Tory Boy Racers

The Conservative war on road safety has begun.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 27th July 2010

In every other sector, Conservatives insist that it is daft for human beings to do the work machines could do. In every other instance they demand that police officers be freed from mindless tasks to spend more time preventing serious crime. In all other cases they urge more rigorous enforcement of the law. On every other occasion they insist that local authorities should raise revenue and make their schemes pay for themselves. But it all goes into reverse when they are exposed to the beams of a fiendish instrument of mind control.

The moment they pass through its rays, Conservatives turn from penny-pinching authoritarians into spendthrift hoodie-huggers. They demand that a job now performed consistently and cheaply by machines should be handed back to human beings, who will do it patchily and at great expense. They urge that police officers be diverted from preventing serious crime to stand in for lumps of metal. They insist that those who break the law should not be punished or even caught. They clamour for councils to abandon a scheme that almost pays for itself, and replace it with one that requires constant subsidies.

What is this cunning device for reprogramming conservative brains? It is of course the speed camera. The government hates it just as much as the moronic petrolheads who dance with glee whenever one is torched.

It hasn’t yet announced a general policy of turning off speed cameras, but it knows that this is the likely consequence of its assault on road safety grants. After losing 40% of its government safety funding, this week Oxfordshire will turn off all its cameras(1). Buckinghamshire says it is likely to follow(2). All the other local authorities in England will have to start counting their options. The roads minister, Mike Penning, leaves us in no doubt about what he wants them to do. Local authorities, he says, “have relied too heavily on safety cameras for far too long.” By cutting the grant, he claims, the government is “delivering on its pledge to end the war on the motorist.”(3)

There is and has never been a war on the motorist. Motorists are handled more gently than anyone else: they are the only people who can expect to get away with breaking the law on almost all occasions. A war is an event in which people are injured and killed. Which circumstance most closely resembles one: an occasional £60 fine, or the daily carnage on the roads?

You can see the victims of the real war that’s being waged – the war against road safety – in every hospital and mortuary. Seven killed, 71 seriously injured, every day(4). About 120 children killed in Britain every year: 120 families plunged into lifelong grief(5).

Every two or three weeks I visit a spinal injuries unit in which a close friend is confined. He wasn’t hurt on the roads, but many of the other patients were. Every time I walk though that hospital I see the broken bodies, the shattered hopes, the endless complications, both physical and psychological, caused by the war being waged on the roads. You will see something similar in wards which specialise in the loss of limbs and eyes, the smashing of faces, the crushing of brains. This is the closest most of us will get to seeing the aftermath of war, a shattering of lives that bears no relationship to what Penning so crassly describes as the war on the motorist.

In other cases – climate change for example – the government has so far been able to resist the junk science peddled by the lunatic fringe of the Conservative party. But not here. The positive impact of speed cameras in reducing accidents is unequivocal. A study for Penning’s department shows that 19% fewer people were killed or seriously injured at accident black spots after speed cameras were introduced, above and beyond the general decline in accidents on the roads(6).

Yet the conspiracists in the Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail, on Top Gear and throughout cyberspace, insist that speed cameras exist only to tax and control us. They point to the example of Swindon, the first place in Britain in which the cameras were shut down, at the behest of a Conservative council. In the year before they were switched off, there was one death and eight minor accidents at the camera sites; in the year after, there were no deaths, two serious accidents and seven minor ones(7). “These figures”, the council’s leader, Rod Bluh, maintains, “completely vindicate our position”. They show that “fixed speed cameras are more about fund-raising than road safety.”(8) In reality they vindicate the proposition that he is innumerate, as they fail all tests of statistical significance. A study conducted by the Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership, across the whole county over three years, found that after speed cameras were installed there was a reduction at those sites in deaths and serious injuries of 69%(9). Mr Bluh’s hostility to the cameras might have more to do with the fact that he was banned for speeding(10).

As for the fund-raising issue, the Treasury takes some £85-90m a year from speed camera revenues(11) and shells out £110m to local authorities to run them(12): the cameras are almost self-financing, but not quite. So when Mike Penning maintains that “the public are concerned about whether they are there for safety or to raise money for the Treasury”(13) he’s engaging in a subtle deception: the public might be concerned, but he knows it’s not true.

Turning off the speed cameras, on the other hand, is a staggeringly expensive policy, if similar levels of safety are to be maintained. Oxfordshire is having to switch off its cameras for want of £600,000: a pittance by comparison to the £13.6m that Thames Valley police already spend on traffic enforcement(14). Penning’s own department reports a cost-benefit ratio for speed cameras of 2.7:1(15). The House of Commons Transport Committee examined the alternatives and found that “a more cost effective measure for reducing speeds and casualties has yet to be introduced.”(16) This Tory cut has nothing to do with saving money.

And even if speed cameras did make more money than they used, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Why shouldn’t there be a tax on breaking the law?

Penning might have fallen for another tabloid myth: that speed cameras are unpopular. The most recent poll whose results I can find show that 82% of British people surveyed approve of them, and that the percentage has been rising(17). The horror and fury being expressed by parents in Oxfordshire will be voiced wherever they are switched off.

