in the outcome of the case?

    Clearly a barrister has no financial interest in the outcome of his case and by the ethical restraints placed upon the bar he is not entitled to hold any such interest. Although it could be pedantically argued that with the rise of no-win-no-fee advocacy in the United States a situation analogous to such a scenario has come about but that is sheer pedantry on my part 😉

    As I understand it an argument has been proffered by several people that the placement of Speeding Cameras has been an exercise who’s chief goal has been to achieve the maximum financial impact of the fining system (indeed if Top Gear are correct there certainly doesn’t seem to be any other rhyme or reason for the placement of the cameras).

    That is one way of looking at it. However if we take into account that the only way in which the police can bring criminal proceedings against a driver is for that driver to have contravened relevant traffic law one could equally note that the reason they are placed where they are placed is because that is where the most people speed. It would seem logical to me, to place your cameras in the place where the most violations of speed limits occur and indeed to you, to extract the maximum amount of money from the motorists.

    By its very definition the fining system means that If the cameras are placed to tackle the areas where there is the most speeding the police will end up receiving the most money in fines.

    The problem is that you can just as easily claim that the police have an interest in stopping the most speeding offenses as you could that they have an interest in obtaining the most funding as a result of the fines because the two are inextricably linked under the current

    Whether you intend to give the benefit of the doubt to the Police or not is a matter of personal opinion, however in this society we like to presume that the civic duty of a Police officer overrides any other impetus to act and it is for that reason that I am unwilling to consider such motivation instrumental in their decisions.

    Perhaps you are correct and we should not place so much trust in our Police Force, however it would seem ironic that you suggest the police would spend too much time enforcing petty laws such as speeding and yet maintain that they are making a killing from speed cameras. Surely if the remuneration is so generous as to draw the Chief Constables to pursue the propogation of the speed camera with such eagerness, there would in fact be more resources for the combating of other crime.

    It is an interesting social question and one which I can see will be debated ad infinitum, the ethics of civil service are always a contentious matter.

    Andy Duncan Wrote:

    Show me where I signed the social contract where I said I would obey the law in return for the munificence of the state?

    The munificence of the state is present in the implied obligation for Crown in Parliament to act for the benefit of the populous. The Social contract to which you allude is the document which effectively indicates your nationality. In truth you are correct in saying that there is no such document, as your passport is merely indication of this and not the document itself. However your obeying of the law is an implied term of your citizenship. If you are British sir, then you are bound to obey the laws of the land, for it is upon this very foundation that the power of the Courts of Justice rests. You effectively signed it when you became a subject of Her Majesty the Queen.

    (incidentally: Bloody nice to be able to debate without being drowned by idiotic spam, for some reason most people with my political beliefs seem to be dilluted by liberal dogma, try making your voice heard amongst 30 posters saying the same idiotic thing they read in the Socialist Worker’s Weekly (or whatever the name of that publication) )

  • The “second” live Stig is indeed Damon Hill.

    He wears the disguise of the inclusive helmet because he is now achieving higher speeds on Top Gears track than he ever could on on the F1 circuit.

    Why is this? Because on Top Gears track Michael Schumacher isn’t always in front of him 🙂

  • John Harrison

    Jeremy needs to drive the civilianized Humvee, the H2.
    In the last series of Top Gear, he did just that. And loved it.
    The one of his colleagues drove a US Army riot control vehicle through a temporary building. Just for fun.

    Clarkson also had a series of his own – I think on BBC2 for a while, part chat show, part documentary clips where he let rip on many subjects other than motor related ones. It was excellent but I think the BBC cancelled it.

    Johnlouis Swain’s point:
    Surely if the remuneration is so generous as to draw the Chief Constables to pursue the propogation of the speed camera with such eagerness, there would in fact be more resources for the combating of other crime.

    sounds logical but the way the hypothecation of fines from cameras is set up, the money raised can only be spent on ‘road safety measures’, like, er, more cameras. That’s why they have proliferated so quickly. With the notorious van camera in Reading, Thames Valley Police raised so much money that the ‘Road Safety Partnership’ – police, Council, etc. could not spend it all within the required period and had to hand millions over to the Government.

