...all change?

I had to attend a course on databases yesterday - sometimes my life just gets too exciting! After cycling into town I got onto the bus, asking the Eastern European driver where exactly the stop in the Flat Old Fen was. I know I've got a Scottish accent, but being married to an Englishwoman for nearly two decades - much of that time spent living in the Fens - has blunted it somewhat. Nevertheless, I had to sit down as wise as when I'd got on, which at that time in the morning isn't very wise at all. I wasn't as unlucky as the next chap, though - like the driver, English was his second language and he was gesticulating at a map trying to ask something. The two men found communication impossible, and the would-be voyager alighted.

What a change from the old days, I thought. We used to have an inspector on each bus who was, in Scotland, known as a clippie and - usually a woman - spoke the lingua franca, enjoining people to "come oan - get aff!" when the value of their ticket had expired and if asked, for example, if a bus went to the cemetery would reply "naw, it's afraid o' the ghosts!" You can make up your own replies for all sorts of situations, but the clippies kept it clean.

Still, I shouldn't complain in the light of what's happened in the Cambridgeshire town of Manea where a Nigerian-born German doctor who barely spoke English overestimated the amount of diamorphine (known as heroin on the streets) to give to 70-year-old David Gray by a factor of ten, killing him. The Cambridge News reveals that the company who employed Daniel Ubani as a locum had circulated an alert on the drug after two patients had placed in respiratory arrest after being prescribed overdoses - thank Heaven, they were resuscitated.

Life and death featured in the Telegraph, with Stephen Adams reporting on Martin Amis' remarks that we need euthanasia booths on street corners to cope with the "silver tsunami". It's ironic to see the man who accused US novelist Jacop Epstein of plagiarism himself stealing the idea of suicide booths first floated by sci-fi writer Robert Sheckley in his 1959 Immortality, Inc.; one wonders at what point the author, now 60, will see himself as part of the silver tsunami? Plus ça change...

I got to the Flat Old Fen, where the course went well, delivered by a team representing various Home Office initiatives who knew what they were talking about. But I wonder if one of them said more than he'd meant to when he said everything was "expected to change in two months when we get a change of government"?

Having gotten back to Cambridge in time for the evening rush-hour, I found myself sometimes going faster than the cars as I cycled up the city's Mill Road. So it was initially surprising to get back to work and read Chris Havergal's article for the Cambridge News speaking of a 20mph speed-limit for the thoroughfare, as I don't think any of the cars I passed managed to get up to that speed. I guess there's a problem with speeding as night draws on, but that's down to problems getting drivers to respect the present 30mph limit. There have been threats of 20mph zones for some time, but they were meaningless until the start of the year when speed cameras that can detect velocities slower than 30mph came onto the market.

I had one stop before getting home, meeting Constanter to discuss an article he's thinking of writing for the mag over a pint at the Tintinnabula. After warming ourselves at the fire we looked out of the window at St Gallicus' tower illuminated by spotlights: symbol of the centuries-long process - whereby everything flows but slowly and organically - that builds a village like the Draughty Old Fen, it's the sort of sight that makes a long day worth it.

booze-buses from Aotearoa - an idea for England?

The Cambridge News reports that a blitz on drink-driving is starting up in Cambridgeshire - as Casualty Reduction Officer PC Barrios says, to target the "increase in the number of people going out and drinking".

I think it's a very good idea: there are crackdowns on drink-driving all over the world at Christmas-time, but it's easy to forget this season of barbecues and country pub gardens in bloom.

I'm reminded of a road-safety conference, I attended in London, which was addressed by Superintendent Paula Rose of New Zealand Police, who studied at the Henley Management College and worked with the Thames Valley Police, both in the UK, as part ot the Foreign and Commonwealth Aotearoa Fellowship, of which she was the 2006 recipient (Aotearoa is Māori for New Zealand).

Supt Rose told us about the country's robust system for dealing with drink-drivers (New Zealand, I gather, makes the rural parts of East Anglia look like central London). Over half of the 4.3 million inhabitants have driving licences, which can be applied for at the age of 15. There are about 400 community police stations, with 10,000-plus staff.

