Speed cameras and statistical ignorance

A new study shows that government claims about lives saved by speed cameras are overstated. This is ammunition against the free-spending little people who run our local authority highways departments. As recession closes in, councillors and others who have been rubber-stamping big budgets are going to have to start questioning what the money is for and why it is necessary to spend it.

Researchers at Liverpool University have knocked Government claims that 100 lives a year are saved by speed cameras. Whilst speed cameras do reduce accidents, the numbers are exaggerated. The research shows a fall in accidents of 19% compared with the claimed 50%.

Does this matter very much, you might ask. After all, this Government belches out false statistics daily and has, indeed, devoted more energy to rigging the apparent outcomes of initiatives than it has on the initiatives themselves. It does matter, and for reasons which go beyond the actual facts behind this research and beyond motoring. Money is wasted in vast quantities on things which make little difference; things which really do matter are neglected in favour of those which yield apparently good outcomes; the police, who need all the friends they can get at the moment, are tarred with the fall-out of policies to which they do not necessarily subscribe; and any little surviving regard for government (as opposed merely to this Government) takes another pasting.

Welsh van man fag trap

A self-employed van driver in Wales has been fined for smoking in his own van. What is it about the local authority mindset, why is it even worse in Wales, and do the local police have nothing better to do?

In my post Smoking Snoopers of 25 February 2007, I commented on the fact that the government had handed £29.5 million to local authorities to help them enforce the smoking ban. It coincided with the news that the police no longer bothered – as a matter of policy – to attend at the scene of a burglary. I did not know it at the time, but the sum so allocated was exactly twice the amount which the Treasury (Gordon Brown Prop.) had shaved off the budget for flood relief.

My focus was on the sort of people who would become smoking snoopers, getting their thrills from lurking to catch people enjoying themselves. They would include, I said:

The sludge which collects at the bottom of every local authority pond who get moved from department to department because they are really unemployable even in that undemanding environment, but who cannot be dismissed through political correctness or union strength.

Imagine being all that and Welsh with it!

Brown the waster tells us not to waste

Hypocrisy is New Labour’s prime characteristic, and Gordon “Heathcliff” Brown’s injunction to us all not to waste anything is a fine example of Labour – and specifically Brownite – hypocrisy

We are, apparently, throwing away £1bn of food each year. That is indeed something to be corrected, with implications well beyond the £420 per family which a Whitehall study has alleged. It deprives others, it generates waste and it inflates the profits of the supermarkets. It is nothing, however, to what Gordon Brown has wasted.

Law enforcers gang up on Cornish shop-keeper

A shop-keeper who fought back against shop-lifters who attacked him has been fined £250 and given a criminal record by Truro magistrates. The thieves were given fixed penalty tickets – equivalent to a parking ticket.

This obviously says something about the quality of policing in Penzance and a little about Truro magistrates. It says very much more about the Government’s criminal justice priorities.

Smoking Snoopers

Three apparently unconnected stories caught my eye in a single week recently.

• The Government has handed £29.5 million to local authorities to hire and train staff to catch people who smoke in pubs and other public places once the smoking ban comes into force.
• Police will no longer attend at the scene of a burglary unless the burglar is still on the premises
• Boys in South London are shooting each other in large numbers, apparently to enforce the “respect” they feel they deserve but do not get.

We see here a pretty clear statement of the Blair Government’s priorities, and a snapshot of the society it has created. We do not, apparently, have the money for proper policing, but we can fund an army of council snoopers to pry on smokers. Perhaps worse, there is no shortage of volunteers for the job. What does it say about our society that there are people keen to take the job of prying on people like this?