  • R. C. Dean

    Surely if the remuneration is so generous as to draw the Chief Constables to pursue the propogation of the speed camera with such eagerness, there would in fact be more resources for the combating of other crime.

    In theory, I suppose, but in practice, not so much. Even if the funds were unrestricted, the incentives in place would lead the coppers to invest, not in crime-fighting, but in either the generation of more revenue. Even without those incentives, experience shows that police departments with surplus funds tend to spend on bigger vehicles, more toys, more stylish uniforms, etc.

    Like all institutions, the police do not exist in order to pursue their mission, they pursue their mission in order to perpetuate their existence. Thus, they will fight crime o nly to the minimum level necessary to prevent the whole department from being put out on the street.

  • In theory, I suppose, but in practice, not so much. Even if the funds were unrestricted, the incentives in place would lead the coppers to invest, not in crime-fighting, but in either the generation of more revenue. Even without those incentives, experience shows that police departments with surplus funds tend to spend on bigger vehicles, more toys, more stylish uniforms, etc.

    Concerning the ‘bigger toys’ that’s certainly a point I’d agree with. The actual increase in police manpower has largely been a result of David Blunkett exercising executive power and setting aside money to hire more constables, when given additional funds most Chief Constables do end up buying into more high-tech gadgetry.
    However, whilst I may agree that another Bobby on the Beat would be a far better use of resources the gadgetry isn’t an entirely failed endeavor.
    As for the fact that most of the money is ploughed right back into road safety measures I suspect that’s probably a particularly sore spot if you don’t agree with said measures in the first place. It depends upon your initial stance as to how you will view the further progression of the policy and if you don’t much like Speed Cameras, the chances are that you’re not going to enjoy a whole lot more of them springing up.

  • mark holland

    road safety measures

    Not a gripe at Mr Swaine just a winge in general.

    West Sussex CC has decided that hatch markings where the lanes part before a right turn lane on a single carriageway are not enough. Instead they think a concrete island with a pole with a keep left arrow and white light globe atop is an aid to road safety. The globe isn’t very bright and it’s too high in the air.

    I don’t like them when I’m on my bike because less considerate cars might try to squeese through rather than harmlessly passing with loads of room to spare. I certainly don’t like them in the car in the dark as they loom out of nowhere. What does it matter if there’s nothing coming and you put a wheel over the hatchings? Nothing. Big deal. If you don’t see this concrete island coming out of nowhere and KABLAM. It’s no surprise to me then that lots of these road safety installations have flowers tied to them where, no doubt some poor moterbiker has wrapped himself around the post. I’m sure as his brain was being caved in he was thinking how good it was that our taxes were being put to such good use in the cause of safety/being used to make work for council workmen in installing death traps.

  • John Harrison

    As a matter of interest, if the guidelines say that the speed cameras should only be placed at known accident blackspots and properly signposted then there must be a way to challenge the siting of otherwise placed cameras and get them removed, or at least moved to where they might actually do some good.

  • In some states in the US, they have what’s known as an “85th percentile” speed limit law. It’s some variation on the idea that, by law, the speed limit must be set to no lower than the speed of the 85th percentile of drivers. This is accomplished by measurement on major roads, and with a system where citizens can appeal the limit and call for a measurement on minor roads.

    Only such a speed limit is just, imo. Speed limits dreamed up by cops or bureaucrats are just another little tyranny. And tyranny is as good a reason for breaking a law as a man should ever need.

  • llamas

    Johnlouis Swaine – all good points.

    I would like to make one thing clear. You wrote:

    ‘Whether you intend to give the benefit of the doubt to the Police or not is a matter of personal opinion, however in this society we like to presume that the civic duty of a Police officer overrides any other impetus to act and it is for that reason that I am unwilling to consider such motivation instrumental in their decisions.’

