Mystery of camera rage directed at life-saving devices

IF 1993 was the year of Britpop and 1994 the year of Girl Power, then 2023 will go down in history (in parts of the West Country, at least) as the year of Chopping Down Average Speed Cameras.

The odd thing about this phenomenon isn’t that it happened at all – a nakedly desperate government, bankrupt of ideas and hoping for some fleeting political advantage, having consciously decided to weaponise motorists’ selfish indignation at laws it had itself introduced, for the most part – but its selected target. Across the county of Cornwall half a dozen average speed cameras, installed and replaced at great public expense, were felled, probably with a battery-powered disc cutter, but I have yet to hear of the same fate befalling a ticket machine or automatic number plate recognition camera in a privately-owned car park, anywhere, ever.

Local papers are rarely without a story about some hapless, wellintentioned motorist falling foul of the often impenetrable and unreasonable rules in a private car park; of ticket machines which are supposed to take cards but are only accepting cash, which no one carries any more; of car parks where you can only pay on an app, even though there’s no mobile phone signal there; of ANPR systems which, without human intervention, will match your registration number to your address and post you a demand for £100 for the 20 minutes you wasted trying and failing to find a vacant space.

Here, a special shout-out goes to the taxpayer-funded Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, which sells motorists’ data to parking enforcement companies on the spurious grounds that “properly managed data release and our support for law enforcement helps control the costs of motoring, reduces vehicle crime and benefits motorists and the environment”: nothing in there, you’ll notice, about further engorging the already bloated profits of private parking firms.

Appeals are routinely snubbed, often in a high-handed, even gloating, fashion and yet despite these enormities, no power tool-wielding vigilante has emerged to mete out merciless electric justice to the instruments of drivers’ torture. I’m not advocating it, since that would be deeply irresponsible and possibly even illegal; it’s just surprising that measures which demonstrably save lives, reduce fuel consumption and improve the amenity of residents are seemingly more unpopular than those which merely enrich grasping landlords and their hirelings. I suspect it’s because publicly-funded surveillance devices are marginally easier than privately-funded ones to weave into a paranoid narrative about the Deep State conspiring with Bill Gates, George Soros, the World Economic Forum, Nazi paedophile space lizards and so on to deprive us of our cars and, by extension, Our Precious Freedom, but that’s only a guess. I don’t pretend to understand how these people’s minds work, insofar as they can be said to work at all.