It was very interesting to hear her talk intelligently and humourously but robustly about keeping on top of drink-driving on 91,000km (56,500 miles) of roads of varying standards. Ears pricked up at the mention of "booze buses" - mobile laboratories to process drivers who had failed a roadside breath test for alcohol, where a breath sample could be taken in a location where chain of evidence could be attested to, and , should the subject so choose, a blood sample could also be taken. They're staffed by officers who had trained to be part of tactical alcohol teams that would shut down a stretch of road and test every driver using it: up to 20,000 in a night.

Cambridgeshire Constabulary Chief Constable Julie Spence has been robust in demanding Govenment give her the means to recruit more police officers to help combat the effects of an increasing population upon the region, including drink-driving, and has made her points in the highest places more forthrightly than anybody who joined any organisation solely for advancement would dare to.

The results of such measures can be amazing: in 1973, the New Zealand road toll was 800 and should have been 1,500 last year but was actually 350, due in no small part to alert and uncompromising traffic policing, led by Supt. Rose. I hope that over the next year the Treasury listens to the evidence that strategies such as "booze-buses" play a major role in reducing carnage on our roads. Supt Rose quoted a Māori saying that lays out the major priority in policing that I am sure is shared by officers everywhere: he tangata, he tangata, he tangata - "our people, our people, our people".





Related post: drink-driving campaigns - a worked-out example

drink-driving campaigns - a worked-out example

On the way to an international conference in London about drink/drug driving, I had my first lesson on the journey down. The train from Cambridge to London lived up to its nickname as "the sardine express". Although there were eight carriages all seats were taken, and the lack of vetilation made the experience feel like standing in a mobile sauna for an hour. I now know why some of those who are able to commute to big cities by car sometimes choose to do so.

The conference, hosted by the road charity Brake in the grand surroundings of the Royal College of Physicians, featured academics, police officers and advertising-campaign organisers from England, Belgium, Germany and New Zealand.

And Scotland. When Caroline Thomas, Senior Marketing Manager with the Scottish Government, started a presentation of a worked-out example of a road-safety campaign with an anti-drink-drive campaign, her Ayrshire accent was as clear as a bell; on the other hand, I'm told in my country of choice that my accent is really broad, and in my country of birth that I sound half-English.

She started with a history lesson: the first recorded death related to driving was that of Bridget Driscoll in London. A contemporary newspaper account reads:

On August 17, 1896, in London, Bridget Driscoll, age 45, became an early car accident fatality as crossed the grounds of the Crystal Palace (London), an automobile struck her at a speed witnesses described as "a reckless pace, in fact, like a fire engine."

The coroner concluded that the car that hit her had been driving at 4mph (6.5kph) and added his hope that there would be no further deaths due to driving. We're currently averaging an estimated 1,000,000 deaths worldwide related to driving per year.

From newspapers we went to other media. While it took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million and TV 13 years, by the time mobile phones were in the ascendancy they had reached this mark within 2 years. Caroline drew our attention to the famous Miracle on the Hudson picture of US Airways Flight 1549, which had just ditched in the New York river, posted from a mobile phone on Twitter by rescuer Janis Krums as he went out on the ferry as part of the rescue team, with the microblog "There's a plane on the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy." The city's own paper, the New York Times, had the story online in 10 minutes. But it had been well and truly scooped: Krums' picture had gone round the world at a speed that made swine fever look as lazy as a fed dog.

So where was all this going? As Ms Thomas explained, the object for Safer Scotland was to reach the relatively small amount of young people who were responsible for a disproportionate amount of failed breath tests and indeed accidents. Not pathological drinkers, people who have a beer then, having been disinhibited a little by the first pint, make the decision to have a second before they get into their car. They would then be more vulnerable to distraction, which was the theme ofthe campaign, starting with a cinema advert where a driver is distracted for a moment on a rural road, and, swerving out to avoid the car in front of him, crahes head-on with the car in front. There followed a wave of mobile-phone picture messages, starting with a ic of a car windscreeen at night, then a "new text" message, culminated in a pic of a broken windscreen. There was also an online campaign orchestrated around the "morning after", which in the UK accounts for 80% of drink-drive convictions.

The last phase of the campaign was, I believe, a stroke of genius: a Facebook page, now taken off, called "The Loneliest Man in Scotland", which achieved 400 friends as videos were posted about how the man, having failed a breathalyser test and been convicted of drink-driving, progressively becomes isolated from the people around him. There was a degree of risk-taking here, as Facebookers are an independent lot, but what sponaneously happened was that abusive comments were taken care of by those many who wanted a serious debate on the matter. "Don't risk it" (the theme of the campaign) posters also appeared on X-box Live games.

