This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Speed bumps are solidified selfishness. They are there because far too many drivers refuse to be careful or considerate. I don’t like them, but if they go, we’ll have to have something else.I’d recommend taking those largely useless speed cameras away from main roads, and putting them on every suburban street instead, set at 20mph.

For a few months they’d make millions in fines. Then people might just change their behaviour. I seethe with rage when I see the way normal, kindly, considerate people hurtle heedlessly down such roads at 30 or 40 miles an hour at the wheel of a ton of steel, rubber and glass. What if a small child runs out into the road, which is almost always cluttered by parked cars these days?

Do they have any idea what might then happen?

Of how, without warning, they could be standing grey-faced at the roadside pleading with the paramedics for reassurance that their victim is going to be all right, and getting silence in return?

They act as if they don’t have any such idea. And yet, as I say, these are otherwise good people. Why is this?I suspect it is because it is absolutely true that power tends to corrupt – and for most of us, the biggest taste of power we get is when we slide behind the wheel of a car. The car advertisements sell us the idea that, cradled in our shiny toy, we need only to touch the gas pedal to be roaring along deserted roads.

The dreary truth, that most car journeys are slower than going by bicycle, waiting for lights, waiting at junctions, waiting for pedestrians to cross the road, crawling past roadworks, is hard to bear. Even if you’re in a Lamborghini, and most of us are not, you can rarely use the power you have.

So at the first hint of an even slightly open road, even if it’s a suburban street, down goes the foot. This is fairly new. Until quite recently, the average family car accelerated like a pensioner. Its brakes were feeble. The absence of seatbelts and airbags meant a likely journey to hospital via the windscreen if anything went wrong. But modern cars make selfishness safer, and offer temptations those sluggish old Hillmans and Austins never had.

And that is why we ended up with speed bumps. Because too many people drove angrily and selfishly, and the large part of the population who don’t drive quite reasonably didn’t like it.

The trouble was, the speed bumps just made them angrier, so they drove even more foolishly when there were no bumps.

If you don’t want speed bumps or speed cameras, just imagine what it would be like to hit a child at the speed you’re doing.

And slow down.

A Razor-sharp expose of our broken society

One of the greatest men of our age is a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple. For decades he worked in a major British jail, listening to the excuses and self-justifications of people who had done terrible things to others, and to themselves.

Refusing to follow fashion, and genuinely concerned for these often very sad characters, he treated them as adults, urging them to take responsibility for their actions instead of offering excuses for them.

Many, who had come to despise authority, were glad to be up against someone they could not easily fool.

My guess is that many of those he treated benefited greatly from his tough-minded approach. He didn’t fill them with pills or substitute one drug for another.

His observations of the way heroin abusers feign terrible discomfort, after arriving in prison and being deprived of their drug, is both funny and a badly needed corrective to conventional wisdom.

All this is to be found in a short, hugely readable new book called The Knife Went In.

The title, a quotation from an actual murderer, is an example of the way such people refuse to admit they had any part in the crimes they commit. The knife somehow got there and went into the victim, by itself.

It is a series of short, gripping real-life stories in which he recounts his experiences with our broken, lying penal system with its fake prison sentences, its ridiculous form-filling as a substitute for action.

It is mainly about prisons and crime, but it tells a deep truth about the sort of society we have become. It is one in which almost nobody is, or wants to be, responsible for anything.

A future historian, a century hence, will learn more about 21st Century Britain from this book than from any official document. So will you. Please read it.

Is this serious?

Isn’t ‘security’ a joke? If we really faced imminent doom from Islamic State, would this armedto- the-teeth robocop have time to enjoy a laugh with the ladies of Goodwood?

Of course not. He’d be scanning the crowd incessantly for danger. As it is, what are he and his colleagues even doing there? Security excuses stupidity.

As far as I know, British holidaymakers played no part in recent terror attacks in Paris and Brussels.

Indeed, you can travel between these two cities without a passport. I’ve done it, as have many drug-addled Islamist fanatics.

So why are these outrages the excuse for forcing thousands of British holidaymakers to stand in airport passport queues for long, miserable hours?

Why do we accept this drivel so meekly?

The REAL villain behind your surging electricity bill

I feel sorry for British Gas, attacked for raising the price of electricity. I still find it confusing a gas company sells electricity, but the facts are quite simple.

British Gas and the other power companies are raising charges because we have a mad Government. Under New Labour’s unhinged Climate Change Act, backed by the Tories and virtually unopposed in Parliament, we are steering straight into an iceberg.

Perfectly good coal-fired power stations all over the country are being shut down and blown up so they can’t be reopened, because of crazed Green regulations.

In some cases, they are being converted to burning wood chips imported from the USA. If this did any good (which is, er, unproven) it would be immediately cancelled out by the huge number of new coal-fired power stations recently built in India and China.

Our nuclear generators are slowly dying. Plans to replace them are hopelessly behind. The Government assumed that the growing gap between what we use and what we generate would be met by new gas-fired stations, but nobody has built them.

So instead, it hopes to meet the need with French nuclear electricity brought under the Channel, which we can’t rely on if the French need it more; and on power generated by wind, which doesn’t blow all the time, and sun which doesn’t shine all the time.

And it is the cost of subsidising the sun and wind power which is forcing up electricity prices. So is the need to link remote windmills expensively to the grid. There’s also the cost of setting up special parks of diesel generators to prevent power cuts if all else fails.

Diesel? Yes, the devilish fuel we’re trying to drive off the roads could be what saves you from a Christmas blackout.

Currently, the Green levy, the main reason for the latest price rise, makes up at least £73 of an average £562 annual electricity bill. It’s going to go up a lot more. I think the power companies should put this on their bills in big letters. Then Parliament might be forced to rethink its mad warmist dogma, and follow a sane power policy.

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