The limits of bad sense

IF YOU'RE one for making a note of moments in history, mark a cross on this month on the calendar.

It's the one when hitherto walking-on-water New Labour embarked on getting a right kicking at the election from the millions of fed-up motorists.

For look what the car-hating clots promise to punish drivers with next - on top of the tax plunder they are already suffering.

This past week alone we have seen the threat of 50 mph speed limits on rural roads and our cranky anti-car councils let off the leash to impose 20 mph zones in towns and yet more humps and bumps to go with them.

We have also learned of the plan to treble the number of speed cameras on the nation's roads with councils and police getting their hands on a share of the fines loot so they can buy even more cameras to catch even more motorists and rake in even more money.

And, to top it all, police chiefs - with nods of approval from Jack Straw's Home Office henchman Charles Clarke - want to make sure they nab speeding motorists by the cartload by prosecuting those doing just one mile an hour over the speed limit!

From all of this, you would think the roads were knee deep in corpses, gore and car wrecks.

But they are not. Britain's roads are the safest in the industrialised world and road deaths at their lowest since they began counting in 1926 when the roads themselves and the number of vehicles on them were minuscule in number compared to today. If that is the state of affairs - and one which, surely, points to the responsible behaviour of the overwhelming majority of road users - then it is manifest that these wholesale purges are not necessary.

Yes, by all means, put 20 mph limits alongside schools and playgrounds - but need they be in force 24 hours a day?

And, certainly, lower the limit on twisting and narrow country lanes where going faster than fifty would be asking for an accident.

But why slap restrictions on every rural highway, when there are lots of stretches where it's safe to go faster?

Indeed, do prosecute the speeders when they are breaking the law with clear intent.

Yet, can that really be the case when a driver creeps one or two miles over the limit and now finds he or she is trapped by an increasing array of speed cameras or traffic police bent on boosting the force's budget?

The fact is that the accident statistics clearly show that you could only drive in Iceland or Sweden, which are hardly choked with either cars or people, to be safer on the roads than in Britain with its 30 million drivers.

It is obvious, then, that there are far better things for the Government, councils and, above all, the police to be doing than hounding motorists.

How about hounding the real criminals and anti-social pests that ordinary people are fed up to the back teeth with?

And what a fine illustration we had of that last point last week from Rossendale and Darwen MP Janet Anderson, who was complaining about the police not doing enough to tackle the problem of teenage vandals and trouble-makers making life a misery for residents of a Darwen estate. Then, just four days later, she was hailing the idea of the police occupying their time chasing the heinous law-breakers going one mile an hour over the speed limit.

If she and other politicians like her want the police to get their priorities right, they need to adjust their own.

That means turning the heat and the police on to the real criminals in our midst - the vandals, muggers, druggies, burglars, and sink-estate louts.

For if they persist in this stupid and wasteful purge against motorists, they risk being banned from their ministerial limousines at the ballot box by the millions of angry voters. And rightly so.

Kick fat cats out of shop

REMEMBER how, in the days of the now-sunk Soviet Union, we used to hear tales of how Communist Party chiefs and officials were the only Russians allowed into the "hard currency" stores that stocked luxury goods that shoppers - mainly tourists - could only buy with western money?

Didn't that stink of the corrupt privilege that characterises a rotten dictatorship?

How much more foul still it is, then, that the wonderful bulwark of free enterprise and democracy known as the European Union is revealed as having it own secret VAT-free shop stuffed with caviar, champagne and piles of other luxury items for the sole benefit of the fat-cat Eurocrats like its 20-member unelected Commission, who draw at least £130,000 and most of it tax-free.

Security guards are employed to keep out the tax-paying hoi polloi who are subsidising this secret shop while having had their duty-free travel perks scrapped by the EU. The difference, of course, is that the corrupt Commies of old got the heave-ho while these guzzling Eurocrats still have their snouts still stuck firmly in the trough.

And this, mark you, comes only six months after the entire Commission was forced to quit because of sleaze and the new lot are supposed to be under firm scrutiny to stop them being bent. Pah!

The only way to sort out this Euro fiddling is for the government of a member state to withhold its entire contribution to the EU until its dictatorial Commission is purged of its disdain for decency and democracy by being made to be elected and the members of its fingers-in-the-till parliament agree to the open policing of their pay and expenses.

If the lot of them are holding us to ransom, it is time the voters did the same to them to purge them of their insulting greed and self-granted privileges.

Britain would do well to take the lead in this.

Sophie's right royal cheek

WITH three out of four of her children's marriages ending in failure, the Queen must wonder whether her youngest son, Prince Edward, has found a lasting union with Sophie Rhys Jones, who now has the grand monicker of Countess of Wessex to put on her headed notepaper.

I do not the think the Queen need fret - for she and Eddie, the new earl of the same non-existent spot, are evidently a well-matched pair. For it has taken no time at all for Sophie to learn Ed's trick of using his royal status to promote his business interests.

In his case, it has taken the form of his TV production company making documentaries about royals and featuring his royal self, presumably to appeal to the American market .

Now, for a reported £250,000, his new wife is offering her newly-royal support for Rover cars.

One wonders whether she would have got the job and/or so much money if she was still a public relations person of common status?

The day, of course, has long gone when deference used to prevent people from wondering such things out loud about the abuse of royal privilege.

Now, many people wonder why we put up with it and the whole institution - and how much longer we will.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.