Driven round the bend

British MEP Jacqueline Foster gets road rage over an article in a Sunday newspaper.

The road to the European Parliament elections in May is very long and fraught with danger.

An early sign of the hazards ahead comes in the shape of a declaration from Jacqueline Foster, a British MEP who speaks for the Conservatives on transport matters. Foster revved herself up into a road rage over a tendentious Sunday newspaper suggestion that the European Commission was about to require that cars be fitted with speed-limiting devices that could be operated by satellite technology.

Foster fulminated against “asking car owners to pay the bill for letting bureaucrats mess with their motors”, describing it as an insult to personal freedom that “bureaucrats in Brussels are effectively going to have their foot on your brake pedal”. (An unfortunate image of a one-footed group of bureaucrats comes to mind.)

Tellingly, Foster conceded that “I don’t know whether this is an imminent threat or a gleam in some Commission official’s eyes”, but added “if or when it appears before the [Parliament’s] transport committee I can assure you Conservatives will be down on it like a ton of bricks” (note the use of the non-metric tonne).

Surely no point in slowing down to see those Commission officials desperately waving from the kerbside to protest that it is all a horrible distortion of road-safety research.