Michael Henderson suggests

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Poop, poop

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Oh, give me a break. James Delingpole uses his column in Standpoint to deliver a lament on how life is so hard for motorists:

We daren’t floor the accelerator on the open road – not even when it’s wide and straight and it’s the middle of the night – because we know for near-certain we’ll be blatted by a speed camera. And we can’t eat or drink or smoke or use our phones behind the wheel, no matter how dextrous we are, because that could easily cost us our licences. As for drink-driving, are you kidding? What kind of an evil, selfish psychopath would you need to be to commit a crime like that? Truly, there is almost no end to the myriad pettifogging ways in which we’ve contrived to make the whole driving experience as miserable as possible.

Does he really think the drink-drive laws are a Bad Thing? Hasn't he noticed that one of the reasons cars have become a problem is that there are an awful lot more of them than there were in his grandfather's day? Unless my eyes deceive me, one of the safety innovations he doesn't mention is compulsory seat-belts. This article explains how much opposition that measure aroused back in the Seventies. I presume Delingpole would have been in the libertarian camp on that one too.

(Just for the record, I love driving fast, and I got caught on a speed camera just a few weeks ago, doing 51mph at dead of night on a stretch of the M40 which had a 40mph roadworks limit. The number of traffic of wardens swarming around the West End drives me crazy, too. But that doesn't make me a martyr.)