Author Archives: Tim Lenton

I was pulled over by the police on the A17 a few days ago. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” they said – which shows how little they know me.

“Just talk to that nice lady over there. If you want to.” Or words to that effect. So I was treated by a female member of the local road safety partnership to a question and answer session that would have been appropriate for a teenager about to get into the driving seat for the first time. The only other listeners were my wife, an excellent driver who qualified nearly 40 years ago, and a couple who looked, if anything, more experienced than I was, with 46 years to my credit.

Unsurprisingly, the lady was concentrating on speed. But she did wonder if we knew about the Fatal Four. I suggested lion, elephant, rhinoceros and hippo, but apparently this was not what they were looking for. It turned out to be driving with no seatbelt; while using a mobile phone; while drunk or under the influence of drugs; and speeding.

I was right with her on the first three, but unfortunately I had an appointment: so I didn’t have time to explain to her that the real danger on the A17, and on most other roads, was people driving too slowly.

Driving slowly is a form of selfishness – a slow driver being much more concerned with himself than with other road users. He makes it hard for others to make progress; he shows no understanding of how to overtake and is unwilling to do so; he ignores queues forming behind him; he has little awareness of hazards; he does not react quickly; he dithers when forced to make a choice; he slows almost to a standstill when turning left; he brakes unnecessarily for corners and when something comes the other way; and he fails to accelerate quickly enough when joining a major road.

Nowadays, this general incompetence tends to be mixed with a generous slice of self-righteousness: vague and erroneous ideas about saving the planet, or slow being good in some indefinable way.

I have used the male personal pronoun, but of course slow drivers could equally easily be female. I do not want to be accused of prejudice.

On a road like the A17, where the “safety” partnership has kindly made it hard to overtake by popping in bollards and cameras at irritating intervals, the slow driver is a particular menace. After miles and miles of following a snail, even the most conscientious driver will want to make progress and be tempted to overtake dangerously. And we are not talking about speeders here; we are talking about competent drivers doing the sort of thing the police used to encourage – proceeding as fast as it is safe to drive.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to be pulled over by the police and told about the dangers of driving too slowly? Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The fatal four will never include tortoise, snail and slug, however justified that would be.

Here are a few questions it might be worth considering in the light (if that is the right word) of the Pakistan cricket allegations.

First, why do bookmakers accept such ridiculous bets? If they didn’t, the opportunities for the kind of scam alleged would never occur.

How much can bowling three no-balls affect the result of a Test Match? The over-reaction of the cricketers and commentators to the News of the World story is bizarre.

Why do we love to stand in judgement on people whose lives we know almost nothing about? Refusing to shake Amir’s hand or acknowledge his undeniable brilliance was childish and judgmental.

How much pressure do you think might be put on a talented 18-year-old bowler by more experienced members of the team? Could threats to his safety or that of his family be involved? Could his progress in the national team be involved? I am not saying this happened: I am just saying it might have. We don’t know.

We are fortunate to live in a country where the rule of law is upheld, we are not oppressed by huge natural disasters, and the Lake District is not under the control of the Taliban. Shadowy figures with the potential for violence rarely cross our paths. So can those calling for a life ban on the accused cricketers be sure that in no circumstances, ever, could sufficient pressure be put on them to bowl a no-ball at a specific time? It does, after all, seem a relatively harmless thing to do.

Would those calling for a permanent ban on Pakistan’s cricketers like to live in that country for a couple of years?

I am not, incidentally, saying the English are naturally honest, while foreigners aren’t. While staying in Italy recently, it was routine for shopkeepers to leave you alone in the shop with valuable merchandise while popping out to get something. And in Greece a few years back I mistakenly left my camera on the pavement while we wandered off up the street. Half an hour later it was still there.

Would that have happened in England? I’m not so sure. What I am sure about is that we would lose no time in condemning anyone dishonest, because we have such a high opinion of ourselves. We even get apoplectic about a woman popping a cat in a wheelie bin.

The prospect of thousands of speed cameras being removed from their pedestals and recycled into something useful is one that will delight thousands of experienced motorists.

In a typical piece of “unbiased” reporting, my local BBC station, Smug East, reacted to this news by interviewing the partnership leader whose job depends on the cameras (amazingly, he wanted to keep them) and quoting the ubiquitous Brake, who always say the same thing, whatever the question is. I suppose it saves research time.

As usual the strong arguments against cameras remained unexpressed. Here they are, in the words of Safe Speed, which has road safety, and not vacuous slogans, at heart.

“The awful tragedy and awful truth is that speed cameras have made the
roads more dangerous by replacing effective policies, by distorting
priorities, distracting drivers, damaging the public-police relationship, giving us false safety messages about speed, pretending that the speed limit gives a safety limit irrespective of conditions and taking away valuable and important thinking time.”

