HRH Prince Michael of Kent can be forgiven for believing that the pious Road Safety Industry is just a nice, caring, benign, charitable and costless necessity when in fact the reverse is the truth.Its very sound-bite and mantra, 'Speed kills!', fails scrutiny. Fact is speed being motion, quite simply, without it the heart stops and we die; so actually the slogan 'No speed kills' is more the truth. It is also a fact that since man took to the horse, the train,plane, faster shipping and production, the faster it went so life expectancy has gone up not down in the faster economies.
So their very untrue sound-bite is a metaphor of the Industry itself. Why would anything honest need an untrue sound-bite anyway?
The Road Safety Industry is a very aggressive and highly costly industry which actually promotes anti driver and dangerous inexpert comment from charities like BRAKE for example. They are supposed to confine themselves to victim support but are increasingly commenting on the highly intricate matters of driving and road safety; aspects for which they are not qualified.
Why is it that in any other life and death issue we would rely very heavily on experts and yet in driving and road safety, virtually everyone from civil servants, councillors, MPs, most police officers who are not specialist, every Tom Dick & Harry and I suspect Princes too, are experts? A recipe for exploitation if ever there were one. But not only is this a life and death issue, people are prosecuted and even imprisoned too.
Surely before awarding people and groups with medals, His Royal Highness should ask a few questions of truly independent experts on this life and death matter and certainly ensure that there is no vested interest involved.
He could do no better than ask himself why so much focus and interest in it when there is more death from accidents in the home?
I can tell him that there certainly are vested interests behind both the medals I am aware of this year. In fact it looks to me very much like the Industry awarding itself. I doubt if any truly independent and voluntary experts will be invited to the presentation ceremonies or even be considered for a medal either.
I have written to Prince Michael to offer my time for him voluntarily and at my own expense.
Watch this space!!
Oh yes. I got a letter of waffle from his personal private secretary, where I enlarged in detail about some of the dangerous and profitable activities of the Industry and now to no further response so far. Ok having acknowledged then and yet still patronising this dangerous and oppressive profiteering, are we to conclude that HRH is no longer innocent?
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ReplyDeleteWe did get a letter from the Prince's office handing us over to the RACFoundation and a direct link with its Chief Executive. Despite our offer of help, they still publish nonsense about road safety but we asked the Prince's office what the connection is with RACF as it is his groups who are rewarding and awarding the Industry profiteers. So far no reply. Interestingly when we use the Prince's email address from his site, after a couple of days our message is rejected. We hope the Prince isn't being protected from hearing about true altruistic road safety so he can carry on his activities in this very serious issue, where people die and others lose their welfare, often their freedom, blindly
ReplyDeleteThe Letter from the RACF was from no less than the Chairman David Quarmby CBE. I hope his CBE was nothing to do with RACF's questionable road safety policies.
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