by Matt Waterman
Amongst my classmates and football teammates at primary school was a kid named Andy Cluett. According to the Guernsey Press of 4th February 2025 (p10) AC was found guilty in court (he admitted it) of a drink drive offence. Two point two times the legal limit. No previous convictions. His punishment: a £900 fine and three years off the road.
I don’t want anyone to get too carried away with what I’m about to write next because there is a bigger point coming in the second part of the article, but to me the extent of those punitive measures, if mandatory or close to, is a bit worrying. I’m not going to call it a sledgehammer to crack a nut because that would be construed as belittling the seriousness of the offence. It’s more like using a nuclear rocket to crack a sledgehammer.
For me and most of us I think, you could double that find or halve it, the “deterrent factor” would not change one iota. For the super rich though, even an £1800 fine would be a mere slap on the wrist.
So it is to be hoped that these measures are not mandatory although looking at some of the judge’s comments I get the sense that there doesn’t seem to be much leeway. And if it is mandatory and the lawmakers have decided that £900 is about right for the average wealth of a citizen (which is of course wildly skewed by the super wealthy here) then that’s another example of the trickle down effect, where having wealthy people here helps out the poorer ones we’re told, being exposed as a con.
As for the length of time off the roads, three years for a 62 year old is a large chunk of what in normal circumstances would be the rest of his “driving career”, so in that sense it’s like taking an eighteen year old off the roads for ten years. I’m not sure exactly how much of a factor the amount by which a driver is over the limit affects the severity of the punishment.
I imagine if you’re so blind drunk you can’t stand up for more than ten seconds when you’re walking to get into your car, you’d probably crash it in the first few yards whilst still in first gear and going hardly any speed at all. Whereas if you’re only just over the limit, you could probably control the vehicle at high speed for 99% of your journey. But you’d likely do a whole heap of damage in the remaining 1%.
There are so many roads closed and traffic jams these days that it’s hard to go fast enough to drive dangerously, drunk or sober. Anyway whilst I question what appears to be another “fine” example of “Boss Hoggery” by the States in terms of fund raising via fines, that’s not my main concern.
This is: According to the article, witnesses, who suspected he was drunk saw Andy Cluett get into his vehicle at Admiral Park and decided to follow him. When he stopped outside Candie Cache Stores, which, without knowing how many roadworks were in place its hard to say how long the journey was, but given the time of day (late afternoon) I’d probably guess anything from 5-15 minutes, “one of the witnesses approached the car and removed his keys from the ignition”.
That’s theft.
If people are going to break laws in order to take the law into their own hands, and adopt “the ends justify the means” that’s a vigilante society. If that’s going to happen we don’t need laws. In this particular instance it’s not clear to me why the witnesses didn’t call the police as soon as they saw Cluett get into his vehicle at Admiral Park, or if they did, why the Police weren’t on the case more quickly or assure the witnesses that they would deal with it.
It should have been the police to remove Cluett’s keys surely. If we are to avoid a vigilante society (its bad enough being spied on by Government and the cloud without other members of the general public doing it too) and lynch mob culture a couple of things have to happen.
The media, Government and vociferous minority groups have to stop bombarding everyone with messages that any sort of wrong doing or any behaviour they don’t like is “extremely serious” (“and/or dangerous”).
Earlier I implied that drink drive was/is a serious offence, but if that lot are to be believed, so is virtually everything else. Society is getting like football where almost any sort of foul tackle – and sometimes not even that – is deemed worthy of a red or yellow card. If the public is conditioned into thinking that any wrong doing they perceive is, or even could be, “a serious offence” they are surely more likely to take the matter into their own hands than would be the case if they were not so conditioned. Or at best report to the authorities. Straight out of Big brother / Brave New World.
Not to mention placing extra demands on police time. Private / foreign owned security firms policing our streets anyone? Related to that last point, the public, if they are to be deterred from taking the law into their own hands, has to trust the police, those who oversee them, the lawmakers, the judiciary and the whole legal system. So those groups have to be seen to be behaving within their democratically directed remits and with fairness, responsibility, transparency and accountability when it goes wrong.
Having sufficient numbers of bobbies on the beat, preferably in white shirts not black and with considerably less armoury would go a long way to reassuring the public. And with more bobbies on the beat they’d also be more likely to spot any miscreants before they got from Admiral Park to Candie Cache. Here by the way is one reason why a Police Officer in the UK thinks public trust in the police is on the decline:
From: The police are not the public and the public are not the police | UKColumn
“So, if the numbers of police are not actually too bad, why are they currently deemed so ineffectual and so little respected? Technology The answer, in large part, is technology. Just as wheat had the power to domesticate man and confine him to one place, so the technological revolution has created slaves in the name of progress…”
One final point and related to just that last line above – technology creating slaves in the name of progress. A recent circular I sent was met with strong disagreement with one (and only one) recipient, who by the way, has been signed off work with stress for the last few months.
One of her main objections was that instead of being able to enjoy her romantic breakaway with her beloved she found herself having to respond to my emails. Where I come from the idea of a romantic break was you tore yourself away from civilisation. But if the generation below me is in the habit of checking tweets, texts, emails and news bulletins even during their romantic breaks, it’s no wonder they are stressed out and suffer from so much so-called “mental illness.”
Next, they’ll be setting their alarms every ten minutes when they go to bed in order to check for incoming messages.