The cinema ads were the workhorse of the campaign in reaching 17-19 year olds, which is perhaps a sad reflection of the cost to a family of going to the flicks. Surprisingly, use of new media like internet and mobile phones widened the age-range exposed to the advertising.

Scotland's safer driving pushes have to take into account that the country has a lot of rural roads that are often assumed to be quite empty, which is where I think Caroline's presentation was an important contribution to the conference. Should the Congestion Charge proposed for Cambridge be implemented, for example, then the Draughty Old Fen and other beads in the necklace of villages around the village will be exposed to even more rat-running than usual, as motorists whose destination is beyond Cambridge but who might usually run through it find ways to avoid the charge boundary. This, coupled with house-building schemes embarked upon to accomodate augmented populations, will fill up roads previously assumed to be emptier.

Another aspect I found impressive was that the campaign married embracing new media and technology with the age-old skill of identifying what a problem is, who is causing it, and how to reach them with which message. And all without the behinderment of ideological blinkers.

Lasly, the campaign demonstrates that, at a time when dismemberment and gore are daily bread for many younger cinema-goers and gamers, tactics have to be cerebral rather than visceral - more Psycho than Saw. As another speaker demonstrated, resolving tension halps people relax - "don't shock 'em and drop 'em, shake 'em and wake 'em". The latest Scottish advert on drink-driving demonstrates a firm grasp of this principle:

Related post: Booze-buses from Aotearoa - an idea for England?

Harriet potters with Cambridgeshire car fees

There was an interesting article in the Telegraph yesterday, stating that Harriet Harman MP, whose hagiography lists her as "Deputy Leader of the Labour Party...Chair of the Labour Party, Leader of the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Equalities, Minister for Women and Lord Privy Seal", wishes to "move bus routes from affluent suburbs to poorer areas".

The piece caught my eye because a congestion-charge scheme is being pushed for Cambridge, whereby anybody driving into the city would have to pay a toll. In yesterday's Cambridge News, John Morgan reported that a Liberal Democrat councillor from South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC), covering the mainly rural area that surrounds Cambridge like a doughnut - effectively forming, with the rest of Cambridgeshire, much of its suburbs - has urged his fellow councillors to accept the measures because it would result in "vastly improved public transport for the majority of [the area's] residents".

Public transport is a major concern regarding congestion charging, on the part of the inhabitants of all the old fens as well as the people of Cambridge. Last May, the Cambridge News reported that 61% of people across Cambridgeshire opposed the introduction of a charge, although many would change their view if "attractive alternatives" for travelling into the city were presented. But if "the suburbs" are going to lose public transport in favour of areas the Labour government classifies as poorer...

I'm not on a country-versus-city kick here: I lived exclusively in cities and towns until I found the Draughty Old Fen. I merely agree with the Telegraph's political editor Patrick Hennessy, in the article linked to in the first paragraph of this post, that Ms Harman is "'positioning' herself to the left of the Labour Party in an attempt to win support for a future leadership contest" so that she can add the title of head chef to her menu of responsibilities.

Head for head, I'd say there's as much financial poverty in villages as there is in urban areas, but possibly less of the more damaging types of poverty that scar the soul. Villages are not as vulnerable to ideologues whose idea of social responsibility is herding poorer populations into vast ghettoes - as happened, for example, when Glasgow's Labour-dominated council transported people out of slums adjacent to the city to shiny new slums in places with names like Drumchapel and Easterhouse.

And that, I think, is the nub of the thing. Limit public transport to the villages outlying a town, and you limit options for people without cars to move out of the town and arguably out of a demographic which is seen as Labour-friendly. A similar thing has already happened, as Andrew Marr notes in A History of Modern Britain. Architects like Erno Goldfinger intended their "cities in the sky" to be built in the countryside so that workers could be free of the environments they laboured in, but corporatist minds saw an opportunity to concentrate as many votes as possible in a relatively small urban area. So the tower-blocks ended up as prisons in the sky - especially when the lifts were broken, as my Mum found out when we lived in one - and Goldfinger was immortalised as a camp übervillain in a mysogynistic spy-fantasy.