The disappearance of speed cameras is a good thing for road safety, but it is not the best thing. The best thing would be a complete reassessment of speed limits by people who are qualified to assess them (and not local residents and councillors). Traffic police, for instance.

If speed limits were accurately and realistically set, it would not matter whether there were cameras or not, because we all know that cameras are designed to catch people who are causing no danger at all.

With realistic speed limits – and this would mean increasing them in most cases, sometimes substantially – experienced drivers would be able to concentrate on what they are doing without worrying about being criminalised by people who ultimately have no interest in good driving.

Camera partnership leaders say quite openly that while they are happy
to run speed cameras and criminalise people, they have no idea – and don’t care – if the limits are properly set and appropriate to justify their cameras and their tickets in the first place. “It is not our business,” they say.

Of course not. Their business is raking in fines and getting drivers off the road.

Let’s hope the removal of incentives to install speed cameras is just the first step on the road to real road safety. It is one cut we can be thankful for.

The vicar in the new TV sitcom Rev is slightly less of a caricature than those we have become familiar with in the past. But he struggles with similar worldly issues, from abusive builders to colleagues with dubious driving forces.

In the opening episode the topic of church schools raised its head, with the scarcely ground-breaking but admittedly funny idea of parents using various forms of bribery to get their children through the doors.

I can hardly suggest that this does not happen, but they are not the kind of Church of England schools I am familiar with.

The hundreds of church primary schools in East Anglia, where I happen to live, are there to serve all the children in the community. They are there because historically the church wanted to educate children when no-one else was interested. And they are immensely popular precisely because of their grounding in the Christian faith, which is seen as enhancing the children’s education and providing a positive ethos for behaviour and relationships.

This is true whether the parents are Christian, secular or belonging to other faiths. In one school an inspector was told by Muslim parents that they valued their children’s Christian school precisely because it had a basis in faith. Other parents without any faith routinely say how much they appreciate the Christian ethos, because it has a beneficial effect on their children.

They feel loved, and they are optimistic about their prospects. They feel there is a reason for their existence. In stark contrast to many of their elders, they have high self-esteem.

To argue, as some have done, that all this is part of a plot to indoctrinate children is to misunderstand Christianity completely. It is not a club trying to attract more members than another club. It is an offer of love, forgiveness and spiritual completeness. It is an offer that remains open permanently and does not seek to coerce anyone. It is an offer that everyone is free to reject and remain loved.

That is what makes these schools special.

Unlucky for too long

The importance of being lucky in sport is often underestimated. We prefer to think that the best player or team always wins, but they don’t.

In tennis a bad line call can change a match; in football a wrong decision by the referee is frequently crucial; and in cricket especially batsmen are at the mercy of the umpire’s eye.

Commentators wax lyrical about a batsman who has scored a couple of hundred when he was in fact dropped on 2 and wrongly given not-out on 6. On the other hand a batsman who is mistakenly adjudged lbw for a duck has “failed again”.

The first man should really have scored 2 or 6, and the second might have gone on to a magnificent 200.

We are told that this kind of thing “evens itself out” – but does it? Maybe some brilliant players never made it because they were unlucky for too long…

Letters pages in newspapers are strange and alien worlds, dominated by “facts that everybody knows” and answers to questions no-one has asked. In short, they are political places, and I feel uneasy in them.

I occasionally cross their borders, but I know in my heart that it’s a waste of time. My opinions are not of the “everybody knows” kind, and I always attract swift retorts from people who do know, know exactly what they know, and know that what anyone else knows is not worth knowing.

Recently I wrote again on the subject of speed limits, which I happen to think are often dangerously low. I left the country immediately afterwards – not to avoid gangs of marauding tortoises, but because I had a holiday booked. So I may have missed some responses, but I did see two, both of which were typical in different ways.

One came from a resident of the Newmarket Road area in Norwich, who objected to my suggestion that 30mph was too slow a limit for a wide open road with excellent visibility and houses set back.

She said residents had asked for the limit, which I don’t doubt at all. They always do. But why had they wanted it? Because “pedestrians have to take their life in their hands to cross three lanes of traffic via the new refuge there because of the newly installed bus lane. Cars joining the main road from the slip road are required to perform a dangerous manoeuvre crossing the new bus lane…” and so on.

Clearly there is a problem, but it’s not a speeding problem: it’s a bus lane problem. If a bus lane makes it dangerous for pedestrians to cross, why have a bus lane? To save buses a few seconds? Why is there not a footbridge, or a pelican crossing?

I suggest that when traffic has been travelling at 30mph along there for a while, she will find it even more difficult to cross the road, because she will have a continuous slow-moving stream of metal to contend with.

She mentions cars illegally turning right across the bus lane: this is not a speed problem; again it is a bus lane problem. Why is it even possible to perform this manoeuvre anyway? What is the highways authority playing at?