    I should like to make it clear that what I said was not intended to reflect upon the sense of civic duty of most, if not all, individual police officers. I have been a PO, here in the US, and it’s my experience that most individual PO’s do indeed have a strong sense of the civic duty to which you refer.

    However, that is beside the point, because few individual officers are involved in the policy decisions surrounding such things as speed cameras – in fact, since many are installed and operated as essentially third-party operations, with the police power only applied when a motorist fails to pay the fixed-penalty in the first instance, the police don’t have much to do with them at all except when it comes to generated revenue – and that is a matter for the very senior command and not for the copper on the beat.

    I trust most working coppers to do right, most of the time. I have no such trust in the command structure, where politics, policy and career are more important than the public good.

    You’ll note that, here in the US, where the police function is far-more-democratically controlled (elected chiefs and sheriffs, elected prosecutors, ASF) the Big-Brother-like encroachment of speed cameras has simply not occurred, because the public won’t stand for it – the societal benefit simply isn’t there. It’s been my experience that speed limits are enforced here with a very different mindset, the attitude being that it’s not speed that kills, necessarily, but great differentials in speed that cause a problem. Most speeding tickets, I have observed, are issued as a proxy for generally-poor driving, the specific violation of the speed limit being the verifiable hook on which other bad behaviour is hung.

    What have become quite popular here are red-light cameras, and those are generally well-accepted, because the dangers are obvious and the benefits self-evident. But it’s interesting to note that the public reacts quickly and strongly when there is any suggestion that these cameras are being manipulated either for private profit or to increase revenue – as for example, suggestions that traffic light timings were jiggered in San Diego and Washington, DC, to snare motorists who were habituated to the existing timings.

    Laws should be ‘the most wholesome, and necessary, for the public good’. Speed limits always have an element of the capricious about them, since they punish a behaviour which almost always has caused no harm to anyone. There’s a distinct element of the nanny state about them, which is enhanced by zealous and mindless enforcement. Couple that with the fact that speed limits have generally not kept practical pace with automotive technology, and the appearance that they are being enforced, not for the public good, but to fill the coffers of local government, and you can see where large numbers of motorsist would be more-or-less outraged.

    Dsmith has noted that speed liomits in the US are often/ususally set by a combination of road engineering factors and actual driver behaviour, and are open to change and modification. This is, IMHO, a more appropriate approach, and much more likely to be acceptable to the public, since it takes account of the fact that in most cases, it’s not speed that kills but speed differentials.

    Mark Holland – solid barriers in the roadway? What are they using for brains? What kills people in traffic is limiting the places they can go to when everything goes to h**l. To that end, modern roadway design looks for ways to reduce or eliminate hard and unyielding stuff – not increase it! Rumble strips, soft curbs, deflecting markers – but not concrete! What a bunch of morons.

    Maybe I’m overthinking it, but it seems to me that that sort of approach is what you would expect from a state which is beginning to care more and more about the rules than about the people, and whose functionaries are held harmless from the consequences of their actions. You’re supposed to use the roadway in this manner, by God, and if you Stray Outside The Lines, we’ll put in concrete to Make You Stay Within Them! If we let people drive outside the the lines, the next thing you know, we’ll have Anarchy, and Uncontrolled Happiness In The Streets!

    llater,

    llamas

  • Rob

    Johnlouis Swaine wrote:

    one could equally note that the reason they are placed where they are placed is because that is where the most people speed. It would seem logical to me, to place your cameras in the place where the most violations of speed limits occur and indeed to you, to extract the maximum amount of money from the motorists

    I would argue that the reason so many people speed in such places is that it is safe to do so. People are not, as a rule, reckless. So then the speed limits in these places must be set artificially low in order to raise revenues.

    Llamas was rightfully outraged at the thought of putting lumps concrete in the road to improve safety. In some places in the UK they put such objects alternately on the left and right side of the road to create, in effect, chicanes. The reasoning is, presumably, that these obstacles slow cars down. It really has to be seen to be believed.