It's a shame that Lib-Dem Councillor Stephen Harangozo has chosen to swallow the Government line on congestion charging, down to the suggestion that by adopting the scheme Cambridge can bid for £500m ($725m) of government money. Not only does this money originate from taxpayers in the first place, but, as Cambridge Prospective Parliamentary Candidate Richard Normington reveals in his blog, at least 10% of this will have to be raised by local taxpayers, who could find themselves with even higher taxes to shore up the scheme should it stay in the red. What's also sad is that parish (village) councillors of most political hues co-operated to force Cambridge City Council to hold workshops for residents of the "necklace" of villages around Cambridge who would have to pay to go to work or to visit the city, and outside whose houses rat-runs of cars and lorries would race to avoid crossing the charge boundary. Richard has also pointed out that, since one of the members of the committee exploring traffic-management issues has proposed introducing a congestion charge elsewhere in England, the process runs the risk of being a stitch-up.

There is, of course, hope. Conservative councillors Tom Bygott and Peter Topping of SCDC have tabled a motion showing how bad the congestion charge will be for rural residents. With Richard Norminton showing how bad the charge would be for people living in the city of Cambridge, one can see how ironically successful the Government is at uniting groups it is trying its best to put at one another's throats. You could say that it's a situation Harriet Harman would find taxing.

stop press, breaking news, shock horror probe: snow in winter

Magus the cat has just seen snow for the first time this morning, and has decided he doesn't like it. He's very territorial about our - sorry, his - garden, and ran about for a bit to try to chase it out. Then he came in and mewled for me to pick him up; when I did so, he put his feet on my forearm to warm them up. Whoever said that dogs have owners while cats have staff knew what they were talking about. (Thanks to Cambridge News Ltd for the pics above and below left.)

The gritters have done a good job in Cambridge, but we got sent home early from work yesterday because a lot of workers in Cambridge generally come from small, outlying villages, where gritting hasn't been so good, giving rise to fears about getting home should the snowfall become a blizzard. So I got back to the sound of delighted screams from the garden, and found the women in my life creating a family of snowmen and punctuating the crystal-cold air with the odd snowball.

I can remember a time when we were more robust in the face of the elements. A workmate of mine from Liverpool and I got into a reminiscence-fest, looking back at trudging to school through over a foot, occasionally two, of snow in his home town and in mine, Glasgow - in Great Britain 6,000 schools have been shut over the last couple of days, with the knock-on effect that parents who couldn't arrange childcare were unable to turn up for work.

Sometimes these things get inflated in a spiral of gossip, though, and you end up with a situation when there was three feet of snow every winter: I only remember this happening once - in 1975, I think - and Prime Minister Harold Wilson rightly declared a national emergency. Now we have less than six inches of snow in London, and the capital's ground to a virtual halt; Professor Calculus estimates this will have cost the capital and the country up to a billion quid, and I reckon he's not far off.

On the other hand, I went to college in Rome for a couple of years in the 1980's. During my stay, the city saw its first major snowfall for seven years. As soon as possible, snow-chains were put round the buses' tyres, and life went on more or less as usual, just slightly more slowly. And I got a chance to take the snap on the right, a sight you don't see often in Rome - note the strategically-placed finger to the left. (I found to my disappointment I hadn't written on the back of the photo - can anybody help me identify the fountain?)

Cambridge is at the same latitude as Edmonton, Canada, and London, about 50 miles south, is still as far north as Kiev. So what do the authorities of a hot mediterranean city know about dealing with snow that we've forgotten?

PS the family of snowmen are still there, and the general concensus is that the fat one's me. Just not (quite) as good-looking.

Congestion Charging: coming to your place soon

There's a problem with traffic, at times, in Cambridge. When I take the bus to work because my bike's in the shop, it can take up to fifteen minutes to get from one side of the Hills Road railway bridge to the other - half the time it takes to cycle to work in the first place.

I picked up the Cambridge News today to see that Richard Normington, Cambridge's parliamentary spokesman for the Conservatives, speaking on a local issue which may be replayed widely over Great Britain and spread to other countries like the US. He's claimed that an investigation into whether Cambridge should have a congestion charge (like London) will be a "stitch-up", on the grounds that the Cambridgeshire Transport Commission's chairman, Sir Brian Briscoe, had previously come down in favour of a congestion charge for Reading, a town to the west of London.