Another letter started: “Mr Lenton suggests we should be concentrating on enforcing existing speed limits”, which I didn’t say and do not support.

Ideally I would like to see speed limits functioning in an advisory capacity, because speed itself is not a problem. On any given road it may sometimes be safe to go at 40mph, and at other times 20mph will be too fast.

Prosecution should be for dangerous driving, not exceeding an arbitrary, ill-chosen limit. This does of course mean having traffic police about, and that I do support.

Nevertheless casual newspaper readers are left with the impression that (a) I am in favour of strict enforcement of speed limits and (b) I don’t care if residents are knocked down as long as I can drive fast.

See what I mean by an alien world?

Everyone wants to be safe. But it is only in recent years that inhabitants of the United Kingdom have begun to feel that they have a right to be safe – that it is a reasonable expectation.

They are outraged that a fox should be in a child’s bedroom. Not frightened, but outraged. Foxes have no right to be in bedrooms. We live in a country shorn of dangerous wildlife, and that, apparently, is as it should be.

A gunman runs amok for reasons unknown, and we are outraged that the police did not stop him immediately. We have a right to be protected from gunmen, don’t we?

But humans are unpredictable, and can be pushed over the edge. Foxes are not tame. Life is not at all safe, actually.

It has been so sanitised that we think it is, and we think it should be. But why should it? Scientifically speaking, life exists on the edge of things, in precarious circumstances. As humans, we walk an unlikely tightrope.

It is astonishing, when you think about it, that over 30 million drivers on our roads manage to miss each other with astonishing regularity, given the often badly designed pieces of tarmac that they drive on, and the fact that many of them are not really very good at it.

It is surprising that immensely powerful forces of nature have tended to leave us alone most of the time. My generation is fortunate that its civilians have never been involved in war.

But we don’t have any right to our safe and easy way of life, and we may soon find it less safe and more difficult. We have no right to be outraged at that, and it is no good looking for scapegoats. We have to deal with it ourselves.

Good at gullibility

What would be the best possible outcome for the anti-Israel activists who boarded the recent Gaza-bound flotilla?

Surely that the Israelis would over-react and commit some act of violence against them that could be spun through the world’s media and used as more propaganda against Israel.

And that is exactly what happened.

Killing people is not good, even in the face of severe provocation, but it strikes me that you have to be particularly gullible to see the flotilla as peaceful victims.

Of course, gullibility is something that certain sections of the media are particularly good at.

Speed limits represent the maximum safe speed in ideal conditions.

So a 30mph limit should mean that it is safe to travel at 30mph if weather and road conditions are good, but not if it is raining hard, or the road is damaged, or there are a lot of parked cars or pedestrians about.

Recently it seems that many highway authorities, and certainly pressure groups like the warm-hearted but inexpert Brake, are ignoring this principle by assuming that if the speed limit is 30mph, everyone will travel at 30mph. This is clearly ludicrous, but their policies are based on it.

So the call yet again is to reduce speed limits. What effect will this have? It will have no effect at all on the people it is supposed to target – namely those who travel too fast whatever the limit. They will continue to do so.

What effect will it have on good drivers? A lot of the time, they will have to drive more slowly than is necessary. Does that matter?

Ignoring the economic argument for getting work done more quickly, let’s consider the practical aspects. The good driver – and most drivers are pretty good – will know from experience what the correct speed is for the conditions. If forced to drive consistently more slowly, he or she will get frustrated, bored and distracted. If the speed limit is enforced by cameras, he or she will look repeatedly at the speedometer, because a good driver does not want to become a criminal.

The result will be large numbers of drivers who are not alert and who are paying less attention to potential road hazards than they would normally do. Clearly, this increases the danger to other road users.

Because the argument for blanket slowing down is essentially flawed, Brake has been using an emotional argument about the effect on children of being hit at 30mph – as if anyone wanted to hit a child at any speed. I mean, we all love children, right? But what they don’t seem to realise is that if you drive at 30mph, you will not hit anyone at that speed unless you are driving with your eyes closed (or watching your speedometer too closely).

If you can see clearly ahead, you will be able to avoid a child running into the road because you see them long before they get there. Even if you can’t see clearly enough to avoid them completely, you will have reduced speed considerably before impact. To state that someone driving at 30mph will hit a child at 30mph is just inaccurate, to put it as kindly as I can.

A recent survey, again by Brake, shows that nearly three-quarters of motorists drive at 35mph in a 30mph limit. I’m sure they do. This is because 30mph is very often (though not always) too slow in good conditions, and is actually an argument for increasing the limit. Needless to say, they don’t see it that way.

