Shock, horror! Controversy rages in Bridport about 20 mph speed limit!
This, at any rate, is how it would have been traditional to represent the debate about Bridport town speed limits.
The reality, of course, is somewhat different. The people of Bridport are actually having a perfectly sensible and grown-up discussion about a perfectly sensible and quite difficult issue.
There are serious things to be said on both sides, and I am quite sure that – as the debate progresses – more points will come out that enlarge the discussion.
Time was when all of this would have been regarded as unthinkable. Not so long ago, speed limits were like model T Fords: you can have any colour you like as long as it was black, or – to be more precise, any colour as long as it was black or white. You either had a 30 mph limit in town or nothing at all.
And there are still plenty of people around who think that, for the sake of good order, all these things ought to be neatly registered on some centralised bureaucratic map. So you get questions like: ‘should there be a universal 20 mph limit in towns?’
When I hear questions like that I recall a wise teacher at my university who reminded me that you have absolutely no obligation to accept the premise of the question when you are answering an examination. The same principle applies in public administration. When someone asks whether there should be a universal 30 mph limit in towns, the last thing we should do is to start answering the question. Instead, we should throw the question out on its heels.
There is no universal truth about things like speed limits in towns. Towns vary; circumstances within towns vary; and it is only the locals who can really ever understand these variations – so it is the locals who should decide, rather than some edict from above.
We are only just at the beginning of all of this. At last, as a nation, we are starting to realise how incredibly centralised everything is, and how unnecessary and counter-productive that centralisation can be. In one field of endeavour after another, we are slowly rediscovering the virtues of letting local communities decide things in ways that suit them.
So I say, hats off to all the participants in the great Bridport 20 mph debate – and woe betide any Whitehall warrior who tries to impose (or ban) 20 mph limits everywhere.