I came down to earth with a thump after the spellbinding Jubilee weekend by attending a Speeding Awareness Course at the Sixfields Football Stadium in Northampton. It lasted four and a quarter hours and was held in the windowless shareholders’ lounge of the Northampton Football Club, not a nice place in which to spend a long afternoon.
I had been tempted to pay a fine and have three points put on my currently clean driving licence rather than undergo this dispiriting experience, especially as I had already been on a Speeding Awareness Course four years earlier and knew what I was in for. On both occasions I had been caught by a speed camera going 35mph along a road with a 30mph limit and was offered the option of indoctrination as an alternative to a formal punishment. But such is the proliferation of speed cameras in Northamptonshire (a county long known as ‘the speed camera capital of Great Britain’, just as it is now also shamefully known as its ‘wind farm capital’), and so easy is it to drift unintentionally above a speed limit when one’s mind is on other things that it seemed prudent to avoid collecting any points at all.
So off I went to the Sixfields Stadium to join about two dozen other repentant miscreants in being lectured on road safety by a couple of experts in the field, who took it in turns to impress on us the error of our ways. We were told in letters from the police beforehand that we would be ‘delegates’ to the course, which was an odd word to use as we were representing no one but ourselves; but then every area of professional activity tends to develop its own quirky vocabulary. The course instructors said, for example, that their aim was to ‘enhance’ our driving skills, not to ‘improve’ them, though the distinction was rather lost on me. More explicable was their rejection of the word ‘accident’ to describe car crashes, since they were at pains to make clear that collisions were almost always somebody’s fault. The course cost £90, £30 more than the fine would have been; and when I paid this on the internet, I received an emailed receipt thanking me for ‘shopping with the Northamptonshire Police Authority’, which wasn’t exactly what it had felt like.
The two ‘workshops’ I attended had much in common — explanations of how even small increases in speed (from 30 to 35mph, for example) greatly increased the chances of death in a collision, advice on how to improve concentration, anticipate hazards, avoid road rage, obviate the effects of tiredness, and so on.
But there had also been some changes of emphasis during the past four years. During my course in 2008, on which I spent three hours at the Northampton Indoor Cricket Ground gazing forlornly at a photograph of Earl Spencer, the instructors made valiant efforts to make us feel warmly towards speed cameras. Though it seemed very difficult to believe, they insisted that all speed cameras were sited in places where three or more people had been killed or seriously injured in motor accidents — sorry, collisions — during a three-year period. ‘Don’t feel aggressive towards speed cameras,’ they said. ‘Think of them as memorials to people who have lost their lives.’ Even more implausibly, they informed us that to make a rude gesture at a speed camera was a criminal offence. If you raised two fingers at a speed camera, they said, you were liable in theory to be prosecuted, even if you were observing the speed limit at the time.
I don’t know whether it’s because these attempts to portray speed cameras as sensitive humanoids provoked too much ridicule, or whether it’s because course instructors found they couldn’t temper the hatred most drivers feel toward them; but now, while still claiming that speed cameras are only installed at high-risk locations and not, as many believe, where they are likely to raise the greatest revenue, they have almost stopped talking about them and have certainly given up any attempt to make them seem lovable. Yet statistics do show that speed cameras have greatly reduced the carnage on the roads and have contributed to making Britain almost the safest country in the world to drive in (according to the World Health Organisation, only Malta is safer).
When so much else is gloomy, this is something to be proud of in this Jubilee year — this, and of course the monarchy itself, which survives only because a vast majority of the people want it to. There is no more authentically democratic institution in the country.
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