We all needed a laugh, what with the pound tanking and inflation running away, my old pal Kwasi delivering a Budget, probably for a bet, like Milton Friedman’s last cheese-dream, and the threat of nuclear annihilation starting to seem like a welcome turn up for the books. Said laugh has just been obligingly provided by the Metropolitan Police.
They have just, without broadcasting the fact, decided to enforce the speed limit with the tiniest bit more rigour – and as a result, they’ve nicked more than two and a half times as many people for speeding in the first six months of this year than they did in the last six months of last year. Some 347,000 drivers have been walloped with points, fines and/or the baneful necessity of spending most of a day in a dismal room being given dismaying accounts of what happens when your front bumper makes contact with a toddler at 35mph.