When we get the hump over speed bumps, it's a monstrous hypocrisy

WHEN AN ELDERLY local recluse was murdered in his rundown house a couple of weeks ago, one thought that did not occur to me was that it was all somehow the fault of the area plod. Then, last Friday, my local newspaper featured as its lead letter a tribute to the deceased, coupled with a violent assault on the constabulary. “What were the police doing while this vulnerable elderly man was being ‘murdered’?” demanded the writer, before supplying his own answers.

“They were most probably handing out tickets to drivers doing a right turn at a no-right-turn junction, stopping drivers who are on their mobile phone and moving school kids along from outside Starbucks.”

I spent part of the weekend contemplating this epistle. First there were its untested assertions. For example, how did the author know whether or not the police had tried to help the dead recluse with, say, improving his security? As it happens (I discovered) they had made contact with him on several occasions. Then there was the tone. The letter might have tentatively suggested that perhaps better policing would have prevented the crime; instead it stated this as though it were incontrovertible fact.

Intriguing too was the choice of law-abiding law-breaking that the writer wanted left alone — turning right at no-right-turns and using mobile phones while driving. So I Googled the author and am reasonably sure that he works at one of the estate agents’ offices along a 100-yard stretch of the High Street. Without casting aspersions on any firm in particular, on-the-go realtors are known for breaking every traffic regulation as they ferry their clientele and their business affairs from office to premise.

Above all there was the placing of the letter. I am not in favour of censorship, but editors do have a choice as to what to publish, and this particular contribution was, I thought, speculative, grossly unfair and not particularly well written, harnessing a genuine tragedy to the writer’s own rather pathetic set of grievances. Yet there it was leading the page. Why?

In the past year or so my local newspaper, once famed for its debates, has become insurgent. Its preferred editorial emotion is anger, and its anger is deployed on behalf of the weak and the downtrodden. The paper is also radical enough to revise the old ideas of who the downtrodden are. The poor, the disabled and the disadvantaged young are passé. Today it is the motorist who is the downtrodden.

A few months ago the paper appeared to be on the side of some parents complaining about a long-heralded reduction in the number of parking passes handed out to motorised school-runners. A bit later speed humps were the enemy. A woman even had printed a long McGonagallesque poem about how speed humps were ruining her life (something like, “Oh dreadful speed-humps over Cecilia Way”). On the same page as this week’s letter is an editorial arguing that the local borough has “become the road hump capital of the Western world”, lamenting the expense of these sleeping policemen, and arguing that they have only been installed so that the council can find something to do with its piratically levied parking receipts. “The writing is on the wall,” it says, for anti-motorist councils.

Any editor who believes that traffic calming measures are mostly the product of council rapacity simply doesn’t know his or her own readers. In their early years speed bumps were like burglar alarms — when you saw one you knew that something bad had happened there. Just as alarms marked houses that had been burgled, humps marked roads where kids had been knocked down, and where parents had campaigned for something to be done. Eventually it occurred to councils to pre-empt the deaths and maimings by setting up traffic calming measures and creating 20mph zones.

Like parking restrictions, the battle here is not — as it has been depicted — a battle between ourselves and the anonymous bureaucracy, but between ourselves in our different guises. We campaign for resident parking and (if we have young children) traffic calming in our own roads, and resent it in other roads. As though periodically abducted by body snatchers, we become something different, something monstrously selfish, when we metamorphose from pedestrians and parents into motorists.

Without policed parking and traffic restrictions some motorists will park or drive anywhere, taking no account of wheelchair users, the blind, other people’s children or the laws of gravity and probability. How can the letter-writing estate agent think that it is a good idea for him to drive around an area full of schools, jabbering into his mobile? Will he only realise it isn’t when he or his fellow agents kill someone? And, Mr Local Paper Editor, should we really return to the days when we needed a dead child to get traffic-calming measures?

