Speech to memorial service for road crash victims

An occupational hazard of being a politician is saying the wrong thing. I speak my mind and not every one likes it. I can say the wrong thing, get the wrong kind of headline, but as the saying goes, nobody dies.

Like other politicians, I hope that my work improves people’s ability to afford a home, or get access to a job offering decent pay, but if I woke up tomorrow and decided to take the day off, no one would die.

I regularly talk to officers in TfL and the Met about what more can be done to stop deaths and injuries, but I am never one of the wonderful police officers, or fire staff, or paramedics at the scene. I don’t have to deal with the trauma of arriving at a collision and dealing with the bloody consequences. I can go a whole day without thinking about the latest road casualty figures and nobody dies.

If I wrote a newspaper column or made a speech, I might get into trouble if I made things up or got some statistics wrong. But at the end of the day, I am not a nurse reading a patients notes & dispensing medicines. I can make a mistake, but nobody dies.

If I crack a few jokes and noboby laughs, it doesn’t matter because nobody dies.

But. If for example, I was in charge of the transport system and I told my engineers to design roads that speed motorists along at the expense of pedestrians or cyclists, then that is different. People can die and do.

If for example, I more than halved the road safety budget & rephased the traffic lights, then it is my job to keep an eye on the consequences. If the casualties go up, whilst everywhere else they are going down, then I would need to worry because that is a consequence of the choices I have made. Politicians make decisions and people get hurt. Occasionally, they die.

All over the country decisions are being made. People are debating police numbers and priorities. How much is spent on safety cameras and traffic police. Whether the speed limit should be raised to 80mph on motorways, or lowered to 20mph across urban areas? In all these discussions, I hope that we remember the human reality and the emotional trauma behind each and every casualty.

Events like this annual memorial are a vital way that our society, our culture, can make that connection between the decisions made in comfortable committee rooms and the human reality of dangerous roads and hospital wards. Memorials can make that vital translation between the personal tragedy and the public debate. We can come together and remind ourselves that most of these so called ‘accidents’ are avoidable. That people have been killed and seriously injured on our roads who shouldn’t have been.

I admire the work of the clever engineers & others who work hard to make things safer. I have also met so many dedicated traffic police officers who have a real passion for their jobs. I hope that us politicians can learn from that dedication and passion. Above all, I hope that many more of us politicians will realise that decisions have consequences and that we to do everything we can to ensure that at the end of the day, nobody died.

A "ghost bike" commemorating a cyclist killed on the roads near Kings Cross Station