  • Ian

    Someone already pointed out a link that car ownership has increased even though accident rates remain the same, that’s a win in my book.

    However, I suspect avoiding accidents is not the real objective of the cameras, but the primary concern is actually traffic flow. A road can only contain so much traffic, narrow down a lane without reducing the traffic load and you get chaos, as anyone who has gone past motorway roadworks will testify.

    I regularly drive the A102/A12/M11 link road, which is alternating between 50 and 40 mph and regularly spaced cameras, I can absolutely guarentee that during peak periods if people did 60-70 then it would stop dead when it comes to the narrow bits and you lose a lane. I have often seen a beautiful sight of steadily moving traffic, evenly spaced and getting to where it needs to go in the right amount of time, all down to properly managed speed and traffic control, administered by PC Gatso.

    Unfortunately boring traffic management doesn’t grab the soundbite headlines as much as death by HGV, so thats the story you hear and the one Messers Clarkson etc pick up on and rant about.

    Accusations of stratigically placed cameras are little too conspiracy theorist to me, coincidently placing a speed camera where people deliberately speed seems perfectly reasonable if you are trying to control the traffic rather than prevent accidents.

    As regards the “average speed” monitors, what people don’t realise is that in keeping with the traffic management school of thought rather than the accident prevention and income earning conspiracy, most of these will be computer controlled and subject to a variance according to conditions, it’s the ultimate goal for traffic management, so one day you might actually be legally able to cruise at 120 mph when the motorway is clear at 4am.

    To blow the lid on my seemingly socialist tirade I actually agree with Jezza (and pop-dildo Simon Cowell) that the fast car owners need their own lane, but it’ll be fenced in by concrete slabs (don’t want them careering onto the plebs) and standard lane width, which is unfortunely only 1cm wider than most supercars.

  • Simon Jester

    Ian,

    I regularly drive down the west side of the M25, which also has traffic control cameras and variable speed limits. They don’t help much.

    There are a number of problems. For example, the most common cause of congestion seems to be queues tailing back from junctions, yet the variable speed limits are applied evenly across all lanes. Consequently, if one lane gets snarled up, they all grind to a halt.

    Yet it is possible to have the limits applied differently across different lanes; this is done where there are accidents. (Of course, in the case of accidents, everyone slows down to have a look…)

    I’ve seen too many cockups with the automated systems (single sections at 40 mph with no congestion and neighbouring sections at 70 mph, fog warnings displayed in clear sunshine, etc) to have any faith in them.

    narrow down a lane without reducing the traffic load and you get chaos, as anyone who has gone past motorway roadworks will testify.

    Here’s a funny thing – the first time I encountered the automated speed restriction was in just such a situation (in 1995, as I recall, on the Southern stretch of the M25). The funny part was that there were no such restrictions in the approach to the roadworks – where all the traffic ground to a halt – but there were such restrictions after the roadworks had finished, where the traffic would speed up anyway. AIUI, this was where these restrictions were first tested on British roads; the results of these tests were what drove their adoption elsewhere.

  • Andy Duncan

    Johnlouis Swaine writes:

    The munificence of the state is present in the implied obligation for Crown in Parliament to act for the benefit of the populous.

    What ‘implied’ obligation? Like I said, I obey the laws of the United Kingdom because if I don’t, they, the agents of the state, will put me in one of their jails, not because I have any respect for either these agents, or their laws, or their jails. Just plain honest fear. Except, perhaps some respect where their laws happen to coincide with my beliefs that people should go through their lives without imposing themselves upon other people or their property. I’m willing to discuss what constitutes other people and their property. That is interesting. What I will refuse to do is blindly obey ‘the law’ of all these omnipotent Judge Dredds, regardless of its nature, because hundreds of backbench Labour morons have voted it through the state’s chambers (or Conservative morons, or Liberal morons, take your pick).

    The Social contract to which you allude is the document which effectively indicates your nationality.

