SURELY, all that was lacking in the latest speed camera propaganda campaign was violins playing in the background.

For what else but drumming up mawkish sentiment can you call the business of East Lancashire drivers, nabbed by police with a mobile camera for doing over 30 mph, being confronted by schoolchildren who asked: "What would you say to my parents if you had killed me today?"?

No doubt, the motorists gulped with horror at the thought. But I'll bet many were also inwardly sighing with relief that having to answer to the policemen's little helpers was saving them the £60 fine and three penalty points they would get if they did not co-operate with this scheme.

I admit that any scheme that aims to save lives and cuts injury on the roads must have some merit. But, yet again, we have road safety officials peddling the notion that speeding is to blame for so much of the death and maiming -- and this time recruiting youngsters to lard it with emotion -- when the fact is, it isn't.

Only a third of such casualties are due to speeding -- and that's official. And this stunt of recruiting pupils to help stop drivers caught by a speed camera and subject them to a shaming quiz might have been a sight less disingenuous if police had also provided figures on how many youngsters, or pedestrians generally, are killed or hurt on the roads because of their own thoughtlessness and not that of motorists.

But lacking that information, what I do know is that Lancashire's glut of 179 fixed speed cameras and 72 mobile sites might be given the credit for just three fewer deaths and 83 fewer injuries last year -- and then not with absolute certainty.

In return for this 128,000 motorists have been criminalised and fined a total of £7.6million while another price has been the immense souring of the public's relationship with the police -- because, just as the minimal road safety gains suggest, so many people believe this anti-speeding mania is more to do with raking in revenue rather than saving lives and cutting injury.

And, surely, even its most ardent proponents can hardly claim that it's a value-for-money exercise when this amount of stealth-tax levied from Lancashire motorists would certainly save far more lives if it was ploughed into health care to cut killers like stroke, coronary thrombosis or breast cancer.

Nor can all these cameras and buying another 160 by the end of next year be justified when a government-commissioned study has now shown that electronic signs that tell drivers they are breaking the limit, without triggering fines, are more effective than speed cameras and when our roads are already the safest in the world.

It's a pity some public-spirited kid cannot be recruited to confront the advocates of speed-camera overkill and ask why his dad is on a long waiting list for a heart by-pass operation while they are chucking public money down the drain.