Strange news. The government has thrown its considerable weight behind a new
type of numberplate that can’t be stolen.
Well, it can be
stolen, but it takes three minutes to remove from your car and it will be
broken in the process. As a result the thief can’t attach it to his own
vehicle and hurtle around the countryside clocking up points on your
licence.
Nor can he fill up his car with fuel and then drive away
without paying, knowing that the CCTV footage will direct the constabulary
to your house rather than his.
All well and good, you might think
from the comfort of your agreeable wing-back chair. But hang on a minute.
Why is the government getting involved? They don’t care two hoots if you
have your car clamped by a psychopathic cowboy.
Truth be told,
they don’t care, really, if it’s stolen. And actually, despite their
sensible expressions and concerned noises, they don’t even care that half of
Bristol seems to have been stabbed recently. So why, all of a sudden, are
they getting so excited by a numberplate that’s hard to nick? You may be
with them, of course. You may be one of the 33,000 motorists who had their
cars “cloned” last year and you may welcome any initiative that makes life
harder for the thief and the vagabond. Well I’m sorry, but you’re looking at
this the wrong way round.
At the moment you drive about with the
correct plates on your car, cursing every time you inadvertently trigger a
speed camera or collect a parking ticket. You think it’s not fair. You think
you’re being persecuted by an anti-motorist, pro-tax, 1984-style government
that’s obsessed with infringing your personal liberty and emptying your
wallet at every possible opportunity. You think all this because it’s true.
So
why not simply fit your car with the plates from another car? That way
you’ll never hear from the authorities again. Unless some other motorist who
“adopts” your plates triggers a speed camera in Bradford . . . which again
is no problem, because you can prove you and your car were in Dunstable at
the time.
Only recently someone stole Terry Wogan’s plates and
then committed some awful atrocity while in Camden. It was a ram raid
possibly.
Well of course it took Plod only four minutes to realise
that Wogan does not sign off at 9.30 every morning and spend the rest of the
day driving his Bentley around Dixons. So they let him off.
And by
using his plates the thieves got away with it, too.
Are you seeing
the problem yet? It’s simple. If we all swapped plates the system would
collapse, and it’s genuinely hard to see how the state could put it back
together again.
They’d need to get off the croquet lawn for five
minutes and pull over every single motorist, and that presupposes they have
a police force that isn’t currently occupied filling in health and safety
forms and refusing to climb ladders. And they haven’t.
And
that’s why I have no points on my licence, and to his eternal mystification,
James May aka Captain Slow has 14.
Let me give you an example. I
was followed this morning by a swarthy-looking chap in an elderly
Mercedes-Benz and I bet you any money he’s never paid income tax in Britain,
he’s never paid car insurance and that the plates on his car are registered
to an elderly doctor in Fife.
Plainly he arrived in Britain,
looked at the way everything works and decided that by dispensing with the
moral code he will never appear on the radar. So why should we? The rules of
formal identity are only in place to persecute members of the law-abiding
middle classes and, honestly, all you need to do to escape is change the six
on your numberplate to a nine. And say, should by some miracle you ever be
pulled over, that you’ve just been on a stag night, and that your mates
mucked about with your car as a joke.
I’m not suggesting you go
out and stab someone in the heart, or that you drive to London and throw
petrol bombs at important public buildings. Changing your numberplate hurts
nobody; it just means you’ll never have to pay the London congestion charge
again, or a speeding fine, or a parking ticket. And every single plan the
government has for road pricing would be thrown into disarray.
That’s
why the government is so damned worried. You are not a free man because you
are a number. But if you change that number you have anarchy in the UK.
If
this does not appeal, but you still want to avoid parking and speeding
tickets, simply pop down to your local Peugeot dealership and buy a 207.
It’s
not an ugly car by any means and nor is it especially pretty. It’s just
“some” car that you buy like you buy curtain material: by the yard . . . You
could drive this through the nave at Westminster Abbey and nobody would even
look up. I bet you could drive past a speed camera at 100mph and it wouldn’t
even go off. And yet behind the anonymous exterior this is an extraordinary
car. You might imagine it’s a replacement for the old 206 but actually it
isn’t. The 206 will soldier on, although as we know it’ll no longer be made
at Peugeot’s Ryton plant near Coventry.
This is because the
workers there paid taxes to Mr Blair who gave that money to the European
Union who handed it over to the Slovakians who spent it enticing Peugeot to
close down Ryton and build a new plant at Trnava. This means the Peugeot
workers in Britain can now use their redundancy money to buy a 206 that’s
made in Slovakia thanks to the taxes they paid while they were working.
Or
they can buy a new 207, which is much more expensive, built in France and
looks, so far as I can see, like the 206 did. Only a bit bigger. Small
wonder the French never got their empire off the ground.
Of
course, you may not care about the politics. You may have £10,000 burning a
hole in your pocket that you wish to spend on a shiny new car. In which case
you may want me to stop with the conspiracy theories and the nonsense of the
EU and actually provide a road test in the rest of the space available.
Here
goes. The 207 model I drove was the S version which had five doors and a 1.4
litre engine that produces some horsepower. It comes as standard with power
steering, remote central locking, antilock brakes, air-conditioning, many
airbags and — get this — body-coloured door handles. You know a car firm is
struggling when they mention stuff like this.
To be honest, for
this money I would have expected a wee bit more. Something to make me go
“wow”. Sat nav perhaps, or a trip computer I could find the button for. Or a
ski jump in the boot. I also would have expected a better driving position.
It
may be all right if you’re a bit small and you wear flexible shoes, but in
my sturdy brogues I went everywhere on the verge of cramp at 100mph, or on
my way to zero mph with my nose mashed onto the windscreen.
Apart
from this (Mrs Lincoln), the rest of the car was all right. I liked the
dashboard very much, though not the way it was reflected in the windscreen,
and I liked the ride too. What’s more, for a 1.4, it didn’t half zoom away
from the lights. Low gearing helped here. And yet on a motorway, at 85mph,
it was surprisingly serene as well.
Overall, I sort of liked it. I
liked it nearly as much as the Renault Clio and the Ford Fiesta and all the
other small European cars that this sort of money will buy. Then there’s the
206 to consider. When that starts to pour out of Slovakia, it’ll be much,
much cheaper.
Here, then, is the ace up the 207’s sleeve. If you
buy one and are caught doing something naughty with it, simply tell the
magistrate that you are a loony. He’ll look at your car and be forced to
agree.