    Do you mean the document I am forced to acquire, in order to cross the invisible lines between states, or do you mean all the other various documents the state forces me to acquire to live my life in some reasonable degree of comfort? I do not acquire these documents because I believe in the British state. I acquire these miserable pieces of bio-encrypted paper because without them my life would be hell. I believe this is sometimes known as blackmail.

    It does not mean I love the state, or that I freely chose to surrender myself to it. It’s just that with the disappearance of the American frontier, there’s a hundred or so thugs out there, controlling the entire world’s land surface, and one must come to some accomodation with one of them (the British state, the American state, God forbid the French state), to stop the other 99 beating you up.

    You seem to know a lot more about British law, than myself, so let’s imagine you’re a judge. In the case against Duncan, if at some point in the past it could be demonstrated, against all my protests, that I DID in fact sign a social contract, but I could show that at that time someone was holding a gun to the back of neck, how would you rule as to the validity of the contract?

    If I lived in criminalised ghetto, would my handing over money to one of a hundred mafia gangs, in order to acquire their protection from 99 other gangs, imply that I thought it was right they should be able to make me do this? Or would it imply that I was simply surviving in an intolerable place, as best I could, before I could help create a better world, in however small a way, without having to live under the thumb of these criminals?

    The case for the defence rests.

    In truth you are correct in saying that there is no such document, as your passport is merely indication of this and not the document itself.

    Yes…

    However your obeying of the law is an implied term of your citizenship.

    No, it implies nothing of the sort. I am a free man, a human being, and any link I have to the British state is merely one of the accidental location of my birth within the territorial boundaries of this particular Mafia gang, originating from Normandy, at this pariticular point in history. That’s one of the reasons, I think, people have recently celebrated the English world cup victory. For the British state has long hated the idea of Englishness, except perhaps where it wins it votes, and English people in turn, are coming to hate the British state. In a few years England won’t even exist. It will simply be the south-eastern British region of Euroland.

    These hypocrite socialist ministers, one of whom refused to pay the poll tax, have a knife to my throat. My life, and more importantly my family’s life, would be much more unpleasant if I refused to obey their orders or pay their taxes. So I obey, when I have no choice not to. I am therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, a slave of the state. But it does not imply that I love or agree with the idea of the state. Merely that I wish to live. And given that in present world conditions, it is virtually impossible to avoid having to belong to one of these gangs, or states, it is my immense luck that I HAPPEN to have been born in one of the less bad ones, the English part of the Anglosphere, with a long history of individualism overcoming statism, from the Saxons of Germany successfully resisting the encroaches of the Roman Empire, through to the Anglo-Saxons of America throwing off the yoke of the German Kings of Britain.

    If you are British sir, then you are bound to obey the laws of the land, for it is upon this very foundation that the power of the Courts of Justice rests.

    Oh, stop being so pompous (and yes, it does take one to know one :). Or, if you must continue in this pompous vein, the next time you break of Her Majesty’s divine laws, such as driving at 31mph, or walking over a pedestrian crossing before the green man comes on, and the police fail to spot you, arrest you, and convict you for your CRIME, I suggest you immediately hand yourself in at the nearest police station and demand the stiffest sentence possible to punish yourself for your terrible dereliction before the omnipotent laws of British Justice.

    Or do you truly live the life of a law-obeying Saint?

    You effectively signed it when you became a subject of Her Majesty the Queen.

    When? Where? Who? How? What are you talking about? God dropped me in the southern part of his own county, Yorkshire, in the 1960s. I therefore accidentally became a ‘subject’ of the Queen. Yes, thank God, it wasn’t somewhere much worse, such as North Korea, and sometimes I wish it had been New Hampshire, and if those good people of the Free State project DO manage to free NH, book me a ticket there, immediately.

    (incidentally: Bloody nice to be able to debate without being drowned by idiotic spam, for some reason most people with my political beliefs seem to be dilluted by liberal dogma, try making your voice heard amongst 30 posters saying the same idiotic thing they read in the Socialist Worker’s Weekly (or whatever the name of that publication) )

    I would be interested to know where you place yourself politically. A God, Queen, and Country Conservative, perhaps? Admirable in many ways.

