Good news for the Treasury at last! It was reported on Tuesday that it receives more than £88m a year in speeding fines. That's almost enough to pension off one incompetent bank chief every three days. All right, it may not go very far in terms of buying up toxic debt or building Olympic stadiums, but it's a start.
And it isn't borrowed against all our futures, wheedled out of the private sector in some incomprehensible "partnership" or just made up by the Bank of England. It's real money paid directly into the public purse by people who've broken the law. Hooray!
Sometimes though, just when you expect a happy consensus, people surprise you. Apparently, the criminals who break the speed limit don't like the punishments they receive. Then again, the criminals who break the murder laws don't particularly like the punishments they receive either, but they don't form quite such a strident lobby.
That doesn't make the speeders' complaints logical. The fact that many more people speed than murder does not make it any less a crime, even though it is a lesser crime. And the difference in the magnitude of the offences is reflected by the huge difference in their punishments. So that doesn't excuse the grumbling letters to Top Gear magazine either.
A question remains: why are motorists, who've been convicted of something they knew to be illegal and which they don't deny, suffered to whinge? What happened to: "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime"? British drivers who think the speed limit is unjust are blessed with a democratic system within which to campaign for its reform. The proper way of going about that is not just breaking the law you don't like and then moaning – that's what the French do.
But speeding drivers don't often argue that the speed limit is a bad law because they're squeamish about road deaths. What they say is that the police should be catching "real criminals". (Speeders are real criminals, of course – they mean "criminals who are guilty of more serious crimes".) This would be a fair point if speed cameras were using resources that could otherwise be devoted to drugs raids, searches for missing children or stopping suicide bombers. But static cameras aren't very good at the more subtle aspects of police work – you know, taking statements, investigating leads, jostling newspaper vendors to death.
Anyway, speed traps don't use resources, they create them – they're profit-making. That's what maddens the speeders most – they feel that the government is making money from their, what shall we call it, disobedience? Rebelliousness? Free spirit? Temporary speedometer innumeracy?
It's seldom an accident, that's for sure – even if it may cause one. Almost everyone knows when they're speeding and almost everyone speeds. Maybe this massed recalcitrance means we should change the law, allow people to drive as fast as they like and accept a few thousand more road deaths?
Any speeders who aren't OK with that need to shut up and pay their fines, even if they were speeding in a way they thought safe – and I accept that driving illegally fast is not always unsafe. Laws, particularly those enforced by cameras, need clearly drawn lines. You can't replace speed limits with nebulous rules against dangerousness as they'd have to be enforced by real police officers, who are, in fact, busy trying to catch real criminals.
It's time I put my cards on the table: I don't drive a car – not out of environmental principle but just a combination of timidity and laziness. So perhaps I don't have the right perspective to understand someone's fury on receiving a speeding ticket, issued by a camera cunningly placed to entrap many motorists rather than to save any lives. Because I certainly don't care about it. There's still a chance the camera will save a life – it won't cost one – and if you don't want to pay, drive at a legal speed.
Some drivers seem to have a gut feeling that racing around attached to a big internal combustion engine, going wherever they want, as quickly as they deem convenient, is some of sort of natural right or ancient British liberty. Well it's not. It may feel natural but so does smoking or an expensive boob job. It's recent, unnatural and unhealthy and the world would probably be a better place if no one had ever done it. Soon they may have to stop.
So for the moment, let's at least make money from it. The country is gasping for cash and getting it from those careless enough to break speeding laws seems at least as fair as hiking income tax for high earners. Economists worry about taxes reducing people's incentive to earn. Well, let's reduce their incentive to drive fast instead. Just think of the huge effort and inconvenience people are prepared to endure to avoid tax – creating offshore companies, living on homophobic islands, even giving to charity. Under this system, they'd just have to slow down in built-up areas.
In fact, there is a host of minor, easily detectable transgressions that we could levy in this new boracic age. Let's have microphones on buses to penalise ringtone-browsing teenagers, scent-censors to identify smelly people in lifts and ankle-level dog-shit cameras on pavements. Tax these and you not only discourage antisocial acts, you turn those who refuse to mend their ways into cash cows. You're not giving them a stake in society – you're extorting one from them.
So let's celebrate speeding fines by calling them a tax. It would remove the criminalising stigma to which criminal motorists object so much, and either boost revenues or improve highway code adherence – either way, we can't lose.
And it may save lives; 2,940 people died on Britain's roads in 2007 and that's a record low – as records go, it seems breakable. If even so few of us perish this year from swine flu, there are unlikely to be headlines clamouring for the NHS to spend more time curing "real diseases".