These days you hear a lot of people saying: Politicians? Bunch of amateurs. Don’t know arses from elbows. Never done honest day’s work in lives. Run the country? Most of them could barely run a bath. Time to get army in. Dose of martial law’d sort all those misfits and malingerers out. That kind of thing.
But anyone who thinks those at the helm of the UK’s ship of state are clueless preening imbeciles may like the ponder this. According to a report in this week’s Fleet News, this has happened: “Government finds direct link between bad weather and serious motor injuries.”
With insights like that at their fingertips, there’s no doubting that those Government blokes have the aforementioned digits firmly on the very pulse of truth, true fact, and truthful revelation.
New figures from the Department for Trans Sport (DfT) and the Office for Notional Statistics (ONS) reveal that more people get killed or injured on our roads when it’s a bit wet than when it isn’t.
These extraordinary findings are the product of a protracted period of exhaustive and painstaking modelling and analysis of the impact of weather conditions on UK road casualties between 1979 and 2012.
Dickie Owen of HMG’s Road Safety Analysis unit told Sleet News that the Government had been obliged to rely on an advanced technique known as “jiggery-pokery” to come up with its findings. “Weather is complicated,” Owen revealed, but basically “above average levels of precipitation can expose those travelling to greater levels of risk.”
He suspects the reason no-one has ever noticed the sinister correlation between rainfall and road death before is that “British drivers are used to rain, so it’s become very normalised.” People don’t really think about it, unless it’s snowing or doing something really dramatic, he opined.
Based on the newly discovered link between unusual weather and road casualties, Government scientists went back over all their RTA data and projected how casualties would have looked if the weather had been normal all that time -instead of ‘unusual’. Shockingly, they discovered that many people now dead or seriously injured could still be alive or not seriously injured if we had only had consistently normal weather since 1979.
It may be some time before the Government works out how to control the weather so as to make sure it is normal all the time. But in the meantime, Owen suggests, that we could have laws that say you have to drive slower if its raining. As a way of sugaring that pill, he proposes, you could allow everyone to drive at 80mph when the weather is normal.
So there you have it: conclusive proof that politicians are not just smarmy and annoying people who wear suits, hang around in big old buildings, and say stupid or obvious things on telly.
Unless, that is, you want to quibble about it and insist that the people really responsible for these astonishing insights are civil servants not politicians.
Come to think of it, you might have a point there. So, (as you were on those politicians), hats off to those hard-working under-appreciated boffins in the Department for Trampsport (DfT), the Office for National Statistos (ONS) and another bunch believed to have had a hand in the work behind these findings: the DBO (Department for the Blindingly Obvious).
Government Warning: un-normal weather
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