Lane discipline and justice

Sir,
Your excellent “Matters of Moment” did right in bringing to light the unwholesome aspect of “that other kind of motoring madness”. But as neither the RAC nor the AA will initiate any action whatsoever on either the disgraceful case of Mr. Rogers or the similar one involving His Grace the Duke of Bedford, surely it is up to the motoring journals in general and Motor Sport in particular to raise merry hell over this type of thing.

You have been kind enough in the past to print two letters from me on just this subject. There has never been any voice of or from any authority to emphasise that, notwithstanding motorways or dual carriageways, we, in this country, still drive on the LEFT unless overtaking. On any dual carriageway at almost any time, one can see the outside lane carrying traffic nose-to-tail and often the two inner lanes completely empty for as far as the eye can see. What stupidity is this?

And what is the position of the driver in, say, the middle lane passing a lorry and being passed by a car on the outside and then the latter, for reasons best known to himself, suddenly decides to slow down? Does the lorry driver and the man in the middle slow down as well? And travel three abreast? How cosy! And what sheer nonsense. We might as well do away with our new roads and go back to country lanes.

But the really terrifying aspect of the two cases mentioned in my first paragraph is that the word of a bad driver is not only accepted by the police but also by the Magistrates who are supposed to dispense justice. Is this the Britain of the 1970s?

R. O. Wilson-Kitchen.
Beckenham.