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.

Lifeboats, lost cats and Wellington boots

The tail end of Summer has seen a spate of stories about minor officials with an acute grasp of the regulations and no brain. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency would rather see a girl drown in compliance with the rules than save her by breaching them. Chichester Council declined to pick up rubbish in a four inch deep stream because they had no-one qualified to wear Wellington boots. And a Canterbury council official threatened a 13 year old boy with an ASBO and an £80 fine for putting up notices about his lost cat.

When Gordon Brown looks back over New Labour’s failures he will find that much of the hatred which he and Labour have inspired will derive from the uncontrolled zeal of stupid officials like this. Labour has created the context – an avalanche of petty regulation and armies of petty pen-pushers to enforce them. There is an economic cost to add to all the other economic costs – compliance amounts to an additional tax and all these dim little people have to be paid for – but the cost in popular support is greater.

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!

Labour lies about rats in rubbish

One of the least appealing aspects of the Blair-Brown administrations – in a very long list of unappealing things – is the institutional dishonesty which these two men and their advisers have brought to government. The dishonesty comes with added hypocrisy since both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in their different ways, have expressly laid claim to a religious and moral basis to their lives.

This dishonesty is not just morally wrong. One is left gaping sometimes at the political stupidity of lying about subjects on which you are bound to be found out sooner or later, particularly things which, however important, are not matters on which governments fall. Governments are entitled to make some mistakes, to experiment, to assess the consequences, and to accept they got it wrong. What loses the votes is the persistent feeling that we are being lied to daily on every subject.

A journey by train from Oxford to London

An evening trip to London by train illustrates how the “customers” are let down by those who provide their “services”. It affects life more than New Labour corruption.

The extent to which we are serfs to the so-called service providers was illustrated four times before the train pulled out of Oxford station.

First you have to get to the station. Every time I queue down Hythe Bridge Street, I curse the valuable time taken from me by the thickest of all thick public servants, the highways officers of Oxfordshire County Council. What inversion of society’s priorities means that flotsam like that can waste hours out of the lives of so many real people, people with jobs and lives that matter?

Googling for Caroline Flint’s bits

Time for an update on the continuing saga of Caroline Flint’s body parts.

Regular readers will recall that I have a double interest in Caroline Flint (see the posts here). One was deliberate – as a libertarian smoker, I have a deep hatred of politicians and others who think they know better than I do what is right for me. She also gave me a model piece for testing theories about Google searching.

Risk adversity at the swimming pool

The point of a council swimming pool is to teach youngsters how to swim, from flapping around in arm-bands and their mothers’ arms, to jumping and and larking about as teenagers. In that safe environment, they can learn how to cope when they go to Marbella with their mates, or fall off a boat, jump into a quarry or get swept away in a fast-flowing river. The whole point is to replicate everything about the experience except the actual danger of the open water.

The worst thing they will find at a council swimming pool is a dreary-voiced functionary telling them what not to do. Three boys were thrown out of Harlow pool last week because they were wearing the long shorts which are fashionable at the moment. The drag of the material could hamper their swimming apparently. But if that is what they are going to wear in real life, then surely that is what they should swim in at the council pool. Many dangerous situations in fact arise when they are fully clothed.

The spirit of the smoking ban

I don’t take the The Sun, so I missed its story of 14 July about the smoking snoopers of Maidenhead. I came across it in an American web site which charts world-wide excesses of power.

The story Mad council stokes fag-ban fire concerned a visit by smoking snoopers (that is “smoking ban enforcement officers”) to the Greyhound pub in Maidenhead. They ordered the manager to close the windows for the summer because smoke might drift in from those exiled outside by the smoking ban. I emphasise the “might” – there was no-one smoking outside at the time, still less any evidence that smoke was actually drifting in.

Dim Scum fights Fat Buddha in Durham

Tracey Ingle, Head of Cultural Services at Durham City Council, has demanded that restaurateur Eddie Fung rename his new restaurant because she objects to the name – Fat Buddha.

There is only one possible answer to such ignorant interference, but we will save that till the end.