There was joy in Wales as theLabourgovernment scrapped its blanket 20mph speed limits just a year after they were introduced.
Wales’ Transport Secretary Ken Skates had admitted that the policy was so unpopular even his own family had signed the petition against it.
Of course it was unpopular. It was obvious that it was going to be as the 20mph limit bore no relationship to actual risk and drivers will treat with contempt such ridiculously low limits.
A student from that part of the world was telling me recently that they had long since given up trying to enforce it, so this news is the final nail in the coffin of this dreadful idea.
So why did it happen? Mark Drakeford, that poisonous little man who has a pathological dislike of the motor vehicle decided to abuse his position to impose his ideology on the people who elected him rather than do the job for which he was elected – to govern.
What does this tell us? Like the collapse of the old Soviet Bloc, eventually people realise that the power rests with them, not the government and the bureaucrats who make up laws expecting reality to bend to their will. As with the EV market that is in the doldrums and a lack of infrastructure if it wasn’t, Kier Starmer is likely to face his own Drakeford moment as the deadline draws near and reality, like a vast cliffside facing the oncoming vessel refuses to give way and the ship crashes into the rocks. He can pass as many laws as he likes and his plan is for thirty five bills this parliament – yes, thirty-fucking-five bills, FFS! The man is like a drunk in a liquor store – reality will slap him round the face. People won’t buy the milk floats, the industry will bend to the will of the consumer or go bust and the whole farrago will collapse in a pile of ordure at his feet. I would like to think that he will be left holding the baby, unlike Drakeford who did a runner before the shit hit the fan and spattered all over his poisonous little face.
Yes, the lesson here is an old one. A very old one. We are many, they are few.
Weak, useless Tories allowed all of this, it would be wonderful if it were to all unravel on Labour’s watch.
A cynic might say that the Tories did all this on purpose so that they could crow about how rubbish Labour are when it all falls apart…
God I hate politicians.
Empty the bins, fill in the potholes, keep the lights on. FFS!
Starmer is merely doing what the senior WEF manager, Blair, is telling him to do, while Blair is merely following the orders of real WET overlords, Soris, Gates, and Schwab. Their globalisation plan is to completely destabilise the West, economically, and racially, and then rebuild it in their own image. Depopulation to a figure which the elite can control is already in the pipeline, with farmland turning into industrial complexes and acted of solar panels. Prevention of the use of oils and coal, preferring to strip the forests of trees to feed power stations, and increasing the number of bird mincers, both on land and sea. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, only the elite will be warm using facilities not available to the rest of us. Nazis and Communists don’t die. They breed and instil their ideals in their offspring.
Pte Frazer really was right.
It’s not all good news. Some to many of the places that got 20 mph limits will keep them. Instead introducing new speed limits the proper way, i.e. road by road or district by district, they introduced a blanket 20 mph speed limit and will revert it to 30 mph (or more) district by district.
It’s the ratchet effect: click, click, click until the proles object, then retreat one click. And it’s almost always “to make our lives safer”, as if we are unable to assess risk ourselves and make our own lives as safe as we want them to be.
This is why I’ve no time for people who think voting is the be-all and end-all of accountability. You know the sort of gits: the ones who say so-and-so “must be brought under democratic accountability”, meaning the government should take it over.
Voting got Wales into this mess, and it didn’t vote itself out of it.
FrankH: True enough. They’re just falling back to the situation here in Scotland, where we’ve had 20mph limits for about a decade.
To be fair, in general they’ve been used fairly sensibly up here. I remember reading an article a few years ago by a bloke who manages speed limits somewhere in America. The idea, he said, is never to slow people down, because that can be as dangerous as going too fast; it’s to set the limit at roughly where people will drive naturally, recognising that most people will push their luck and exceed the legal limit by up to 10mph anyway, then you can collar the absolute nutters who totally ignore it and really do drive too fast for the road in question. In other words, they’re set exactly as most people read them: a recommendation for what you should be doing, rather than an upper limit which you must stay below come what may.
In my experience, for the most part that’s what’s happened here with the 20 limits. In general – there are always exceptions – they’ve been imposed in places where nobody was ever realistically doing 30 in the first place. I mean, if you accept, as that bloke wrote, that most people will read a 30mph limit as the “correct” speed for the road with the absolute upper limit being 40, it was too high for most of the places where Scottish councils have lowered it. (As far as I’ve seen, at least.) But the blanket change from 30 to 20 in Wales was insane.