Monbiot is bang on about speed cameras, and the motorist lobby are hypocrites.
Look, I’m honestly not all that bothered about speeding. I’m not even that bothered about the number of children killed every year by cars in Britain. The one purely driving issue that does really get my goat is people tailgating, for which I think there is no excuse whatsoever…and indeed there is no excuse for it in the eyes of the law either.
So why am I about to bang on about speed cameras?
Well, here’s the thing. It’s not so much the cameras as the people, and an aspect of them which Monbiot nails very accurately.
They are staggering, collosal hypocrites. Maybe not all of them, but certainly most.
The big beating heart of this lobby comes from the right wing tabloid press, with commentators like Jeremy Clarkson and Kelvin McKenzie (all the drawbacks of Clarkson with none of the charisma or humour) consistently leading the charge.
Apparently speed cameras infringe on our civil liberties (though CCTV of course protects us from thugs and junkies). They assault the ‘rights’ of the ordinary motorist (though the notion of human rights in a specific, written down, actual law sense is often derided). They criminalise law abiding people (though it’s fine if you do that through punitive drug laws or terrifyingly loose definitions of ‘terrorism’). They take our jobs and smell funny (oops, sorry, that’s actually asylum seekers. Apologies to all concerned).
But here’s the thing. The speed limit is a LAW. By breaking it, you are breaking the LAW. Again, laws being broken is not something that particularly stresses me out. Hell, in my view some degree of rule breaking is an essential part of creativity, and on a national scale it’s an essential part of what keeps the powers that be in some sort of check and balance…enough law breakers and a law will usually be changed (poll tax for example).
However, these are not columnists and newspapers who advocate breaking the law. They see the law as an inviolate entity that should not be challenged, with two exceptions:
1) Have a go heroes.
2) Speeding motorists.
Interesting that both of these should directly endanger the lives of others, yet when it comes to drugs, most of which harm nobody except the person who ingests them, the penalties for breaking the LAW, according to these same commentators and newspapers (or their ilk, I don’t want to misrepresent Clarkson who for all that he hugely angers me is not quite the hypocrite in these matters as McKenzie, never heard him bang on about drugs for example…) almost can’t be harsh enough. Drug users need jail time, need zero tolerance, need to be cracked down on.
Smug hacks in overpriced overpolluting penis extensions, however, have a god given RIGHT to endanger the lives of themselves and others, and to break any mere earthly LAW that prevents them from doing so.
The upside of this though, is it does expose a large proportion of the right wing press, and the people who lap it up and create the demand for it, as petty, self serving, smug whining gits who don’t even have one of either the intellectual capacity or honesty to deal with the contradictions caused by their position on motoring crime, preferring instead to hide behind well worn tiresome thundering rants about vague notions like the ‘nanny state’ and ‘political correctness’, generally with reference to some shocking story about, for example, the EU wanting to straighten our bananas which 9 times out of 10 turns out to be a totally fictional rumour propogated in order to spread the myth that political corectness is:
1) An inherently bad thing (as if we all miss the days when it was fine to call people Darkies or Kykes or whatever in any situation we liked in the name of wholesome banter).
2) Spiralling out of control even though these same papers seem to have no problems in shoving a dumb bint’s tits in my face every time I glance at a newspaper stand. In the world they describe, these newspapers would not be allowed to exist.
But I digress.
To conclude:
Are there worse people in the world, doing more harm? Yes, absolutely.
However, there should always be a special distaste in anyone’s heart reserved for rich/comfortably off people using the considerable platform and attention they are given in order to promote such a self-serving, utterly narrow and pathetically non beneficial view.
Surely by their own terms, what with us going ‘To Hell in a Handcart’ and all (the title of McKenzie’s fantastic work of literary bog-roll) there would be more important things to hyperventilate about than speed cameras, but apparently not.
Which leads to the question…how badly off can your life really be if not being allowed to drive faster than the law allows on public roads for reasons of not risking killing people is the, or on of the most important issues affecting your life? These are the people who set the standards against which the ‘youth of today’ are (apparently) steadily declining? Who tell us that the moral fabric of society is breaking down and that they are it’s guardians? That they are, in fact, in ANY way qualified to judge anyone on just about any moral issue whatsoever given the clear and blatant moral vacuum that they not only display but actively wear as some kind of warped badge of pride?
