Since late 2024, my wife Joanna and I have received a combined total of six speeding tickets from the Metropolitan Police. And, in each case, the strategically-placed automatic camera had caught us driving at … 24 mph. Most recently, the strategically-placed automatic camera caught me driving at 24 mph in the dystopian Wandsworth one-way system, where – as well as there being no oncoming traffic and no houses, shops or pedestrians – the road is four lanes wide. I am pretty certain there wasn’t another human being within 50 metres of me at the time.

Yet, previously, over a combined total of some 70 years of driving, Joanna and I had only ever received one speeding ticket each (both issued in Wales, as it happens). And, as the £100 fines and penalty points have mounted, I have- for reasons I will come to – repeatedly ranted to my friends and anyone else who might listen about how, to my mind, the roll-out and fascistically rigid enforcement of a default 20 mph speed limit in London (and elsewhere) is one significant cause of ordinary people’s increasingly evident loss of faith in our supposedly progressive political class.

So, today, my eye was drawn to the Guardian‘s brief report of a comment made by Jo Stevens, the Cardiff East MP and Secretary of State for Wales in Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer KC’s cabinet of the walking dead, in an article for WalesOnline about the outcome of last week’s Senedd election:

People are rightly cross about the rollout of 20 mph speed restrictions and public money being spent on tree planting in Uganda when we weren’t getting the basics right. The NHS. Education. Cost of living. Any time spent away from those key priorities was time wasted.

Yes, it was news to me that, since 2009, the Welsh Government has spent £4 million (including £500,000 in 2024/25) on a programme to plant trees in Uganda, but unsurprisingly it’s been an absolute gift to Reform UK in Wales. And you really don’t have to be a highly-qualified psychologist to realise that almost nobody in Wales (or anywhere else) enjoys receiving a letter informing them that they have to pay a £100 fine for driving at 24 mph. So Jo Stevens is absolutely right to suggest that the woke policy agenda of the Welsh Government was a factor in Labour’s crushing defeat in Wales last week.

Because it was not the ordinary people of Wales who clamoured for the 20 mph default speed limit in residential/built-up areas introduced by the Mark Drakeford-led Welsh Government in September 2023, at a direct cost of some £33 million, just as it was not the ordinary people of Wales who clamoured for the Welsh Government to splash out on planting trees in Uganda. Similarly, it was not the ordinary people of London who clamoured for Sir Sadiq Khan’s July 2018 Vision Zero action plan to make 20 mph the default speed limit “in central London and all inner London”, just as it was not the ordinary people of London who clamoured for Sir Sadiq to make London a ‘safe space’ and ‘beacon’ for LGBTQIA+ people.

Yet that is not because the ordinary people of Wales and London are racist, transphobic bastards who do not care about the number of black trans-identifying children killed on Britain’s roads. It’s simply because Britain’s roads have consistently been among the very safest in the world for decades now.

In short, thanks to the economic impact of globalisation and the rise of China, the financial crisis of 2008 and the implosion of neoliberalism, the insane self-harm of Brexit, the nightmare of Covid19, and the drunken orgy of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, the ordinary people of Wales and London have many greater priorities than spending millions of pounds on the impossible goals of reducing the number of deaths on their local roads to zero and making trans-identifying students feel happy.

Yet the lefty political class of Mark Drakeford (so ‘clever’ that he studied Latin at two universities), Sir Sadiq Khan, Sir Ed Davey and Sir Keir ‘you’re fired!’ Starmer KC have arrogantly and complacently assumed that what the ordinary people of Britain really, really want is to be told that they must not drive their car faster than 20 mph, and that it is only the majority of women who don’t have a penis. And, in acting on those ludicrously woke assumptions, they have recklessly opened the political door to pernicious populists such as Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski, neither of whom have a ****ing clue how to solve the challenges faced by ordinary people in 2026.

Whatever, if you’d like a job walking in front of my car carrying a red flag, I’m offering a zero-hours contract on the minimum wage. Because I really, really don’t want another three points.