Part of Richard's statement, reported in the News, was:

Sir Brian has a credibility problem. As part of a transport commission looking into the future of Reading, he proposed introducing a congestion charge and signing up to the Government's Transport Innovation Fund - which makes charging compulsory for local authorities. His previous support for Labour's flagship policy puts his neutrality on the subject into question...now, more than ever, is not the time to impose greater financial burdens on Cambridge businesses and residents.

Sir Brian has responded that what he suggested was "a package of measures...with the possibility of a congestion charge in the long term". However, what the Independent Transport Commission Report for Reading Borough Council, co-authored by him, says is,

We think the Council should, with its sub-regional neighbours, urgently examine the case for managing demand by road pricing to influence driver behaviour...We are satisfied that the technical means exist to introduce more sophisticated charging regimes and we recommend that the Council examine how it might devise a scheme with the object of maximising economic use of road space [italics and bold in the original]

Another member of Reading's Transport Commission, Professor Tony Travers, published an essay in 2004 in the left-wing New Statesman in which he breathlessly and rather embarrassingly pours praise on the then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone (known as "Red Ken") for putting Congestion Charging in place.

I don't know whether Travers still believes in socialism or not - obviously people change and we have to allow them to. But the fact remains that transport charging is highly politicised, as it is in effect a form of taxation on a group of people - drivers - who are already taxed up to the hilt with road tax and duty on petrol. For example, back in Reading, prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate Alok Sharma has been accused of "lying" by opining that town dwellers would have to pay the charge (this has always been on the table in Cambridge); and the present Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, has been accused of "turning his back on carbon emission reductions and turning 'petrol blue'" (blue being the colour of the Conservative Party in the UK) by announcing that he would scrap an extension to the capital's Congestion Charge.

But to be tough on congestion requires us to be tough on the causes of congestion. A study commissioned by Cambridgeshire County Council states that 56,000 new dwellings will be required in this largely rural county by 2016. We just don't have the roads to support this, no more than the market towns and villages who are being pressured to accept new housing have the facilities and infrastructure. Not to mention that most rural areas are rural for a reason - the fens are very low-lying, and floods are common.

Travers makes a very interesting point in his essay: "no other city in Britain has anything like London's extensive public transport system. Less than 15 per cent of people working in central London commute by car. The political and economic risk would be far greater in a city where 65 or 75 per cent of workers travel by car." Stagecoach, which has a virtual monopoly on providing buses in and around Cambridge, must be congratulated for bringing in more and better stock. But to drive them they're hiring a lot of drivers for whom English is not a first language. If a prospective passenger doesn't speak good English either, it's a sight to behold.

If you live in or around Cambridge, please give your views online on this vital issue.

If you're from elsewhere, watch this space, because there's a very good chance that Congestion Charging and its ideological fellow-travellers are coming to a town near you soon.

don't go down the road to hell, it's jammed with bendy-buses

In order to survive, any extremist organisation has to turn public opinion against the group from which it recruits in order that some individuals in this group will become radicalised and provide the extremists with an intake.

A case in point was the methods of nationalist and loyalist paramilitary organisations emanating from Northern Ireland, which would carry out operations in such a way as to cause feelings of revulsion in the target community and polarise the non-aligned, often by using twisted logic to classify innocents as enemies and act accordingly. For example, attacks on peace-loving Irish people in London following IRA bombs weren't a side-effect of the campaign, they were one of the desired outcomes, to cause radicalisation.

A similar process can be seen in the 2004 murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam. Local government, in introducing its action plan to counter radicalisation, stated: "Although we were prepared for the possibility of an attack in Amsterdam, we were totally unprepared for the abhorrent way in which this attack took place. It put an enormous strain on relations in the city."

I wouldn't want to accuse Professor Richard Dawkins of wishing to radicalise those atheists who don't accept that being so doesn't mean they have to be anti-religion in a violent way, but he is involved in an attempt to radicalise them nonetheless.

