I’m afraid a combination of jet lag and family duties has kept me from my typewriter; and that after making it home in a world record time, after a lengthy flight from Kuala Lumpur. Airlines are not allowed to overflow India or Pakistan at the moment for fear of an errant nuke or ground to air missile inadvertently causing unnecessary civilian casualties. It therefore took the best part of fourteen hours to go from the 111 degrees (f) of sweaty heat to a beautiful but cool 6 degs C at London Heathrow. We touched down at 05.35 and I was home in Eastbourne at 07.40. Apart from a five minute delay going past Gatwick, I can’t imagine it could be done any quicker. I was first off the plane, first through immigration, and my bag was almost first on the carousel. I was in the car and travelling, thirty minutes after the rubber hit the tarmac; astonishing. We made it home without exceeding 80 mph on the motorway and staying within all other speed limits. Now, as you may have seen, the European Fun Police (EFP) are at it again. In two or three years time all new cars will be fitted with a multitude of clever gadgets that prevent you from exceeding the speed limit and automatically slowing you down if you’re going too fast, entering a lower limit. I’m not sure what happens if you’re in the middle of overtaking with oncoming traffic rapidly approaching, but presumably there must be some sort of override. Maybe that’s where the Law of Unintended Consequences comes in? Either way, whilst being highly meritorious and no doubt a huge contributory factor to safer motoring, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of freedom of expression; in fact just freedom of any sort. The Nanny State is slowly and inexorably guiding us towards a Brave New World. It may not be the one Aldous Huxley predicted exactly but it will happen. The advent of Artificial Intelligence and an international refusal to control the use and impact of robotics means all those Sci-Fi films could easily be more accurate than most of us care to imagine.
It reminds me of perhaps the most effective speed limit I’ve come across. When the Iron Curtain was still in place and Berlin was a divided City in Soviet controlled East Germany, there was a corridor from the West German border to get into the British Sector in Berlin. As you entered the corridor you had to present your passport to a Red Army soldier who looked as though he’d come straight from pulling a plough in some far distant field. He would disappear into a mysterious, windowless booth, where, for all we knew, he’d have a quick brew before returning some time later with the necessary authorisation for us to proceed. You then had to go through a similar checkpoint at the other end of the corridor and if you were more than a few minutes either side of two hours you were liable to be handed over to the Stasi and shot…..or castrated….or brainwashed….or whatever it was they did then. The point is it was a very effective constraint because we really didn’t know what would happen, but we had this irrational fear of the “Communist State” and its all-encompassing power. There’s a theory that the world was a much safer place then; just East v West with no realistic threat of conflict so long as both sides had roughly the same number of Nukes. It was called MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction and most people thought that wasn’t a very good thing; destruction, I mean. Nowadays there are so many more threats, often involving unknown and potentially maniacal madmen, that there is much greater reason to be concerned for our future.
One of the reasons I voted to leave the European Union was to be rid of their arcane and often ridiculously pedantic regulations. It still looks likely that we will exit the European Union, but apparently we’ve already accepted the “law-abiding car”. Plus ça change.
2DtC
ADayInTheStrifeOf 