Gordon Brown, Yesterday- Had the money gone straight into the councils coffers, would they have readily wanted to close down this particular revenue pool?
- Unlike the police, speed cameras catch people in the act of the particular crime they are being punished for, at the crime scene 100% of the time; the only arguement against speed cameras in this light is to increase the speed at which a ticket is issued to above the accepted speed limit slightly - someone being ticketed for going 34mph downhill in a 30mph zone when their speed reads in units of 10 is incredibly unfair and a recipe for criminalising and alienating law abiding citizens for what should penalise dangerous drivers.
The motive of Swindon Council should be addressed here; since they cannot get their hands in the cookie jar they've decided that their own source of biscuits should be cut off - this is not the beginnings of good policy and forgets that speed cameras are designed to curb the number of road deaths, not provide a revenue stream.
In Swindon Councils defence however, the blame really lies at Whitehalls door - consistent underfunding of the roads for years has meant that the monies raised by road tax, fuel duty and every other tax NuLabour wishes to milk our last remaining drop of money and human dignity for has been wasted on other nonsenses; now that the coffers are empty in the midst of an economic downturn NuLabour are viciously scrabbling around to find revenue sources for their insane projects, tax bungs and related guff. My guess is that those mythical "road safety grants" that Whitehall should've given Swindon to create safer roads have been spent on something pointless, ineffectual and completely unrelated.
Then again, its not unlike NuLabour to first take our money, lose it in storage, burn a little more, and then hand it back to some of us, perhaps getting some of it stolen or too much given by mistake...