On June 20 this year, Guardian blogger Ariane Sherine reported seeing a poster posing the question that Luke 18:8 tells us Jesus asked his disciples during a discourse in the house of the Pharisee where he cured the man with the dropsical hand (starting 14:1) - "when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?". She went on to write a rather amusing article which she ended by proposing that thousands of atheists club together to buy an advert on a bus that would say, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life." She states the Guardian's Comment is Free editor contacted the head of the National Secular Society for her to check out the feasibility of such a scheme. He appeared not to be very impressed, and suggested people donate to the NSS.

That same day, however, Jon Worth, who in his other life designs websites for Labour politicians, came by the post and changed it from some slightly controversial fun into something else in his blog, in which he states "you can’t spend a day in central London without being confronted by some sign that religion should be your only salvation", adding "what I really loathe is people somehow judging that those with religious belief are somehow superior beings".

He set up a pledgebank page devoted to the cause, and - despite the support of a campaign of bloggers - by the time the pledge had run out, the Telegraph's Matthew Moore reported that only 877 of the 4,678 people required had made a pledge, and the whole thing appeared "dead in the water".

Enter Richard Dawkins, who appended his name to the campaign by pledging to match funds donated up to £5500 ($9350). He seems to have somehow negotiated a deal whereby the message will be carried by as many as 60 London bendybuses for a month for £11,000 ($18,700). But a combination of Dawkins' name and a serious networking campaign (look at the messages at the bottom of Sherine's blog on the issue) led, as Martin Beckford reports, to £31,000 ($52,900) being raised.

I've been to London many times in the course of visiting family, and journeys related to my former job as a drugs-worker, and don't share Jon Worth's experience that you can't escape being "confronted" by religion. Away from the centre, I've seen a lot of hope, but also the sort of sights that drove Ralph McTell to write "Streets of London". But that's ok, seemingly, because bendy-buses will be going round telling people that "probably there's no God" (the first word is there to avoid litigation).

Perhaps wisely, some religious groups and figures have contributed to the campaign, which hopefully will draw some of the poison from it and eventually help indicate the ridiculous nature of the whole venture.

I say ridiculous advisedly - it's time to look at the website which prompted Ms Sherine's musings. (Although what seems to have exercised Jon Worth, who really started the ball rolling, was "a 40 minute sermon" from somebody who from his description may have been suffering from a mental illness.)

The jesussaid.org website opens with a welcome page and has 12 bars down the side indicating different pages. I had to open 11 of them before I came across the mention of hell that Sherine mentioned - she had obviously put a lot of work into being offended. Still, I'm sure it's had a lot of hits through all this, which is obviously a good thing.

But who is the campaign aimed at? I imagine it will offend a lot of people of many faiths or none, and am worried that the poor bus-drivers might get a bit of hassle. But the target of the campaign, I think, is atheists. Specifically, those atheists who lack the visceral fear of religion that pervades The God Delusion, and do not subscribe to the view that lack of faith presupposes hatred of faith. I've known many atheists who have no problem with religion or religionists. And the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes reminds people of faith that, regarding those who shut out God and try to dodge religious questions, "believers themselves frequently bear some responsibility for this situation". The object of the campaign is for "non-aligned" atheists to be given grief in the hope that some of them will become radicalised.

Pace Cardinal Murphy O' Connor, Archbishop Williams et al, I won't be donating to this scheme, as there's better ways I can use my donations. I can only finish by referring to the 4 pages near the start of The God Delusion that Dawkins devotes to the cartoons of Mohammed that appeared in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, which led to riots in February 2006. Similarly, some time has elapsed from Ariane Sherine's throwaway remarks in the Guardian to the near-culmination of the campaign to put anti-religion posters on London buses; and if Dawkins thinks the cartoon outcry was a set-up, then this is no less so.



NB: I was not being facetious in comparing the bendybus campaign to those of terrorists; I believe the basic process as regards radicalisation and recruitment is the same. For those interested in the progress of Amsterdam's campaign against radicalisation I recommend a page from Muhammad Haniff, who links to a very interesting (but long) report on the process of radicalisation in the context of Amsterdam.

car-taxes fuel the madness of the guilty rich

My friend Barbacana's selling his car.

He doesn't plan to make any money from the sale, profit would be a bonus: all he wants to do, being retired, is to avoid having to shell out approximately £500 in tax, insurance and MOT fees. And that's before he puts petrol in the damn thing.