    But I love myself, my family and my friends far more than I will ever love ‘my country’. As Dr Friedman says in his book, the Machinery of Freedom, if the state is the final line between us and socialist tyranny, then, grudgingly, I will support this useful criminal organisation until someone clever like Dr Friedman can figure out a way to get rid of even this raison d’etre, its last prop.

    But please don’t ask me to blindly love the British state merely because it controlled the land in which I was born. That is to deny human intelligence, and to reduce us to the level of ants. The place where I was born was once part of Roman Britannia, then Romano-Celtic Gwynneth, then Anglo-Saxon Mercia, then the Danelaw, then Norman Britain, and in the near future, Euroland. States come and go, and people come and go.

    One day we will be rid of all states, at least that is my dream, probably a risible one. And then, I believe, people will truly prosper, just as they have in all ages when states have been weak.

    BTW, don’t waste your time arguing with socialist workers (none of whom work, except as state drudges). Brick walls have more active brain cells than socialist workers. You’d be better off smashing your head against breeze blocks. Though as a former quasi-member of Militant Tendency, I even said that back then, when my own brain cells were frozen! 🙂


  • Oh, stop being so pompous (and yes, it does take one to know one :). Or, if you must continue in this pompous vein, the next time you break of Her Majesty’s divine laws, such as driving at 31mph, or walking over a pedestrian crossing before the green man comes on, and the police fail to spot you, arrest you, and convict you for your CRIME, I suggest you immediately hand yourself in at the nearest police station and demand the stiffest sentence possible to punish yourself for your terrible dereliction before the omnipotent laws of British Justice.

    Or do you truly live the life of a law-obeying Saint?

    Sadly I am one of those annoying people who do in fact wait for the green man to appear, perhaps not because I’m some sort of social saint but more because I don’t consider it worth my time to risk myself before some driver who’s going to push the envelope for those precious few seconds that the amber light affords him 😉

    Yes it does indeed sound pompous but without that fundamental principle the courts are flawed absolutely. Absolute obedience to the law is the founding principle of society, even if that enforcement is in practice lax the notion is essential.

    Equally your citizenship isn’t ‘mandatory’. For instance I was not born a British citizen despite having been delivered at Portland Road Hospital, I became one at a later date (I am by birth Italian, although I current hold Dual-Nationality). Your nationality is a privilege and you don’t so much ‘drop in’ as a subject ready made but are instead instilled with the right to claim that citizenship.

    In addition to which you can rescind your citizenship, whilst your parents entered into that social contract to ‘bind you to the state’ as your guardians and so to speak you have right of self determination and can happily repudiate that ‘contract’.

    Naturally it is understandable to feel that a government you didn’t elect can’t represent you which is one of the curiosities of Democracy, it is nothing more than playground politics. Is it right that the 9 kids can tell the other kid what to do? We’d all say that’s unconscionable and bullying and yet that’s all Democracy is. Your distaste for the actions of the government is not only completely understandable but in many respects completely justified.

    RE: the munificence of the state I wasn’t referring to your duty to obey the laws of the land but simply to the duty of Crown in Parliament to act for your benefit which you obviously agree with as you reject utterly the principle that they are acting in a manner beneficial to the electorate. Your arguments are tantamount to suggesting that they are in breach of that duty and you are correct that they do have such a duty, I was merely echoing that fact.

    My political affiliation is that of Labour Left but with a substantial degree of contempt for the hard left and above all, the Liberal Democratic ideals (Cash for all, High taxes in place of any public sector reform, EU Subordination and a complete absence of courage to pursue legitimate aims in international affairs)

    I read The Times and not the Guardian and find it bitterly ironic that there are more intelligent voices to be heard in that journal than within a paper which supposedly represents my political ideals.

    I hope to read more of your work on this site. It is after all interesting to have libertarian ideals delivered in a readable manner.

