Pedestrians are worthless scum

Well that’s certainly how it feels to me. As a car driver, very occasional cyclist and mostly pedestrian type person it would seem to me that the liberty of the latter has all but been lost. And no doubt this ConDem government will with its actions consign us to permanent perambulatory serfdom. This government is supposedly pro-motorist. Their idea of being pro-motorist is a strange one, but then they are Tories so why wouldn’t it be? Basically their big idea about being pro-motorist says, ‘if you commit a motoring offence we’ll ignore it’. In the name of liberty they are encouraging people to break the law. Motorists are being given the freedom to oppress; a very shallow freedom indeed. The removal of speed cameras, the cuts in police numbers and the financial castration of councils has and will continue to drive us down the road to total motoring anarchy. The evidence is very clear for all to see. Too many motorists now just ignore the law. They drive like speeding maniacs and then just park where and how the hell they like. In its urban homeland, the habitat of choice for the law-abiding pedestrian is the path and the pavement. unfortunately today’s motorist has no respect for the domain of others. Parking on the pavement is the fashionable thing to do these days, it is so prevalent, and  it’s going to get worse I have no doubt. Mark my words!

Yellow peril

If a law is deemed to be generally acceptable by society and a person breaks that law it would seem equally acceptable, if caught, for that person to be dealt with by the justice system. I have no desire at this juncture to go further on the outcome of being dealt with by the justice system as it is irrelevant to my argument and I have blogged on it here. Suffice to say that if you break the law and get caught there will usually be something referred to as punishment. As a procedure or process this doesn’t seem unreasonable to me and I suspect most people feel the same.

Are burglar alarms an affront to people’s individual liberty?
Are they evidence of the ‘big brother’ society?
To a burglar the answers are probably ‘yes’ and ‘yes’, unless of course you are Norman Stanley Fletcher, in which case it could be ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But to most of us they would seem to be a useful, if not occasionally annoying when they go off in the early hours near where we live, piece of crime prevention equipment.

Road safety experts say that “speed kills”. We have laws that say speeding is an offence. In general most people accept these arguments. So what is it about speed cameras?

Why are they seen as an instrument of oppression by the BMW driving, Daily Mail reading hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade?

They encourage people not to break the law and they catch them when they do. Agreed they are more effective than your bog-standard burglar alarm, although the more sophisticated burglar/surveillance equipment is pretty good at ‘catching’ people. They are electronic witnesses to law breaking. What is wrong with that?

Now I know that some people object to speed cameras because they see them as an easy tax revenue raising facility, and I have some sympathy with this viewpoint. But I do think the use of the camera and the penalty need to be kept separate in the argument. Personally I’d like to see the emphasis put well and truly on rehabilitation. If people are caught driving dangerously then perhaps the answer should be re-training and education in the consequences of bad driving rather than a fine.

Accident

As I was walking from the train station to work this morning, I came upon an accident. It was on the main road, in front of the trading estate that I work on. As I reached the scene the ambulance was arriving. It was hard to make out what had happened. Some poor soul was lying on the path, with another citizen crouched over him. In the road there was a two car shunt. A car, not sure what make, had run into the back of a Rover. Not wishing to intrude into other people’s misery I carried on walking, rather than stopping to gawp. It was not clear if the person lying on the ground was a pedestrian, a cyclist, or passenger in one of the cars. I suspect the former, but it’s so easy to jump to wrong conclusions. My immediate thought when seeing the Rover was that the accident was probably caused be the driver being the obligatory dozy fucker one needs to be when driving this make. And despite wearing tracksuit bottoms the injured bloke (I do hope he wasn’t badly hurt) is somebody’s loved-one, be it son, father, brother, husband or lover.

This comes on the day of the funeral of the daughter of a work colleague. She was killed in a car accident.

Events like this make you stop and think about your own life. Well they do for me. It brings home the fragility and precarious nature of life. It makes me reassess how I treat those around me. How I live my life. How I should do more to confront my own prejudices. The trouble is that for me, these feelings will no doubt fade, as they usually do, after a relatively short time. If only I could distil the compassion and appreciation that I currently feel, and place it in a phial. A phial to hang around my neck, to act as a reminder about the person I should be, and to use in times of need.