Know Your Place
Monday, February 12
More motoring morons
You'll have read, no doubt, about the million-signature petition on the Downing Street website, knocked up by idiot drivers who want to stop road tolling in its tracks before it even begins. These are the same fuckwits who complain about speed cameras because they prevent them from driving at 70 miles an hour in 20 mile an hour zones, thus interfering with their constitutional right to kill as many children as they like, at whatever speed, wherever they like.
These people are morons. There is no better word for them, though there are many considerably ruder ones. They believe that they have a right to drive their stupid cars anywhere they stupidly like, whatever the stupid consequences. They are donkeys. I would seriously challenge their right to even vote, let alone to dictate the news agenda and national policy decisions on climate change and road safety.
I mean it. Give these retards an inch and they'll take a mile - at top speed, probably in a dragster, the twats. And then they'll expect sympathy when they crash. The next thing we know they'll be campaigning to ban zebra crossings, ambulances and traffic lights on the grounds that they slow them down unacceptably on their journey from their pointless house to their pointless job, during which the pretence that they are Michael Schumacher is the only thing that prevents them from the desperate, miserable unmourned suicide they should have undertaken years ago.
Anyway, Newsnight is tonight running a report on the dodginess of all this. The morons have made much of the fact that a million people have signed their petition. ' That's democracy', they drivel. 'The government should listen to the people, and scrap road pricing!' Well, the last I heard, there were 60 million people in this country, from which we could fairly extrapolate, if we so chose, that 59 million of us think road pricing is great.
Newsnight is running its own poll, to highlight this spurious nonsense. The more people sign it, the less ammunition the Jeremy Clarkson Fan Club has. I reproduce Newsnight's text here. If you don't sign, you only have yourself to blame when they run over your dog and then sue you for slowing them down.
More than a million people have signed the online petition, hosted by Downing Street's website, against plans to introduce road pricing in the UK. But are these "unprecedented" numbers not quite as remarkable as they appear? In tonight's programme Newsnight will be asking how good an indicator of public opinion such petitions really are.
And by way of illustration, we're giving you the chance to support a petition that was reportedly rejected by the Downing Street website because it was outside the remit of the Government.
Submitted by "Tez Burke of Gun-totin' Badgers for Jesus", the proposed petition read:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to sing "We're Going To Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line" through a megaphone while standing in a barrel of custard outside Parliament.
Our own version is somewhat simplified, and won't require you to leave your name or other personal details - a one-click "yes" or "no" vote via our website is all that's required.
Click here to vote.
Posted by Paul at 3:02 PM 
7 Comments
Paul - you've gotta watch this!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6MJVzXbqRU&eurl=
Posted by: 
Tom Atkins at 11:48 AM
Here's the current Canadian petition that's doing the rounds.
Just one more thing that makes me glad I left the UK. The politicians still suck, though.
do you really think it's a good idea paul? seems like a horrendous waste of money to me, going through the process of tagging every car in the country in order to introduce a system of taxation according to the number of miles you do when we already have that in the form of fuel duty. i'm all for more taxation on driving but surely... just raise the fuel duty and instead of spending billions putting tags on everyone's vehicle invest that money in decent public transport? seems a bit more logical to me.
Posted by: andykisaragi at 8:44 AM
I have to travel 300 miles whenever I wish to see my parents and hate the journey so much I do it twice a year at most. I drive as the transport system is at best unreliable and at worst slower than my car. If it makes me a petrolheaded twat or a moran for not wanting to be screwed by even more taxes then that must be what I am. I recycle waste whenever I can. I use public transport to work. I don't think your comments help the situation at all. Creating two sides to the argument is not constructive. The whole point of signing the petition, which I did, is the need for a public debate on the matter which it seems it has been successful in doing.
Posted by: at 12:26 PM
Well anonymous, if you're not a petrolhead - and it doesn't sound like you are - then you have been duped. The 'whole point' of signing the petition, as you put it, was not 'to start a national debate', but to close one down. It was a concerted effort by those who do not want any further restrictions on their motoring to prevent them from happening.
You're quite right about the tragic public transport situation. We allsuffer from it. But what I would ask you - and others who have said similar things - is what would your alternative be?
How will you prevent further congestion, if not by stopping people driving as much? And how will you do that, without hitting them in the wallet? People are hardly going to stop driving out of social or environmental responsibility. And where will you find a further money to improve public transport? Why not price people off the roads and spend it on buses and bicycle lanes?
At the end of the day, however imperfect road pricing may be, it is surely incumbent upon its opponents to come up with a better idea. Or to stop complaining.
The only way to solve any perceived traffic crisis in this country is to strengthen the public transport system rather than attempt to price motorists out of the private transport market.
A few years back I worked in Stockport, a few miles outside of Manchester and 10 miles from my home. Each morning I'd get the bus to work, and 3 mornings out of 5 I'd be at least ten minutes late. Manchester - or, at least, my little part of Manchester - has a relatively good public transport infrastructure, and yet I'd have to leave my house at 7:30 to get to work for 9AM, and the buses couldn't even manage to do that with any degree of success.
Once I gave up and bought myself a car I could make the same journey in 20 minutes. I cut my daily commute from 3 hours to just over 40 minutes.
Can you imagine being handed an extra 2 hours and 20 minutes each day to see your family, cook a real meal or just sit around in your underwear watching TV? Can you imagine the confusion we feel when we're told that we're somehow wrong, stupid and irresponsible for grabbing that opportunity with both hands? Can you imagine the anger we feel when we're told that we'll be taxed even more of our scarce financial resources if we choose to hold onto that opportunity?
I don't hate speed cameras. I don't want to tear down the street at 70 miles per hour leaving a trail of crippled children in my wake. I don't want to choke the atmosphere, melt the icecaps and tear down the rainforests. I just want to sit around the table with my family with a home cooked meal. Show me a sensible way to do that without my car and I'm all ears. Calling me a moron won't get you anywhere.
well-argued, taylor, and you're right, in one way. everyone wants this. however, there are two points:
1. many others feel the same. they have all bought themselves cars too, because public transport is so crappy, result: congestion increasing, more of them stuck in jams - and no way out other than pricing them off the roads, or building more roads: which itself is a very short-term solution.
2. all the research - plus common sense - shows that both carrots and sticks are needed. i live in oxford, where public transport within the city is very good. there are also bike lanes everywhere, a park and ride and good rail and coach connections. we still have jams two miles long, people sitting one to a car in bus lanes, twice a day. attachment to cars is psychological as much as practical, and people need to be both priced off the roads and given good alternative. neither will work on its own.