The real reason why conservatives hate the enforcement of speed limits is that this is one of the few laws which is as likely to catch the rich as the poor: newspaper editors and council leaders are as vulnerable as anyone else. The conservative reaction to speed cameras suggests that they love laws, except those which apply to them.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jamie McGinnes, 25th July 2010. Government axes speed cameras. Sunday Times.

2. http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/8291805.Transport_chief__Speed_cameras_could_go/

3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10755509

4. Department for Transport, September 2009. Reported Road Casualties Great Britain: 2008 - Annual Report. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/casualtiesgbar/rrcgb2008

5. Department for Transport, 2010. Fatalities in reported road accidents: 2008. Road Accident Statistics Factsheet No. 2. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/casualtiesgbar/suppletablesfactsheets/fatalities2008.pdf

6. The headline figure is 42%, but once regression to the mean is taken into account it falls to 19%. See page 155. UCL and PA Consulting Group, December 2005. The national safety camera programme: Four-year evaluation report. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/speedmanagement/nscp/nscp/coll_thenationalsafetycameraprog/ationalsafetycameraprogr4598.pdf

7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/england/8636654.stm

8. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268392/Town-scrapped-speed-cameras-sees-increase-accidents.html

9. http://www.safetycameraswiltshire.co.uk/

10. http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/8290743.Oxfordshire_decides_it_will_turn_off_its_speed_traps/

11. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7909246/Treasury-set-to-cash-in-on-speeding-fines.html

12. Department for Transport, no date given. Road safety grant - the allocation process. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/secroadsafetygrants/secspecificrdsafetygrants/pagerdsafetygrantallocation

13. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7838300/RAC-local-authorities-cutting-back-on-speed-cameras.html

14. Chris Walker, 24th July 2010. “We will still police roads”. Oxford Mail.

15. Department for Transport, no date given. The national safety camera programme: Four-year evaluation report. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/speedmanagement/nscp/nscp/thenationalsafetycameraprogr4597

16. House of Commons Transport Committee, 31st October 2006. Roads Policing and Technology: Getting the right balance. Page 40. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtran/975/975.pdf

17. Claire Corbett, School of Social Science and Law, Brunel University, 2006. Memorandum submitted to the House of Commons Transport Committee, 31st October 2006. Roads Policing and Technology: Getting the right balance, Ev 73. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmtran/975/975.pdf

Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein.

Why Socialism?

By Albert Einstein

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

My faith in mankind is restored, and it's the French what done it.

I was pottering around northern France yesterday on yet another WW1 genealogy trip, only this time I wasn't my usual organised self and had somehow neglected to bring a map with me. The towns and villages in this area are very pretty, in that tidy Lego-like, litter free way, but the one thing that always strikes me is the lack of people and the number of businesses which seem to be permanently closed - it's as if a nuclear bomb has gone off, or the scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when they realise there's no children to be seen. So anyway, I was getting more than a little lost (and irate); I knew the war cemetery was somewhere in this settlement they call Merville, but bugger me those Frenchies weren't making it easy to find.


The tourist information office was, naturally, closed. As were all the shops. And the town hall. That only left the police station. At this point I should add that my French is more than a little rusty, in fact my progress in learning the language ground to a halt somewhere around 1982 when I discovered that Mrs Diffy's lessons were much more fun when we concentrated on her refereeing of food fights and spent less time even pretending to learn some complicated foreign language. Unsurprisingly, the boys in bleu charged with protecting the good (yet invisible) citizens of Merville had a correspondingly inadequate command of English (and no doubt threw their food with a little 'je ne sais quoi') - cue several minutes of us all staring blankly at one another making various noises which may or may not have stemmed from one of our languages, until I grabbed a pen (un stylo, see) and scrawled '1914-1918' on the nearest piece of paper to hand.


What happened next was one of those out of the blue moments that you know you'll remember for the rest of your life yet will mean fuck all to anybody else.


They decided it was far quicker to actually show me where the cemetery was, and so within minutes I found myself trying to keep up with their car through the predictably empty streets. This was beyond the call of duty I thought, but when we got there, instead of just pointing and disappearing, as is usual when guiding someone somewhere, they got out of their car and came in with me. They showed me where the visitor book was, helped locate the grave on the map, and then spent a quarter of an hour helping me find the grave (no easy task in cemeteries this size). The language barrier came tumbling down with our enthusiasm to somehow communicate, and they asked about the grave (my great uncle's), where he was from (Southampton, and proud), his age when killed (19, as in Paul Hardcastle, millions of them). I felt like bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing' and spliff up and talk about the brotherhood of man, man.


In short, my little afternoon was fucking brilliant.


They didn't have to do that. I don't know if they thought I was particularly stupid, or if they just had even more than the usual amount of time on their hands. Maybe they help everybody who visits the war graves. I don't know, I don't know how I'd treat foreign visitors if the roles were reversed (although there's plenty of Polish graveyards near me, hey that's a point). I like to think that my town, including myself, would behave like those French policemen did yesterday, but I can't be sure. But I do hope so.