Safe Speed Forums

I know there are some regular visitors to this site who think all us "speeders" (with the emphasis on ALL) deserve everything we get when the law throws the book at us.

Now for those of us who do accept that we 'speed' but would contest safely, we have had to put up with this crap about obeying the law and not second guessing the intentions of Parliament with regard to 'helping ourselves' to see just how far we can go in breaking the law to suit our own aims.

OK. The Law is the Law and we should obey it.

Let's look at a different Statute: The Theft Act 1968.

Basically it defines 'theft' as the intent to deprive the rightful owner of his property for all time.

I challenge every single individual who has come on this forum to spout the usual crap about 'obeying the law' at all times to confirm that they have NEVER stolen anything.

Ever put a letter through the firm's franking machine?

Ever made a telephone call where the firm has paid for it without having the firm's express permission to do so? Or on their time?

Ever taken a biro pen home with you? Realised you had and NOT taken it back? That's THEFT!

I wonder how these smug, power-pissed arseholes who advocate locking up ALL speeding motorists would feel if, for example, they were shown to have put a biro in their pocket and not have put it back when they had realised that tehy still had it with them??

Should we label 99.9% of the populatiuon as THIEVES (because strictly speaking, using the examples above - I AM a thief), by taking them to court and fining them?

Now, I say we need to look at policing Speed in the same way we do office workers taking stationery from work or people making phone calls to relatives at their employers' expense.

No Doubt that someone who goes to work and collects 50 odd pens a week KNOWINGLY, takes them home and flogs them at a Sunday morning boot fair is a THIEF and should be treated like one. But what about the guy who forgets to bring back the odd biro?

I would suggest that the vast majority of us who post our angst on this and other forums (or is it fora?) fall into the 'forgot to take the biro back' slot.

The reason why I HATE speed cameras and the F*CKING IDIOTS who enforce our speeding laws is because they bring the law itself into disrepute. People who really quite rightly have been done for driving and grotesquely inappropriate speeds are getting away without any stigma for what they've done and the danger they've caused others because the State has lumped us all together.

How would you feel, pro camera people, if you'd been prosecuted for the theft of that biro?

Think about it

Good points, but I feel that a much better example would have been copyright theft, i.e. how many people out there copy/download music illegally, copy dvds, record programmes of the telly etc etc.

If the copyright laws were stringently upheld, even if you only had say, just 1 copied cd, I suspect most of us here and the hypocrites you mentioned would either be buried under fines or facing prison time, and most of us would be unhappy about that.

The only flipside to the argument you put forward to this is the good old emotional one, that we're dealing with people's life here, although even then that is something I never understand with the critics of safespeed etc. If saving life is the aim of the game here then surely every road safety policy must be scrutinised and scrutinised and scrutinised to make sure it is delivering. Anyone who opposes that simply does not have genuine road safety concerns at heart.

Good point, and it is also probably illegal to sing "Happy Birthday" to someone without the permission of the copyright holder.

Another Good example made by Alex.

At the end of the day, the government is only interested in getting its sixty quids off of us.

If this were about saving lives and reducing accidents, then they'd already be removing every single fixed camera in the country to replace them with those flashing ones which say "Slow Down" as you approach them. Apparently, they are more than 4 times as effective in getting everyone to slow down than the retrospective flash of the Gatso as the victim motorist passes it.

At the end of the day, this is a handful of power pissed politicians along with a handful of power pissed senior police officers who think they're being clever in perverting the law to extort as much money as they think they can get away with from ordinary people.

It's just robbery by another name. These are thieves, nothing more, nothing less. I doubt there'd be that many tickets issued if it weren't for the money.

another example would be parking in london....way back in time it was all run by the police with the primary aim of keeping traffic moving and just ticketing the people taking the p***...... then they outsourced it to the councils.........the councils didnt bother to patrol the important routes as they couldnt make a lot of money there they just targeted the easy places where they could get a lot of victims.

So to keep the roads flowing the police had to take back control of a lot of the important routes and the councils.... well most of them earn half of their total revenue from parking enforcement.

Or how about the fines they recently introduced for getting caught in a yellow box junction after the traffic lights have changed (thus blocking the traffic coming the other way)......most people thought this was a good idea, improve traffic flow etc etc......then one council painted out a 100 yard box junction that actually went round a corner (you couldnt see the exit when you went into it) and they were making large amounts of money until they were told that wasnt sporting at all and to scale it back a bit......

Its the nature of the public sector, if you want to get paid more ideally you raise a lot of money for your organisation (so they can afford to pay you more) and then try to become as big as you can ....the more staff you have working (in the loosest sense of the word) for you the higher the grade you have to be to manage them all and the more money you make.

If everybody stopped speeding tomorrow the managers of all the scamera partnerships would have a long hard think and then find something else that needed to be enforced (and that only they could do)

PaulF, this is an excellent topic, and I believe that your refreshing angle on this is dynamite.
Now how can we get the rest of the over-complacent, roll-over-and-accept-status-quo people to bother to read and absorb the point?


This also amazes me, until I remember how much self-interest and inertia there is built into the whole speed-camera industry .

And I thought pyramid selling was illegal( but hey the egyptians dont)