Samizdata

London is today in the grip of a tube strike. Tube as in underground railway. For a brief summary of the anti-strike arguments, try Burning Our Money. (Burning Our) Money quote:

Here we have a reeling dispirited government who no longer care if they give away the shop. They’re way beyond that. Their main aim now is to minimise the scale of their defeat, which definitely DEFINITELY means no Winter of Discontent style public sector strikes.

Sure, if they give in to big union demands they’ll be increasing the problems facing the next government. But why should they worry? They don’t care if they make life more difficult for Dave and George in 12 months time – in fact, that would be a positive bonus.

And the union bosses ain’t quite so dumb as they look …

In other words, another bit of earth will get scorched.

Well, full marks for trying, I guess. Ross Clark – a columnist whom I enjoy reading – argues that the fuss about proposals to reduce certain speed limits on UK roads are unwarranted. This is his argument:

It didn’t take long for the militant motorists’ lobby to get into gear to attack the Government’s proposal to reduce the national speed limit from 60mph to 50mph.

That’s true.

To lop 10 mph off the speed limit on country lanes, apparently, is tantamount to declaring a fascist dictatorship. “These corporate Nazi New Labour bastards are intent on turning law-abiding citizens into criminals,” began one of hundreds of angry posts on the website of a prominent motorists’ pressure group yesterday – before, bizarrely, imploring his fellow petrolheads to vote for the British National Party.

A classic bait and switch. For sure, some opponents of speed limits might like to clam they are the equivalent of bringing back the Gulag, but for most of us who do not see the logic of ever more draconian controls on the car, the case can be made without invoking images of Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany.

That the leaders of the motorists’ lobby are not quite the defenders of liberty they often profess to be is obvious from reading their output over the years. They have never been slow to demand the prosecution of cyclists, jaywalking pedestrians and motorists who drive too slowly or in any other fashion that impedes their progress.

That has probably something to do with the fact that a lot of pedestrians and cyclists do not think the highway codes in countries such as the UK applies to them. But he does make a fair point, but so what? Just because some motorists are hypocrits does not undermine the broader point.

Unfortunately, Mr Clark descends into nonsense:

The assertion that tighter motoring law is tantamount to dictatorship is further confused by a paradox. The world’s most illiberal regimes happen to have some of the most anarchic and dangerous of roads, while the most liberal nations tend to have the strictest traffic enforcement and safest roads. For all the conspiracy theories, Morgan Tsvangirai now says that the car crash that tragically killed his wife on Friday was an accident. It shouldn’t come as a surprise: reporters who have used the road between Harare and Beitbridge paint a terrifying picture of speeding, overloaded lorries and complete lawlessness – this in a country where if you criticise the President you can expect a rapid visit from Robert Mugabe’s thugs.

He’s right that consistently enforced rules of the road are hardly the same as political oppression, forced labour or torture. Of course. Rules of the road are a bit like etiquette: if consistently followed, it helps us all to rub along, which in a small island like the UK is not a trivial matter. But Mr Clark needs to think this through. Take countries such as post-war Germany or France, with their excellent motorways. Speed limits are, and can be, quicker than in the UK and in the case of Germany, some of their autobahns have had no limits at all (this may have changed, I’ll have to check). When that fella with the silly moustache was in power, the autobahns got built, and the quality of driving in Germany is, in my experience, high. But that example, when set against the chaos of Zimbabwe, proves little. In India, which is a democracy and fairly free place, the driving is absolutely terrible. There’s no correlation between oppression and driving like Jeremy Clarkson on crack. None.

Local authorities would love to reduce speed limits on a great number of roads, but they are hampered by bureaucracy. Whenever they want to designate a limit on a rural road lower than the default 60mph they must justify it through accident statistics. It may be obvious that motorists are driving too fast on a stretch of road, but a council must wait for the required number of people to be killed or injured before it can take any action. And even when, finally, sufficient coffins have been filled to justify a speed limit on a rural road, it remains legal to drive along surrounding lanes at 60mph, giving reckless motorists an incentive to divert on to even more dangerous rat-runs.

Well obviously, if we had privately owned roads, rather than roads run by bureaucrats, then speed limits would be dealt with without the need for all this sort of wrangling. This is, by the way, a powerful argument for privately owned roads.

The only problem is that the proposal does not go far enough. Many country roads are no more than cart tracks covered with tarmac, where 50mph is still far too fast.

Match the speed to the conditions – that is a sensible principle. But if that is the case, that does rather mess up the idea of blanket speed limits in the first place, unless one is going to adopt a sort of “if in doubt, walk” approach to getting from A to B.

And Mr Clark makes no reference whatever to the glaringly obvious fact that the profusion of speed cameras is, and has been, driven in part by a desire to raise revenue. Now, if roads were privately owned and the driver, as consumer, knowingly signs up to the deal, that would not be an infringement of liberty. But as things stand, the obsession with restricting use of the car is all of a broader assault on these machines, for ideological and environmentalist reasons. And the proposal to cut speed limits comes across, at a time like this, as just another, petty little squeeze on private citizens and their desire to get around relatively quickly. It has nothing to do with a yobbish desire to drive as fast as one likes and damn the results.

Notwithstanding traffic congestion – which private road ownership would help solve – the car is a symbol of freedom for millions. Mr Clark, who has written brilliantly about the assaults on freedoms in this country, should focus his ire elsewhere.