Letters From A Tory’s Wednesday roundup of blog posts of interest leads me today to A Very British Dude who draws our attention to the latest nanny lunacy from the Scottish Government- an announcement that they’re going to end deaths on the road and make the roads 100% safe, via swinging and ridiculous levels of regulation. British dude rightly points out that this target ignores the balance involved- that the roads need to be fit for purpose by allowing vehicles to actually use them as intended.
So, more anti-car stuff from the lefties, right? No surprise there. The thing is, when something like this comes up, we look at those implementing it- the politicians- as British Dude says-
What we also need of course is Health Nazi politicians to bugger off, and realise that every law they produce from their tiny little brains is another chain link in the shackles of human slavery.
But is it right to presume that this has come from these politicians’ tiny little brains? Well first, a quick google for “zero road deaths” will return a lot of links. Even better, try “Vision Zero”. Vision Zero? What’s that? It’s the Swedish Government’s plan for… zero road deaths. So rather than just looking at Scotland, we may begin to suspect that there is an international element. Indeed, just as with, say, smoking bans, we find governments all over the world apparently having the same idea at the same time. Either that’s a big coincidence, or there is some international coordination going on. We might well then suspect the hand of NGOs in this somewhere.
Let’s look at Sweden. A little more ferreting around turns up the name of Professor Claes Tingvall, an academic activist who appears to have spent his life grinding the road safety axe and inventing Vision Zero, and was rewarded by being made Sweden’s director of traffic safety. We also find him on the board of the Commission For Global Road Safety, alongside such towering luminaries as George Robertson, Lord of the Glens.
So, here’s some of our international coordination going on. A tranzi NGO. lavishly funded and pushing for internationally coordinated road regulation. Lavishly funded? Who’s funding it? Glad you asked. They’re funded by the FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society. Who are the FIA’s members?
Why, none other than national motoring associations, including the AA and RAC.
Who makes laws these days? Not politicians. Not really. They enact them. But the people deciding what laws should be made are spread out throughout the massive corporatist bureaucracy of NGOs, presure groups, industry groups and so on. The politicians are “advised” to make particular laws with ever increasing intensity until they do. The place where these absurd ideas originate is rarely the parliament, or the tiny brain of a politician.
Any driver in future who feels miffed at the new law requiring his butler to walk in front of his motor-car waving a flag might like to wonder why organisations which are supposedly advocates for drivers are deliberately supporting and funding such measures.
Dutch authorities are on the same bandwagon, but have chosen the cheap option.
Instead of actually implementing roadblocks to prevent people from driving more than 1kmh they lower the speedlimit to something ridiculous and use camera surveillance to fine anyone who dares to go over the limit by the slightest margin.
I lived in Sweden for a while some years ago… Jeez it’s a bloody strange place. A complete nanny-state socialist paradise. Half the year it seemed hardly to get light… Bloody dismal. They had the Victorian outlooks on sex and alcohol swapped round, so you could fuck yourself daft but couldn’t get a drink - and even if you could you needed a damned mortgage to buy a pint.
It’s no wonder that they had / have the highest tax and suicide rates in the world and whenever you meet Swedes outside Sweden they’re pissed out of their brains.
As to JTW’s comment above… Wasn’t Holland the home of the “Tuk Tuk Club” - an organisation dedicated to blowing speed cameras up?
Oh, Sweden is a very progressive country. It was still running a eugenics programme until the 1970s.
When I worked in Stockholm many years ago, getting a bottle of spirits was like queuing up for heroin at the Leicester Square Boots. (This was before the war on drugs, when registered addicts could buy their fix in a chemist. Not that I knew anything about that of course.)
Anyway, I still remember Stockholm being full of drunks at all times of the day and night. “I’ve got a bottle of duty free Scotch in my hotel room” was the only chat up line needed.
Now the city is built on a load of islands and there are bridges all over the place. Bridges over bridges on top of bridges everywhere.
Which brings me to the point of this comment. (At last! I hear you cry.) My theory is that the high Swedish suicide rate was largely made up of drunks falling off bridges, and the local authorities filed them under ‘topped himself’ rather than own up to the shameful fact that despite their nannyism, the place was still full of pissheads.
The FIA, eh? That would be Max Mosley’s mob, right? The son of former Labour MP and would be dictator Sir Oswald, who’s always strangely reticent about his involvement in his father’s post-war political shenanigans?
Just saying, is all.
I’m also just saying that eight F1 teams recently wrote to the FIA demanding that Alan Donnelly be removed from his post as Chairman of the F1 Stewards.
Who is Alan Donnelly? Some oil-stained spanner-monkey steeped in racing lore since childhood, and therefore utterly irrelevant to this story of Tranzi lobbying? Nope. He’s only the former leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, who resigned in 1999 after a newspaper investigation… into… altogether now… ex… penses. Not to mention a conflict of interest concerning his directorship of a lobbying company that worked for… you guessed it, Max’s FIA.
The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile is a fully-paid-up pillar of the Tranzi establishment, make no mistake about that.
Yes Pogo, that is or was a Dutch group. AFAIK they never did it though (or rarely), they just posted pictures on their website of destroyed cameras submitted by others.
The phenomenon has never taken off here like it has in the UK. Of the ones around town where I live only 2 have ever been destroyed, one by setting fire to it and one by taking a powersaw to the casing and stealing the camera.
Both were in time replaced and have since been left alone.
Thanks for the hat tip Counting Cats. Of course when I refer to the tiny brains of politicians, I am refering to the timidity and moral cowardice required to be a politician; and the fact the job doesn’t require any independent thought whatsoever. So by them merely adopting some ridiculous proposal trotted out by a Quango/NGO without any thought whatsoever I’m sure that ticks the Tiny Brain bit of my comment.
All the best