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.

Department dogs look like their jobs

It is often observed that dogs resemble their owners which, if true, would make me a handsome black chap, friendly to everyone he meets, always thinking the best of everyone and eager to please, absolutely none of which is true of me (nor, indeed, and perhaps fortunately, do I pee on every bush and rest my head on visitors’ knees under the table). Have you noticed, though, that public servants somehow acquire the characteristics which suit their jobs? Or perhaps people who look like that gravitate to jobs which suit them.

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.

Got nothing to say? Send for Harman

There was not much Labour could say as the extent of the overnight debacle in the local elections became clear. If there is not much to say, Harriet Harman is just the person you need to say it, and the mere fact that it was Harman who was sent out to speak on the Today programme this morning was evidence enough that Labour was lost for words.

She was eloquent and fluent as streams of nothing poured from her mouth. John Humprys was gentle with her in a way he would not have been with, say, Geoff Hoon or Hazel Blears or any of the others from the substitutes bench who might have been sent out on New Labour’s behalf. It would be like kicking a dandelion.

Alienation in my own land

The state of the nation was neatly summed up between trains at Reading station one day last week.

For the second time that week I had bounded out of a west-bound train and dashed across to Platform 8 in time to see the doors lock on a train heading north to Oxford and beyond. Both trains were running to time so it is deliberate time-tabling which ensures that one cannot do a seamless change. Well, it may be deliberate – some venomous little bureaucrat spotting an opportunity to inflict a little more misery on those who are compelled to suffer the “service” which First Great Western offer to those who pay the wages; it may just be stupidity.

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?

A hit-squad of old nurses

Libby Purves, writing in the Times on Tuesday (Send in the storm-trooper nurses) suggests that dirty hospitals be visited by

“a volunteer regiment of ex-nurses trained before 1975: opinionated middle-aged women with strong memories and no fear of offending. Every hospital would be invaded by several dozen for one month. During that month all normal taboos would be suspended: there would be no interdicts on workplace bullying, harassment, job demarcation, paperwork, or protocols of line management.”

I know one or two of that generation of nurses. They are appalled to see nurses out in the street in their uniforms, never mind the visible dirt in the wards. Their fear of long-dead Matrons remains as strong as their conviction that the discipline was right and necessary.

You might think that a reforming government with a big purse and a belief in its capacity to change the world would have managed at least to clean the hospitals. The stumbling-block is that those things which are at the root of the problem are things which are simultaneously dear to Labour’s heart and susceptible to Labour’s great weakness – lack of attention to detail.

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.

A&E Dilemma for Brown

Closing down half the country’s Accident & Emergency units would be an easy decision for Gordon Brown the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Whether Gordon Brown the Prime Minister will be so enthusiastic remains to be seen.