  • Andy Duncan

    Johnlouis Swaine writes:

    Sadly I am one of those annoying people who do in fact wait for the green man to appear

    It’s a good job you weren’t in the crowd when Jesus asked for he who was without sin to throw the first stone. He’d have been in big trouble! 🙂

    Yes it does indeed sound pompous but without that fundamental principle the courts are flawed absolutely.

    The courts are flawed absolutely. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry too much about the Royal Courts of Justice. They are merely a footstool, now, to the superior court bench in Strasbourg filled with Greek, and no doubt shortly Turkish, judges.

    Absolute obedience to the law is the founding principle of society, even if that enforcement is in practice lax the notion is essential.

    I take it if you’d lived in Hitler’s Germany, in 1933, and he’d passed a law through the Democratic Reichstag demanding that you help his democratically elected government identify homosexuals, so the Gestapo could round them up and take them away, you would have obeyed this principle of absolute obedience and done his bidding?

    Equally your citizenship isn’t ‘mandatory’.

    No, I suppose I could become a stateless person, and live in a box in a truck, somewhere, before being slung in jail by kind Mr Blunkett for not having any papers. Yes, I have this choice. How unprincipled of me not to take it. I am a disgrace.

    RE: the munificence of the state I wasn’t referring to your duty to obey the laws of the land but simply to the duty of Crown in Parliament to act for your benefit which you obviously agree with as you reject utterly the principle that they are acting in a manner beneficial to the electorate. Your arguments are tantamount to suggesting that they are in breach of that duty and you are correct that they do have such a duty, I was merely echoing that fact.

    Nope, sorry. Lost me there. I never went to Law School, I’m afraid. I was too busy drinking.

    I don’t want the state to do anything for me. I don’t feel it has any duty to do anything for me. Except. That where it forces me to pay taxes, which leave me in a financial position where I’m forced to use the pathetic services it offers, and where it disallows me from providing myself with alternatives, even if I had the financial means left to provide myself with a decent private alternative, then I will use its services, even if only to try to get some of my money’s worth back.

    I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish I was a multi-millionaire with the ability to avoid the state entirely, but I am not yet in that position. Though I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard.

    With its current monopolistic ownership of all roads, all courts, and all police, backed by ruthless use of force, it is impossible not to use the resources of state, even if you are one of these multi-millionaires. But this does not imply that you want them to have this control. Merely that you have no choice. And this lack of choice is the whole problem.

    My political affiliation is that of Labour Left but with a substantial degree of contempt for the hard left and above all, the Liberal Democratic ideals

    You had me bang to rights, there. I had you down as a High Tory.

    Though I suppose this may show how close High Tories are to right-wing socialists? 🙂

    I read The Times and not the Guardian and find it bitterly ironic that there are more intelligent voices to be heard in that journal than within a paper which supposedly represents my political ideals.

    I have hope. You WANT to read the Guardian, because you feel it represents your political beliefs, but you READ the Times, because you find it more civilised (except of course for Peter Riddell). There’s a Smeagol’s glimmer of a chance that you may yet be saved. Stick with Samizdata. We are here to help.

    I hope to read more of your work on this site. It is after all interesting to have libertarian ideals delivered in a readable manner.

    No, don’t read my emotive knee-jerk rubbish. Read Brian Micklethwait and David Carr. THEY know what they’re talking about. Whereas I merely babble.

    Why d’ya think I love Jeremy Clarkson so much? 😉

  • While I hate speed cameras as much as the next man, Jeremy’s interpretation of the statistics is quite poor and biased. Firstly, the “fact” that as the amount of speed cameras has increased, the number of accidents has stayed the same; tactfully neglecting to mention that the amount of cars on the road has also increased, which actually suggests that speed cameras “work.” Second of all, he said that “only 7% of accidents are caused by excess speeding.” While that statistic sounds impressive at first, if you think about it, it actually is pretty meaningless. After all, you could interpret it to mean that speed cameras are causing it to be such a low figure just as easily as it meaning that speed doesn’t kill. I agree with the comment about the 10 worst roads on Britain having only 4 speed cameras. Ridiculous.