Instead of victimising safe motorists and making the roads more dangerous – which is what slower limits would do – it is time we targeted really dangerous drivers. There are various ways of doing this (cameras set to realistically high levels is one option), but the most desirable by far is increased numbers of traffic police. Combined with proper penalties for proper offences, this would hit the dangerous drivers and remove the repeated demands and distractions from so-called safety “experts” who simply don’t like cars.

Risk of stalemate

World chess champion Viswanathan (Vishy) Anand has narrowly avoided the need for a coalition with his challenger, Veselin Topalov, when he beat him in the final game of 12 in the championship match in Sofia this week.

Although Anand, from India, scored only 6½ against his Bulgarian opponent’s 5½, this was sufficient to take the title outright.

Players keen on proportional representation would like the championship decided by a tournament of the top players. In that case, if Anand won with 12, Topalov scored  11 and the world’s currently highest rated player, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, made 10, the championship could theoretically be shared by Topalov and Carlsen.

Sources close to the International Chess Federation described this as “fanciful”, but Prof Sam “Ian” Aufmerksam, of the University of East Anglia’s School of Chess, Penguins and Road Surfacing, said it could herald an exciting new era of chess politics. On the other hand it could lead to stalemate, or perpetual check.

Anyone with any sense was unavailable for comment.

An astounding turnround in voting habits has been predicted by the parliamentary candidate for Corpusty East, Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago (90).

Mr Houseago, who has a bad leg and is standing for the first time this year, said yesterday that voters could not help but be overwhelmed by his party’s radical immigration policy.

“It is a radical policy,” he said. “We would allow anyone at all to come to this country to live, as long as the country they come from takes someone in return. We suggest primarily operators of speed camera vans, then Guardian readers, and if necessary Liberal Democrats in general.

“We are convinced this will receive radical and widespread support, and I will be the new MP for Corpusty East within a week.”

Asked if his was a single-issue campaign, Mr Houseago said he would not go that far. He planned to introduce capital punishment for anyone who referred to voters as bigots. He supported wind turbines completely, as long as they were confined to Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea. “They would fit in well there,” he said, “because they don’t do anything useful, but are very expensive and make a lot of themselves.”

Mr Houseago’s flat earth spokesperson, Professor V A R Scheinlich, said he was planning an independent inquiry on house-building. It would be conducted mainly by house-builders and decorators. He promised that a whitewash would be very unlikely, and such allegations were totally without foundation.

Corpusty East is a new seat, formed by combining parts of Little London with Irmingland. Local expert Len “Kissme” Hardy of Hindolveston described it as both radical and far-reaching. It was quite possible that it would hold the balance of power, he insisted.

The shock result in Corpusty East, where favourite Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago lost on a 90 per cent swing to someone else, was attributed today to a misunderstanding.

“We really didn’t get our message across,” he said. “Too many voters thought I was trying to form a Government, but I would have been quite happy to share power with Dave or Gordon – or even Nick, if he could have met my demands.

“With the situation in turmoil, I believe we should have a rerun. Now that everyone knows the way votes are going, they can adjust their choice accordingly. If that happened, I’m sure I would be returned by a monstrous majority.”

Corpusty East, a new seat formed from parts of Little London and Irmingland, will until then be represented by the winner of yesterday’s poll, Len “Kissme” Hardy of Hindolveston, who was standing as an Independent while claiming double expenses.

“Len is well thought of in the area,” said radical cleric the Rev Nick Repps-cum-Bastwick, “and should make a fine member when he is available.”

Mr Hardy is a whole food chef and comet chaser and has been linked with Mr Houseago’s ex-fiancee, Dorothea Goodchild. He favours “getting out of Europe and into the Atlantic”, abolition of bicycles and turning the A11 into a motorway. He is also a strong supporter of the Free Hingham Poetry Collective.

“I was delighted to get into double figures,” he told Professor David Dumbleberry in an exclusive interview. “That’s always plenty in Corpusty. Where’s the canteen?”

Twitter hate campaign

Amazing the amount of hatred generated by General Elections. Twitter was alive with vituperative comments about the Tories, mainly of the “they’re posh” variety, which I would have thought was a bit simplistic even for 140 characters.

Then the possibility that the Tories might form a minority government made these same people apoplectic. How can they have the nerve to want to govern, they gasped, when they haven’t got a majority? Well, I hate to point this out, but they have a lot more votes than anyone else.

But what about the Lib Dems and Labour together? Mmm, yes, but what makes them think that Liberal Democrat voters’ second choice would be Labour? And Tories plus Lib Dems is an even bigger majority.

Of course the biggest majority would be Tories and Labour. Why don’t we go for that?

All very amusing. But not as amusing as Gordon Brown, an inveterate obstacle to electoral reform, who now suddenly finds it’s pretty much his priority. Please, Nick?
Come on, Nick. You know you want to.

Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that if this was an English election, the Tories would be overwhelming winners. Can all those Tweeters be closet Scots?