I have a confession to make here, in that I have something in common with the Prime Minister other than being Scottish. I don't drive. But you don't need to be a driver to see that the rising cost of fuel, doubtless a measure to get money out of savings accounts and into Government coffers, is making the pips squeak all over the place. For instance, food prices. As if the criminal practice, described by Townhall's Chuck Colson (right) of driving up the prices of badly-needed grain by turning not a little of it into biofuels wasn't bad enough, the cost of getting food to shops is rising because it's dearer to drive the lorries (which carry 82% of UK freight). Bicycle-parts, crime novels, red roses and all the rest are rising in price because it costs more to get them to outlets.

Up north in the mid-'90's, I took some driving lessons, but didn't finish them, as I didn't enjoy the experience of driving; so I never bought the Yugo a workmate was trying to flog me. I remarked to my instructor that there were a lot of Chelsea tractors about. He replied with something I hadn't thought about - as well as their growing reputation as a status symbol for people who'd never drive off-road, there was also a rising demand for them among people, predominantly women, who'd been in a car accident or seen the results of one. Gives a new meaning to their popularity on the school run...

In the Budget this March, Darling Brown (right) informed the nation that there would be changes to vehicle excise duty. Among other things, a new £200 charge on high-emission vehicles - like Chelsea tractors - is to be applied retrospectively to cars bought since 2001. I would have thought that if you bought something legally and in good faith seven years ago, and finished paying for it but still drove it in order to pay fuel tax, then your duty to the Treasury was discharged with honour.

It appears not. Unsatisfied with controlling our lives with targets and tickboxes that are dislocated from everyday existence, Darling Brown is using taxation not only as a brake on our aspirations, but to punish the hubris of those who'd thought that the point of working hard was to spend what you'd earned. Even as the climate-change pantheon plunges from the heavens he replies to the misgivings of his own people: "don't you know these reforms are going to save 1.3 million tons of CO₂ and increase the numbers of clean cars?"

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a saloon or a hatchback (or even my bike), but people who sweat for a modest wage shouldn't have obstacle after obstacle thrown in their paths when they try to go for something a bit better, should they wish to do so. To tax law-abiding workers to distraction is merely to accentuate the earnings of the true guilty rich - drug-importers, people-traffickers and eco-socialists so far up their ivory towers you wonder if they remember how to tie their laces.

Meanwhile Barbacana, who's had a car for decades, tried my bike, and found he was a bit wobbly. So he's resolved to start taking the bus. I don't know how to tell him that the fares are going up.

reducing roadside shrines

Without rules, people tend to do what they want, regardless of the consequences for others. The realisation of this has led to the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta and Sadie McGlumphur's Tartan Emporium's Code of Conduct for Kilties.

And the Highway Code.

The Highway Code isn't actually part of British Law, but while you'll never be arrested for observing it, you might well be for breaking it. If, that is, you're observed to be not observing it.

This is where the problem arises in Cantabrigia and its environs, not least the draughty old fen.

We have long had "rat-run" problems, whereby motorists try to evade snarl-ups on busier roads by using the roads running through the d.o.f. which they perceive to be less busy, only to be caught up in other snarl-ups which are largely of their own creation.

Leaving the draughty old fen, some motorists tend to accelerate before the national speed limit is applicable. The main reason for this has been cited as the lack of signage on some roads reminding drivers that the speed limit is still 30mph.

So the solution appears simple: put more signs up so that drivers know the speed-limit.

But, thinking about the matter, do we need to put up other signs, for example "when you're shooting rabbits don't shoot at people"? Or, "if you're cutting down a tree, don't aim your axe at any non-sylvian being"?

Cambridgeshire County Council is dealing with the problem of fatalities in the region's roads, and it has to be admitted we do not have a situation, we have a problem. It's rationale: to prioritise "accident cluster sites where people had been killed or seriously injured".

So far, so fair. But its method is to remove roadside shrines, on the basis that they distract drivers and cause accidents. Personally, if I saw a cluster of roadside shrines, it would occur to me that since a few people had died in that location, I should reduce my speed. Taking the shrines away, to my mind, is removing intelligence that drivers should be extra careful on a certain section or a certain bend.

New Labour's boast once was that it was going to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. It turned out to be neither. I would, however, ask one thing of them: if they are going to allow county councils to be tough on roadside shrines, then please, please, force them to be tough on the cause of roadside shrines.