18 June

Orwell often said politics is mostly about language. One of my favourites is one the boy racers of the world use, to argue against speed limits, ‘drive to the conditions’. What it really means is ‘we should be allowed to drive as fast as we like, because we’re wonderfully skilled drivers and won’t crash.’ Basically it’s a recipe to turn roads into race tracks. Speed limits aren’t just about safety, having cars travelling at roughly the same speed also spaces out traffic, whereas ‘driving to the conditions’ bunches it up into repeated traffic jams.