  • Ed

    Firstly, the “fact” that as the amount of speed cameras has increased, the number of accidents has stayed the same; tactfully neglecting to mention that the amount of cars on the road has also increased, which actually suggests that speed cameras “work.”

    Or this proportional fall in accidents could be explained by improvements in car safety, airbags, side impact protection, traction control to name a few

  • bogush j mann

    Johnlouis Swaine wrote:

    The problem is that you can just as easily claim that the police have an interest in stopping the most speeding offenses as you could that they have an interest in obtaining the most funding as a result of the fines because the two are inextricably linked under the current

    Whether you intend to give the benefit of the doubt to the Police or not is a matter of personal opinion, however in this society we like to presume that the civic duty of a Police officer overrides any other impetus to act and it is for that reason that I am unwilling to consider such motivation instrumental in their decisions.

    But how does sending a lawbreaker a stealth tax bill, sorry, NIP, a fortnight after the event stop speeding offenses?

    In the Welsh rally incident some drivers received up to 7 (yes, seven) NIPs on the one stretch of road.

    Now, how many drivers that he video’d breaking the law did the policeman operating the camera actually stop in the excercise of his civic duty?

    That would be none then!

  • bogush j mann

    Paul said:

    While I hate speed cameras as much as the next man, Jeremy’s interpretation of the statistics is quite poor and biased. Firstly, the “fact” that as the amount of speed cameras has increased, the number of accidents has stayed the same; tactfully neglecting to mention that the amount of cars on the road has also increased, which actually suggests that speed cameras “work.”

    Sorry, wrong:

    The rate of fatalities had been falling for decades. The trend in the rate started to flatline with their introduction, and now appears to have reversed with their proliferation.

    To make it worse, that is the overall rate. But whilst traffic has risen overall, that is mainly down to a large increase on the safest roads (eg motorways) more than compensating for falls in urban areas, eapecially city centres. These falls are caused by congestion engineering which discourages driving by ensuring that traffic slows to a crawl. And as we all know, it’s only Speed that Kills!

    Paul said:

    Second of all, he said that “only 7% of accidents are caused by excess speeding.” While that statistic sounds impressive at first, if you think about it, it actually is pretty meaningless. After all, you could interpret it to mean that speed cameras are causing it to be such a low figure just as easily as it meaning that speed doesn’t kill.

    Yes, but it’s always been a low percentage (and it’s between 2% and 4% speed in excess of the limit, and 7% to 10% excessive speed for the conditions, regardless of whether it is above or below the limit, depending on which figures you prefer).

    And the first ever pedestrian killed in an accident involving a motor vehicle was killed in a 4mph accident.

  • Adolf

    You are a bunch of pricks

  • I’m sorry about some of the comments above. Jeremy Clarkson is entertaining, irreverent and our lead ally in the destruction of nanny statism.

  • Speed doesn’t kill – drivers do. One person could safely drive down a motorway at 90mph while their next door neighbour might be so shit a driver that they’re too scared to do over 45mph. All a speed camera will do is catch somebody driving over an arbitrary spped limit drawn up in the days when cars had drum brakes and ABS hadn’t been invented. It won’t tell the police about the drink driver doing 10mph swerving all over the road, the boy racer overtaking dangerously and doing emergency stops at every speed camera. It won’t catch someone driving dangerously where there is no camera. What we need is to get rid of the speed cameras and use the money that is normally wasted on them to pay for more coppers to be out catching real criminals, be it on foot or in their car.

  • Grant

    Obviously you people don’t give a damn about the 10,000 or so people that are killed and crippled on the roads each and every year, but let me pose just this one question regarding speed cameras: Do people have a choice about whether they decide to speed or not? We all know the answer don’t we! But I guess you can’t help being fascists. Heil Clarkson!