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Fast cars and cannabis

12 January 2004

When laws are broken by responsible people in their millions, enforcement is not the answer. It's time for the government to look for a more constructive approach.

There was an outbreak of seasonal harmony in the interval between Christmas and the New Year festivities, as transport minister Tony McNulty rushed to embrace (or, at least, not to rubbish) proposals from the Conservative transport spokesman Damien Green to restrict the use of speed cameras. Mr Green's idea is that these cameras are being used too indiscriminately and too punitively, and that there should be a wider range of penalties depending on the location of a camera and the time of day that an offence is recorded.

The notion of the state "lightening up" on speeding offences might seem counter-intuitive in the present era. The last ten years have seen a big increase in the severity in criminal sentencing (including sentencing for motoring offences) and a moral climate increasingly intolerant not only of serious wrong-doing but of loutishness and other minor misdemeanours. The proliferation of surveillance cameras and campaigns of zero tolerance reinforce this picture. Governments, and the present government in particular, have developed stronger controlling instincts, and might not be expected to write-off the wholesale disregard for the law that speeding represents as something that lies beyond their power.

But that, of course, is precisely the problem. In order to get that power, the government needs votes, and speeding is an offence that almost all motorists commit. With two million of them caught on camera last year, and the prospect of that number rising rapidly in the future, there comes a point at which people begin to ask what's in it for them. Three penalty points on a driving licence are no joke, particularly when the offender is "caught" in circumstances presenting little inherent danger.

It is natural for people to distinguish between their own "safe" speeding and someone else's "dangerous" speeding, and anyone inclined to mock would do well to check out the mote in their own eye first. When a community campaigns for a speed restriction on a certain stretch of road, it generally happens that most of those caught by it are the locals themselves. Similarly, when faced with a sparsely populated motorway on which all the cars are travelling in excess of eighty, not even the most principled are likely to trudge along at seventy in the nearside lane, getting tangled up with the lorries that themselves are trying to maintain a steady but illegal sixty-five. What people say about speeding and what they do are not always the same thing at all.

The truth is that speed limits are entirely arbitrary. They have no claim to moral force other than their general acceptance. It may be safer to drive at sixty than seventy, but if safety is the moral imperative it is better not to drive at all. In life, risk is part of the deal, and speed limits do no more that provide an acceptable framework for the balancing of risk and benefit. Since, for the sake of clarity and enforcement, they have to be inflexible, a degree of "safe" law breaking must be tacitly accepted if the system is to work.

This approach relies upon enlightened self-interest. Many roads and lanes have notional sixty mph limits even though it is impossible to drive them safely at such a speed. That they are not littered with wreckage is testimony to the self-policing of drivers, who wish to stay alive and have no wish to cause damage to others. People do not drive recklessly at sixty simply because the speed limit permits it, but then no more do they limit themselves to sixty when conditions permit a higher speed. In general they do what is sensible, and they trust their experience and judgement to tell them what that is.

The thrust of Mr McNulty's argument is that when people are behaving sensibly they do not want to be penalised for it. Policy on speed cameras has already changed to reflect this to some extent. They are now required to be highly visible, and to serve the purpose of slowing traffic down at known danger spots rather than catching people not slowing down. Implicit in the decision not to put cameras on safe stretches or roads and to discontinue hidden speed traps is the acknowledgement that, to be effective, laws have to coincide with people's own ideas about what behaviour is appropriate.

It may be argued that strict laws are needed to deal with the people who would otherwise abuse the freedom to behave sensibly. The difficulty here is that no law can prevent the damage that is caused by breaking it, and dangerous drivers are no less dangerous because their behaviour is illegal. To treat everybody as potentially irresponsible because some people are is to break the social contract that makes society work. Changes to the enforcement of speed limits acknowledge that responsible behaviour is the norm rather than the exception. People who drive dangerously and cause accidents will continue to pay dearly for their actions.

In terms of effective policy-making this recognition is a huge step. It allows the government to stand back from enforcement and to concentrate on facilitating measures that people cannot easily provide for themselves. In the case of motoring, these would include safer roads (better built, better marked, better lit, etc.) and safer vehicles, both of which can be achieved through regulation requiring centralised authority.

In the face of millions of voters increasingly resentful of their speeding tickets, this approach has clear political attractions. It concentrates resources where they are most effective, reduces the number of the disaffected and reinforces attitudes of social responsibility that are easily eroded when regulation becomes too strict and the only maxim is "don't get caught". And what works for speeding could have other applications. In any area where the law is being broken wholesale there should be room for re-assessment of the political objective, and none is so striking as the situation that pertains to "recreational" drugs.

To ban cannabis (and other substances, for that matter) but not alcohol or tobacco is entirely arbitrary and also has no specific moral logic. It is just a question of drawing the line somewhere. But, as with speeding, people tend to draw their own lines, and by interfering in that process the government is wasting energy and resources that could be applied more usefully to enlightened regulation. Given that millions of people regularly use cannabis, it is strange, to say the least, that no controls or standards are in place in relation to the quality of what they are consuming. By criminalising an activity rather than seeking to make it safer, the government fails to achieve its objective in terms of the public good.