Letter from Allan Ramsay (From Swindon Advertiser)

Letter from Allan Ramsay

3:03pm Wednesday 8th July 2009 in

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GIVEN that we now have 52 pillars and a memorial plaque naming each of the victims of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London’s transport system, doesn’t this spell time for a national memorial for all the victims who are killed on our roads?

Each and every year since records began in 1926, more innocent lives have been claimed on our roads (the first being Bridget Driscoll in 1896) than were claimed by terrorists in America’s 9/11. In our worst year, more than 9,000 lives were claimed. Figures may well be a third of that today, however we are still nowhere nearer to finding a ‘cure’ than we are to finding one for cancer. Why?

It is said lives claimed on our roads, (in some areas still being referred to as accidents), are not taken with intent, therefore those responsible - some not unlike suicide bombers, only their ‘sacrifice’ is for speed - cannot be called terrorists. But if a person blatantly disregards a law that is designed to protect innocent and vulnerable people, then what should they be called? Haven’t the ‘speed merchants’ and the ‘speed freaks’, protected by their ‘monarch’ - ‘The Car Is King’ - reigned terror on Britain’s roads for the best part of a century?

The victims of 7/7 will be remembered for all time by 52 unique pillars, and although the nation doesn’t yet recognize them as such, the blatantly obvious speed cameras (‘revenue raisers’) are in fact pillars of remembrance to all lives lost on our roads - the innocents and the ‘terrorists’ both.

Accidents will always happen, but if we are nowhere nearer winning the battle against the speed-camera-hating ‘terrorist’, then we surely won’t ever win the battle against the terrorist who hates the West.

ALLAN RAMSAY

Radcliffe Moor Road

Radcliffe