17 December 2007
Scepticism the healthy option
My article last time on our drift into an Orwellian society was proved right by an immediate accusation from one reader – that the figure I gave for the percentage of accidents caused by exceeding the speed limit contradicted government statistics.
Well, if she chooses to believe the spin put on statistics by a Government heavily committed to speed cameras, that is up to her. I believe scepticism to be the more healthy option.
Other analysts have shown that the Government crunches together different accident causes under the heading of speed for dramatic effect; and that the five per cent for exceeding the speed limit – as opposed to excessive speed, impatience, losing control and driving too fast for the conditions, for example – is accurate. In 2003 the chief constable of Durham, an obvious anti-Orwellian, put the figure even lower at three per cent, and very recently the chief constable of Lincolnshire admitted that “simply driving above the speed limit” could not cause an accident.
But there will always be those who like everyone to agree with the Government. Presumably anything else makes them nervous.
They should take care that they are not like Sir Thomas More – at least as portrayed in The Tudors on BBC – who always sounded very reasonable until his belief structure was threatened. Then he started burning people.
Other recent Orwellian symptoms:
- Yellow and red tags are coming to rubbish bins near you if you throw the wrong thing away. How long before people are asked to inform on neighbours who are rubbish at recycling? I put plastic bottles in my green bin last week – encouraged to do so by the council’s own magazine – and my entire green bin was rejected. No sign of a tag, but my neighbours are looking at me oddly. Admittedly, that is not much of a change.
- A road safety website aimed at young people invites them to inform on their friends and hand them “deadly” speeding tickets. Can’t think of any way that might be abused.
- The Prime Minister signs a treaty that he knows most of the electorate are opposed to and refuses to let them vote on it.
- And (in Australia, admittedly), there is a suggestion that parents who have more than two children should pay a hefty climate change tax to offset the effect of their greenhouse gas emissions.
To cross or not to cross, that is one question
After declaring rashly that I would rather move to an Undecided area of Norfolk than remain in what might become a cash-wasting unitary authority, I was alerted by a correspondent to the peculiar goings-on in the shadowy borderlands where Norfolk, Suffolk and the coast meet.
Here the Government had declared that no unitary authority would be created that crossed county boundaries – thus ruling out the creation of a Yartoft authority – or as I prefer to call it, Lowmouth.
But the stone this was carved in now seems to be unexpectedly fragile, and Ministers have hinted that a brave new cross-border unitary council is still on the cards.
The cost of it all could be higher than you might imagine. What will happen, for instance, to the planned £50 million Waveney Campus, planned for the shores of Lake Lothing in Lowestoft as a joint home for 1000 staff from the Centre for the Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Sciences, Waveney District Council and part of Suffolk County Council? Rumour has it that the compulsory purchase orders going through are going to cost Waveney council tax payers £3 million, for a start.
My correspondent writes: “Obviously, not until after this building is completed and occupied will a unitary authority for Yarmouth and Lowestoft be announced, and plans for a new building somewhere in the Gorleston / Hopton area - between Yarmouth and Lowestoft - started. All this will of course be heralded as the most efficient solution for the area.”
Surely some mistake? Or is the European Union involved in some way? Or both?
Stonehenge no, Pondhenge yes, if we could find it
If I ran a satnav company, I would think twice before promoting a survey designed to expose people’s lack of geographical knowledge.
The other day I was being driven from Norwich to Wymondham town centre by someone who possessed a satellite navigation system. Admittedly German (we give the directions), it was correctly programmed but took us most of the way to Attleborough on the A11 before turning back and entering Wymondham from the south, adding at a guess about five miles to the journey.
Most of us have a better idea of geography than that, even if some think Leeds Castle is in Yorkshire (forgiveable, in view of the obvious deception) and Hadrian’s Wall is in Scotland (right direction, and it was supposed to be the boundary at one time).
The survey also revealed that about 200 people (a tenth of those surveyed) think Stonehenge is in Norfolk. Well, it would certainly be more convenient if it was, but surely that’s also an understandable mistake. After all, we do have the original site of Seahenge at Holme and the equally inaccessible Pondhenge, somewhere in North Norfolk.
I would be more worried if people did not know that Norfolk sometimes contains the Autonomous Republic of Hingham, a beautifully formed area that displays some of the most intriguing time-space distortions in the known universe. Apparently, this was not included in the survey.
A bridge too far away
Not that I think Lottery grants are the best way of creating and distributing money for deserving projects, but I was delighted to see that the plan to connect Norwich city centre with Whitlingham Country Park was awarded £900,000.
Charles Clarke says, for some reason, that this is a “victory for sustainability”. I would have said it was a victory for common sense, until I read that work was scheduled to start – yes, start – in four to five years. Now I see what he means: we have to sustain our interest even longer. Or shall we cross that bridge when we come to it, if we’re still alive?