“Thy Welby, done”

A pun is the lowest form of humour – unless you thought of it first. In this case I didn’t, but I wish I had.

It’s someone else’s witty comment on Archbishop Welby’s brush with the law, the part of it that mandates driving at 20 mph practically everywhere in London.

His Grace was done by a camera on Albert Embankment on the way to his home, Lambeth Palace, across the river from the Houses of Parliament.

Oh well, bless you, Father, for you have sinned. Driving at 26 mph on a road that’s usually safe at twice that speed may not be a deadly sin, but it’s a jolly expensive one.

His Grace was fined £510 and got three points on his licence.  There goes his daily bread, or rather two-days’ – His Grace’s salary is about £250 per diem. Thus the fine is unpleasant but hardly ruinous. Nonetheless I’m in complete sympathy with Archbishop Welby, and I thought these words would never cross my lips.

You see, I used to work in Albert Embankment, exactly the stretch of it where the good Archbishop got done. For six years I drove to work along that same 0.8-mile stretch, blessing God my Lord for having graciously bestowed upon me a company car and parking spot.

My windows overlooked the Mother of All Parliaments, which has to be the best office view in the world. I can testify to the stark realism of Monet’s vision. He didn’t let his imagination run wild when painting the buildings those soft hues of indigo or pink. When the sun drops beyond the cloudy horizon, they do take on those colours, keeping busy copywriters from their work.

Here’s something else I can testify to: that stretch of Albert Embankment is straight, wide, relatively free of traffic, and no streets run into it apart from a side lane leading nowhere. Making people drive at 20 mph there is perverse, irrational and vindictive.

His Grace was in a VW Golf, a rather fast car even if it wasn’t a GTI or the 6-cylinder version. Driving that vehicle – or any other decent modern car – at 20 mph is well-nigh impossible for any length of time. Unless, of course, you keep your eyes riveted to the speedo rather than to the road.

My car, a 3-litre BMW, exceeds 20 mph if I just caress the accelerator pedal. I suspect even spitting on it would produce the same effect, but so far I haven’t put that hypothesis to a test.

Still, driving even at that speed in the side streets around my house would be suicidal – I’d say 10 mph is the top safe speed there. But we aren’t talking about my area. We are talking about straight, wide roads where not so long ago the speed limit was a sensible 40 mph.

There’s no rational reason for the new limit, except one: fleecing motorists and punishing them for the cardinal sin of driving when they should be risking their lives by riding push bikes. If the mayor came out and said that the new speed limit is a tax designed to replenish the city’s coffers, that would still be outrageous, but at least it would be honest.

What he does say is ridiculous. We are out to save lives, he intones, and the new limit does so in two ways. First, the slower you go, the less likely you are to run over a tax-paying pedestrian.

No, you aren’t. That’s nonsensical both in theory and in practice.

In theory, you avoid accidents by watching the road as you cruise at a sensible, natural and steady speed without sudden accelerations and braking. Having to watch the speedometer all the time will thus make accidents more rather than less likely.

This is confirmed by statistics. A recent 3-year study showed that the 20 mph limit doesn’t reduce the number of crashes and collisions. True enough, another study yielded a blindingly obvious finding: a pedestrian is more likely to survive if hit at 20 mph than at 30.

It’s that old mass times velocity squared, divided by two then. Thanks for reminding me of my school years, chaps. But I and most other people did go to school, so whatever money was spent on that study was wasted. In any case, the aim is not to hit a pedestrian at all, rather than doing so at a speed less likely to send him to his Maker.

What else? Oh yes, it’s that global warming apocalypse again. Apparently, driving at a ridiculous speed will keep ‘our planet’ in business a while longer. You see, the slower you go, the lower your exhaust emissions. Which, incidentally, also reduces lung cancer rates.

Forgetting for now the fraudulent claims about climate, the statement above is simply false. If whoever came up with it knows it’s false, then the statement is also mendacious and he is a lying lowlife.

Car engines produce the least amount of exhaust emissions when cruising at speeds in the 55-60 mph range. May I suggest that, if reducing emissions is the overarching objective, we raise the speed limit accordingly? No? Then for God’s sake, just shut up.

Cars produce more emissions at 20 mph than at 30, the old speed limit everywhere in London except on some faster roads – such as that stretch of Albert Embankment, where it used to be 40 mph when I took it every day.

Again, another recent study shows that the 20 mph limit doesn’t lower the rates of lung cancers at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if it increased them.

There are only two reasons for this ridiculous limit: one is pecuniary; the other, punitive. The first is driven by one deadly sin, avarice. The second, by two: wrath and envy.

The avarice part is self-evident: since keeping a car at 20 mph in light traffic is next to impossible, fines, such as those imposed on His Grace, must be pouring millions into the city’s treasury. This sin largely overlaps with the other two, because it too is motivated by the hatred of motorists and the urge to punish them.

The onset of that war predates the time when the UN ruled that ‘our planet’ was being fried by carbon dioxide. It goes back to the age when only wealthy people could afford cars. Envying and therefore hating such people is a prerequisite for class war, and class war is something every leftie swears to fight.

An assault on drivers is one battle in that eternal conflict, and it continued when even poor people started to drive. Iconoclasm always outlives the icons.

The war intensified no end when the global warming fraud kicked in. The assault on drivers then took on sanctimonious overtones, squeezing it into ‘new morality’ that neither has anything to do with morals nor is particularly new.

Lefties on a rampage always unfurl banners with moralising slogans, replacing Exodus and Matthew with trumped up diktats motivated by anomie and hatred. His Grace has at times been known to add his own salvos to the non-stop barrage aimed at sanity.

Now he has reaped what he has sown, but the pinprick was too slight to make him think twice before preaching all sorts of falsehoods. That’s a shame. After all “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth”.