An inconvenient development
Some regular Rusters will be aware of my occasional brushes with “the long arm of the law” over my tendency as a driver of motor vehicles to pay slightly more attention to the condition of Britain’s roads – and the activities of those using them – than I do to whatever “speed limit” signs the authorities may have randomly chosen to set up as a means of generating revenue.
Over the course of my driving career of some fifty-two years (I add here “touch wood” in order to ward off any future intervention by Fate to increase this number as an act of irony) I have had but one collision/accident – and this was emphatically not my fault: another motorist came out of a side road without warning and hit my Mini amidships on the passenger seat side as I was going by, minding my own business, well within the speed limit at the time.
Nevertheless, I admit that I do have a habitual problem with “staying within any given speed limit”.
The way I see it, I am an average to good driver – I am not a “boy racer” (it would be difficult to be one when I shall be 70 later this year).
When I am driving I major exclusively on dealing with the road conditions (and what is happening around me) at the time – and, if I am driving at a safe distance behind the car in front and it happens to be travelling at 34 mph in a 30 mph maximum limit zone, then so will I be. This seems perfectly natural and reasonable to me.
However, my attitude has caused me to pick up the proverbial “three points and a fine” penalty on numerous occasions over the years and/or – separately, as an alternative option when made available to me – paying £95 or thereabouts to reserve myself a place on a government agency “speed awareness courses” which, if attended, would avoid me receiving the aforementioned standard “three points” penalty and a fine.
The significance of the “three point” penalty is, of course, that it is structured to be cumulative.
If any given motorist amasses a total of 12 penalty points [i.e. is “caught speeding” four times within any three-year period], he or she is liable for an automatic driving ban of three months-plus, save in circumstances where he or she is able to mount a sufficiently compelling mitigation plea to convince a magistrates court that the hardship that a driving ban would inflict would be so far-reaching that in all reasonableness it would be onerous and/or unfair.
It may not surprise Rust readers to learn that mounting a successful plea of mitigation to a potential driving ban for a cumulative total of 12 points in “speeding” offences committed on the roads of Britain is as near impossible as makes no difference and – in many respects – is not even worth the effort for at least three reasons.
In the first place, anyone who has pleaded to being (or been found) guilty of four “speeding offences” within any given period of three years cannot argue that they did not commit the offences listed and (when you think about it) will be hard pressed to come up with a logical argument that in any way minimises the offence. You were either driving at a speed higher than the maximum permitted on a stretch of road – or you were not.
To be specific – to take the example of a 30 mph speed limit – it doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether you were going 33 mph, or 43 mph. You were over the limit – game, set and match.
And why were you driving at a speed beyond the permitted limit? There is no possible “viable” answer.
In the second place, even magistrates are not fools.
If even a relatively novice magistrate has sat in only a dozen prospective “driving ban” cases, he or she has probably already heard every bullshit reason imaginable as to why a ban would cause untold hardship to the offender’s life and career, the health of their aged parents and the education of their eight children – or even the “make or break” success of a lifetime’s research that has gone into a book one had just published and was planning to market round the country by attending innumerable lunches/dinners and giving talks about it.
I know about the last of the above because it was the excuse I tried to peddle on the previous occasion I personally was “up before the beak” for reaching “12 speeding points”.
In court I was advised the form would be that – once I had said anything I wished by way of mitigation – the magistrates would then retire for a quarter of an hour in order to consider whether to ban me or not before giving their verdict.
Twenty-five minutes later, having in the meantime (I felt) made a stirring case that the future of sport, literature and indeed history would be irreparably damaged beyond repair if I was banned – and here I kid you not(!) – “my” magistrates hardly retired at all. They had barely gone out through the door before they executed a collective U-turn upon their heels, re-took their seats and gave me a brutal 6 months ban.
And finally, in the third place – and I know this for a fact because I recently discussed the subject with an experienced magistrate at a social gathering – the entire mitigation aspect of the “driving ban” protocols and procedure in this country effectively amounts to no more than a worthless gimmick: via the sentencing guidelines handed out to all magistrates which they must then follow, to all intents and purposes there are no circumstances in which any amount of mitigation will sway a magistrates court from dishing out a ban.
Which is a somewhat convoluted way of me registering that at some point today – having already been informed by correspondence with the presiding magistrates court that this will be the outcome – I will be given a driving ban for the second time in my life for having reached 12 “speeding points” within a three year period. Given my first such ban (a decade ago) was for six months I should think that this one will be significantly longer.
From this point onwards from time to time I shall be reporting further on this pages of this organ as to how this imposition has been affecting my life (if it does).
