Jumping the traffic lights... and leaving our conscience behind

The big black car swept straight through a red light and on to the pedestrian crossing, just in front of me.

It was only thanks to luck and providence that nobody was hurt or even killed. The steady green man, which is supposed to mean that it is safe to cross, was clearly showing.

I called out to the driver, who looked guilty but drove on.

Then I saw, 20 yards away, a red police van, containing three officers in uniform. I tried to get their attention. By the time one of these surly public ‘servants’ had grudgingly wound down his window, the offender was well on his way down the road.

‘We’re doing something,’ the scowling constable said, with the air of an important person diverted from his important duties. It was true. They were doing something. All three of them seemed to be sending text messages on their mobile phones.

As it happens, this was one of three instances of drivers jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings which I saw last week.

One was a toffee-nosed Kensington lady (no doubt a stalwart of the Conservative Party) who was angry with me for catching up with her and rapping on her window. ‘How daih you touch my cah!’ she shrieked. Not a hint of shame or regret. How were these people brought up?

I can’t for the life of me see any difference between her and the foul-mouthed White Van Man who (later the same day) ploughed heedlessly through a different pelican crossing and swore unoriginally at me when I simply pointed at him.

Pedetrian crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law, and that other people are just as important as we are. By not stopping at them, we scorn the law and assert that we are special.

And these days lots of people do not stop at them, and I think it matters a great deal.
 
We are slowly becoming barbarians, even in Kensington, but not just there. It was the same week in which a teenage girl was mauled to death by a pack of dogs that no civilised person could possibly have wanted to own. It was the same week when the actor Clive Mantle had half his ear bitten off in a Tyneside hotel. Why? He asked some people in the corridor outside his room to make less noise.

And it was the same week the Government came up with its solution for the problems of the NHS. Make nurses do some actual nursing (you know, washing the patients). Make it a rule that hospital staff tell the truth (!). And set up yet another Stalinist inspectorate to check up on everyone.

Of course it won’t work. Like the useless police, the inspectors will always be ‘doing something’. The rules won’t be enforced. More people will die in filth and pain.

Because there is only one thing that really keeps us safe, on the roads, when we are ill, everywhere – and that is conscience. Conscience is what makes us observe red lights, what makes nurses do the dirty, smelly jobs, and tell the truth, and look tenderly after the helpless, querulous beings that most of us will one day become.

And conscience is dying among us, among Tory ladies and foul-mouthed White Van Men alike.

By a strange coincidence, conscience is dying more or less at the same time as the Christian religion is dying, and Easter is becoming just another chance to shop. Are these things connected? I suspect they are. While you wonder, take care crossing the road and don’t fall ill or get old, or ask anyone to be quiet.