5:40pm
Magnus Linklater broke the law three times. He was found out. As a result, he thinks he'll lose his licence.
And his complaint is: that he was found out.
I don't get it. I really, really don't get this obsession people have with the iniquity of speed cameras. There's a very simple way to not to fall foul of them. Don't break the law.
UPDATE: One of my commenters comes up with a classic red herring:
You are a small government advocate (aren't you?) and cameras are just the heavy dead hand of big brother/nanny state depressing us all. They are way overused when they should have a respected place in the management of roads.
Big or small government has nothing to do with this. It's an issue of whether or not one obeys the law, The argument of those who froth over speed cameras is that they should be able to ignore the law when they see fit because it suits them so to do. The law might say the speed limit is 40 but if they want to travel at 50, why shouldn't they? What an utterly bizarre argument, which they would not seek to use when it comes to plunging any other lump of metal into another human being's body - which is, of course, the impact of a crash.
Another commenter writes:
[L]et me pose to you a simple question. The parliament makes it illegal for anyone to step outside their front door. Your response? What's the problem? Just don't step outside your front door. My point? You have to look at the substance of the claimed illegality and gthe wider context. Is driving at 75mph a great crime?
Well no, it's not a great crime. But it is illegal. And the argument is not usually framed by the opponents of speed cameras in terms of the illegitimacy of speed limits per se (as the comment seeks to imply) but over the mechanism for detecting breaches of the law.
If you think that speed limits are indeed wrong, then fine, but make that case and see how far you get when there's a child run down in a suburban street by someone driving at 65 mph. But if one accepts that 30 is a safe limit, even 20 (as it is in my road), then one cannot with any semblance of sense argue that if people then ignore that limit, they should not suffer any consequences. All cameras do is pick up when people are going faster than the limit.
I repeat: if you don't want to be fined or to suffer at the hands of speed cameras, there's a very simply solution: don't break the law.
(Not that it matters to my argument, since I am not complaining about cameras, but in response to a couple of emails, no, I have never been done for speeding. And I passed my test in 1981 - although I went a few years when I didn't bother having a car).
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2:02pm
BTW, if you haven't already seen it, Oliver Kamm has a superb piece today on Iran. Here's the key point:
The likeliest way to increase tension and exacerbate Iran's obstructionism is to act as if the regime has done nothing wrong. Avoiding military action requires that the UN pressure Iran to abide by its international obligations as a signatory of the NPT.
...With concerted diplomatic pressure, sanctions and luck, our message might yet be effective. Iran has an extremist regime but, unlike North Korea or Ba'athist Iraq, is not a totalitarian state. Its civil society, according to anecdotal evidence from journalists and academics, contains much sympathy for the US; it may prove a potent ally in turning Iran away from support for terrorism and studied nuclear ambiguities. But, as Blair rightly maintained, western diplomacy cannot afford any "grand bargain" while the message remains unheeded.
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12:45pm
Or, to be specific, the wisdom of 57 per cent of the crowd:
Some 57% of respondents thought Gordon Brown was tainted by sleaze.
Tainted? Covered in it from head to toe, more like.
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12:27pm
I hate to disagree with the estimable James Forsyth, but I'm not sure he's right when he writes of the report on Iran's nuclear programme:
At first blush, it appears to thwart any chance America and the EU-3 had of getting the UN Security Council to vote for tougher sanctions on Iran.
Surely the people with severe egg on their faces are the appeasers of Iran? The lesson that any objective analyst has to draw is how necessary it is to be tough.
If the intelligence report is to be believed (and it's curious how those who continue to scorn the use of intelligence reports in regard to Iraq now embrace this latest US intelligence) then the conclusion is obvious. Why did Iran pursue a weapon until 2003 and then stop? Because it turned into a peace-loving nation? Because it saw the error of its ways? Of course not. It seems unlikely that it was an accident of timing that it put things on hold in 2003 - the very year when the US showed that it was serious about dealing with terror states when it took action against Saddam.
The message is that it's no use asking nicely. And it's no use making idle threats. The only words that work are words backed by the convincing threat that failure to comply will lead to serious and damaging consequences. In other words, the Iranians were convinced that the US meant business. (It's exactly the same process as when Libya caved in.)
Now, more than ever, the West has to show that it is determined not to allow Iran the weapon.
UPDATE: Great minds think alike.
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11:48am
I've not posted yet on one aspect of the David Abrahams affair: the 'it's a Jewish conspiracy/it's Mossad' innuendos (and even outright accusations) which have been flying around. The worst - by far - was a front page Telegraph report worthy of Der Stürmer, which showed the former Israeli Ambassador shaking hands with David Abrahams and alleged:Fears are growing within the party that David Abrahams, who hid his identity by using four intermediaries, may himself have been a conduit for another mystery benefactor, after senior Labour figures questioned his personal wealth.
Melanie Phillips has dealt with this, as has Martin Bright:
The 'mystery benefactor' turns out to be our old friend, global Zion.I'm not going to link to any of the many blogs that have been touting this vicious nonsense, but I will name the repellent MPACUK -- a British Islamist website -- as one of the worst, so take a look if you want to be appalled by how readily some will still turn to anti-Semitism as a default postion.
It's amazing isn't it? In the case of the craziest 9/11 theory, the Jews conspired to get themselves out of trouble; in this bonkers plot they appear to have conspired to get themselves into trouble. Today, though,our old friend the Yazzmonster has been up to her usual tricks, playing the holier-than-thou card whilst in reality peddling vicious smears.
Even in her intro - some of her best friends are Jews, you know - she's at it, decrying how she's had to weigh up whether or not to reveal the truth lest she face "the wrath of Moses". Ah yes, Moses, short hand for 'the Jews' (the sort of short hand, by the way, that Nazis used).
Brave heroine of truth that she is, she won't be silenced by them yids:
[T]hese questions will not stand aside or lie down. They have been bothering me since the Labour party donor row broke last week.
And the truth is?
David Abrahams, the strange shape-shifter at the centre of the funding furore, was once Mr Big in LFI; so is John Mendelsohn, the smart fundraiser picked by Gordon Brown to garner "election resources" to finance the next Labour win. Lord Levy is also a key member of LFI.
Bingo! They're all supporters of Israel. And we know what that means don't we? They're up to no good:
We witnessed the tortuous police investigation into the peer's affairs during the cash for honours investigations, but not once was there any scrutiny of Levy's connection to LFI and how that might have led to the offer of his prestigious position as the Middle East envoy, handed to him by his tennis partner, Tony Blair.
Well done, Yasmin. Good to know that you have evidence of the real crimes which the Jewish Lord Levy - that's Lord Levy THE JEW in case you'd not noticed from her piece - is guilty of and which the police didn't find and which the CPS was unaware of.
BTW, nifty use there in the same sentence of two of the oldest tropes of the lot. Abrahams is "a strange shape-shifter" (the Jew as the rootless cosmopolitan) and also a "Mr Big" (they run the world, even if, er, Yasmin, you've simply made up the idea of Abrahams being the power either in front of or behind the throne at LFI because it suited you.)
Pretty great, eh? We're not even two pars in to the piece and we've got accusations, innuendos, Jewish conspiracies and two of the oldest antisemitic tropes in existence.
Don't bother with the rest of it, because it made me feel slightly sick and it'll probably have the same effect on you. Unless, that is, you enjoy reading ignorant peddlers of the oldest antisemitic caricatures.
Then again, I would say that because I'm a yid too. Isn't that right, Yasmin?
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