Hitting a moving target

The government proposes to increase the national speed limit from 70mph to 80mph. The Institute of Advanced Motorists are rubbing their hands (for example) at the prospect, although I’d really rather they had both hands on the wheel. The argument goes: people already drive at 80mph, so we may as well make it legal.

This is a strange argument on many levels. In the first place, we have the idea that what (some) people do is by definition blameless, and should not be limited in the first place. As a view of human nature, this is delusional. As a view of what government is there for, it is almost American.

Shall we legalise theft of office stationery? Phone tapping? Tax avoidance? Throwing rocks at fire engines?

Then we have the idea that, where people’s actions differ from the law, it is the law that is in the wrong. This is utterly strange. There is an old puzzle about a gun which always fires to the right of the target. You could hammer the barrel (not recommended) or adjust the sights – but which way?

I can’t remember the “official” answer: but the IAM have a simpler solution. You move the target. The trouble is, when you now take aim, you end up firing even further to the right.

I was in Spain in the early 1980s and was struck by how many young people would fall out of bars asking each other for “chocolate” – which I finally figured out meant marijuana. But they didn’t seem to be unconscious, and they didn’t appear to be fighting. I was told that all drugs were illegal, but the police turned a blind eye to “soft” drug use, while coming down like a (metric) ton of bricks on hard drugs. The kids got to rebel within (fairly) safe limits, and the problem was at least contained.

Not long after that, someone said: the kids are doing cannabis, we may as well make it legal.

So they did, and within a short time the kids moved onto hard drugs.

The law has to allow a safety margin. If people respond to the current limit by driving at 80, why should we not think they will respond to an 80mph limit by driving at 90 or 100? We are asked to believe that these drivers are naturally careful and scrupulously law-abiding: but that the target is simply wrongly positioned, and if the limit were 80, they would stick to it.

Tell you what, shall we lower the age of consent to 12? After all, plenty of 12-year-olds are already doing it. It’s easy to foresee that men will then be arrested for sex with a 9-year-old and will say: “I thought she was 12.” But that's probably not a fair comparison. As the Insititute of Speedophiles will doubtless say, it's different in a car.