A friend of mine said to me yesterday that there wasn’t much good political satire around at the moment. I pointed out to him that there was plenty that was savage and supposedly funny both said and written about our politicians. Channels of it. Rory Bremner, sketchwriters, cartoonists, sports writers, novelists, film reviewers — none so distant from the political process that they can’t intrude something at the expense of our supposed masters into their chosen oeuvre. I’d happily pay some of them to stop.

We know we have no respect or time for those in power, wondering only how they got into power in the first place, given their monstrous deficiencies. And we must after all be right, for the consumer is king. But if that’s true, then it should be we who are satirised. Our hypocrisies tend to be what makes hypocrites of those who seek to represent us. We are the ones who demand the irreconcilable, while expecting not to be bothered with the details of the attempted reconciliation. We are permanently indignant about our own ignorance.

Ask almost any conscientious school governor or PTA activist. You can send out a zillion letters, put up a gallery of posters, invite endless consultation — and no one but the same half-dozen parents will respond. Then, as in the case of the school-run permits, suddenly it affects them. Wardens are moving them on as they attempt to triple park in a narrow road. Bang! Why didn’t you tell us? It’s a disgrace! Boom! There’s a campaign group and the local paper moans about a dearth of discussion.

Perhaps indignant passivity is a product of representative democracy, in which the citizen almost expects to be protected from her own prejudices by the enlightened representative. Under this system we are free to dissociate ourselves from the results.

I wonder whether this doesn’t infantilise us all. Perhaps we should be forced to live more directly with the consequences of our own decision-making, through much greater use of local plebiscites or the setting-up of citizens’ juries, who can hear all the facts and then decide on the complicated question of, say, whether the discomfort of motorists is more important than the lives of children.

Comments

[John Angliss]

That's very well said and necessary! Will be directing a few bloggers your way.

[Al]

Well said, David. I liked your bit about us "demanding irreconsilables". In the run up to the last election I kept reading the tired old mantra that “most politicians are useless and/or liars”, but nobody seemed to spare a thought for the poor politician who has to deal with an electorate that seems somewhat inconsistent. Today’s voters want better services but do not want to pay more tax, want to be safe but do not want to pass security laws, complain that they are not being "listened to" when what they really mean is that they cannot have their own way, moan about their own problems without considering what is best for the common good, believe what they read in their choice of media without considering the counter-arguments, do not want the unqualified to receive state-benefits but refuse to accept the introduction of identity cards and can always spend tax money more wisely than the current government while getting themselves into massive personal debt If I was a politician I'd want to "throw out" the electorate rather than vice-versa.

[Frank Schnittger]

Good post David, but it might have helped had you actually interviewed the local Editor and Estate Agent to establish whether all your suppositions and assumptions were true. Or might that have spoiled your argument?

I have to agree with you though that we have an extraordinary ability to disassociate ourselves from the leaders we have, ourselves, elected. I think there is a bit of snobbery at work here. If the general run of the mill voted for him, he can't be very good, can he?

Most marketing/advertising works on the principle that we want to differentiate ourselves from the common man - and each product sells us the illusion that if we buy it, we will be the envy of everybody else.

Democracy has the perverse requirement that we humble ourselves to the point where our vote isn't worth any more than that of the local village idiot. Ergo it cannot have a good outcome. Those elected can never be good enough to represent US!

I'd never join a club that would accept me as a member" - Groucho Marx. We always aspire to something a lttle higher than the reality of where we actually are. Politics has the disconcerting habit of bringing us back down to earth.

Our politicians are a mirror image of who we actually are, when we would rather prefer to touch up the image just a bit!

[johnthefinger]

What were you thinking of when you wrote this, David? Camden's environment chief was slung out at the local elections along with all his colleagues (in Gospel Oak too) largely because of the council's bonkers approach to parking enforcement and speed humps. What about the government review that has just been announced all over the UK because private firms are making fortunes out of council contracts to zap motorists. Do you approve of this blatant exploitation? Apparentlz the Ham&High gets about 10 complaints a week about parking enforcement (that's more than 500 a year) and they can't all be from whingers, can they?