Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid? Today, for example, I read what a police spokeswoman said after a man on a motorbike had been shot dead on the M40 motorway. The police, she said, were not treating it as a case of road rage; they were treating it as a case of murder.
So from now on killing someone who annoys you while you are driving — a pedestrian, shall we say, or an old lady puttering along who holds you up on your way to a supremely important meeting — is not really murder, but an understandable and therefore excusable response to frustration, at least in the merciful eyes of the police, who will treat the victim, that is to say the poor sufferer from road rage, with all due consideration.
Of course, senior policemen these days are politicians rather than law-enforcers, whose job is to manipulate public opinion to the satisfaction of their political overlords, which is to say to do as little as possible about crime consistent with the public not taking the law into its own hands.
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