I have rather a poor record for speeding over the years. I have been caught by cameras quite often, sometimes getting points on my licence and paying modest fines, and twice avoiding further points by attending speed-awareness courses to be educated in the dangers that speeding can cause. It has all sort of worked; I am now much more careful. But imagine if I was Finnish? According to a report I read recently in the New York Times, a Finnish businessman called Reima Kuisla was fined €54,024 (about £39,000) for driving at 64 mph in a 50 mph zone. This, Mr Kuisla pointed out, was enough to buy a brand-new Mercedes.
But this was not his first speeding fine. In 2013 he drove at 76 mph in a 50 mph zone and was fined even more — €63,448 (about £46,000). The reason he was asked to pay these astonishing sums (which were, however, reduced on appeal to rather fewer thousand euros) was that he was rich, and in Finland fines for more serious speeding infractions are calculated according to a person’s income, the size of which the police can establish in seconds by contacting the Finnish tax office on their mobile devices. Mr Kuisla, a property developer, earned 6,559,742 euros (about £4,730,000) in 2013.
This ruthless system doesn’t seem to make Finnish roads any safer. In 2013 there were 4.7 road deaths in Finland per 100,000 inhabitants as against 2.8 in Britain. But the principle of fining people for minor crimes in this way is an egalitarian measure that perhaps hasn’t yet occurred even to Len McCluskey. He might like to impose it on the next person he appoints as leader of the Labour party. If it had existed here earlier, it might have ensured that the much-convicted new Duke of Marlborough would have had to get rid of Blenheim Palace, which surely would have afforded Mr McCluskey much pleasure.
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