“Plans are afoot to make the default speed on A roads 50mph instead of 60, while more 20mph zones will be introduced in residential areas and in the vicinity of hospitals and schools. All this with the avowed aim of reducing road fatalities by a third, from 3,000 per annum to 2,000. In fact, road deaths have already declined by a third in the past decade – which can only be a good thing. But while no one disputes that a pedestrian hit by a car travelling at 20mph has a far greater chance of surviving than one struck by a car going 10mph faster, I have my doubts that greater speed limitations will actually help in urban areas.   More...

Read Will Self’s tribute to JG Ballard, who died on Sunday.

“I never took to Tony Blair at all. I was never impressed by his populist touch, nor was I sure that the benefits of a Labour government that sacrificed its principles to the free market could be outweighed by the gains to the British people. As for the stain of Iraq on Blair’s reputation, it now seems that his successor is going to allow an inquiry — but it isn’t scheduled to be completed until after the next election. And not just our general election, but after the ‘election’ by EU leaders next year of the first European president as well, a post for which one T Blair is angling.”   More...

“I’ve always known when a TV series is starting to bite with me — I begin consciously organising my life around its scheduling.

“It’s happened with a string of US-made drama series that shame our home-grown television, including The Wire and The Sopranos. So it’s proved with Mad Men, an Emmy-award-winning show, made for cable — or at least, up until the halfway mark of each season.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column, go here.

“One thing that seems to have been lost in the media blizzard surrounding the Home Secretary’s dodgy expenses claims is the nature of the ‘entertainment’ that was charged by Richard Timney – Jacqui Smith’s husband – to the taxpayers’ account. A whole slew of commentators – including feminists one might have expected to be in the van – have backed off from outright accusations of sexual immorality. There seems to be a large dose of ‘what you do in the privacy of your own home’ in circulation.   More...

“If Google’s aim is to be master of all it surveys, then the launch of Google Street View in the UK brings it that much closer to surveying, well, everything.

“Privacy campaigners have made a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner about the service, saying that blurring of number plates and faces is insufficient to protect individual anonymity.

“Personally, I can’t imagine for a nanosecond what use anyone could conceivably make of Street View, unless it was something nefarious or criminal. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, assures us that the service’s success proves that people ‘love to see what is going on in their local community’. Can he really believe that it’s better to do this online, rather than simply walk out the front door? Because that’s what I, in my hokey old way, call a street view.”   More...

“Sir Paul Stephenson has chosen a good issue with which to make his mark on London’s policing, saying that he wants his officers patrolling on foot and alone.

“He’s called for a renewal of the ‘uniformed governance’ of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, when the presence of individual officers walking the beat was the sine qua non of an ordered society.

“Personally, I’m all for Sir Paul’s proposal — but only so long as London doesn’t find itself going back to the future. I agree that the individual police officer, doing the rounds, chatting with the people on his patch, is the key to good policing.”   More...

“The splendidly named Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas is at it again, using her New West End Company — basically a shopkeepers’ association — to campaign for fewer buses on Oxford Street, Bond Street and Regent Street. True, her stated aim is to make the area more pedestrian-friendly but, I wonder, what sort of pedestrians does she have in mind?

“Not, you understand that we omnibus-lovers have anything to be ashamed of. After the dark days of the Eighties, when Thatcher proclaimed that anyone over 30 who was still riding the bus was, ipso facto, a failure, these red clippers on the tarmac ocean have enjoyed a surprising comeback. Now, thanks in no small measure to Ken Livingstone, the service in London is both frequent and — more importantly — used by the very acmes of success, such as myself.”   More...

“I was once on a panel that gave a prestigious award to Julie Myerson for her first novel, Sleepwalking, an elegantly overwrought account of an abused woman who begins a passionate affair. Myerson has said there are autobiographical elements to it, but if so they were properly obfuscated by the routine devices of fiction. She since seems to have forgotten that all good fiction is a form of psychic autobiography: there’s no need to give such revelations the seeming authority of fact, when fiction speaks with greater authenticity.   More...

“Now that Binyam Mohamed has returned to the UK from detention at Guantanamo Bay, there must be quite a few Whitehall mandarins — not to mention some ex-ministers — who are wandering Westminster frantically trying to clean the blood from their hands. For make no mistake: Mr Mohamed is only one among a number of British residents and citizens who claim they were tortured with the tacit support — and even connivance — of their own government.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.