Equitable Justice.

Back in March, the British Formula 1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton got into a spot of bother with the Australian police. It seems he performed some stunts in a road car, and on a public road, for the benefit of enthusiastic onlookers. Everybody had a few minutes fun, apparently, but the Aussie police charged him with ‘improper use of a motor vehicle’ and today he was fined A$500. Now, this raises immediate suspicions about the mindset of Australian bureaucracy, but I don’t know the details well enough to argue the matter.

What I can say is this. Lewis Hamilton is a Formula 1 world champion, and that means he’s at least a millionaire, if not a multi-millionaire. I think it reasonable to suppose that he spends more than A$500 on a haircut. Which brings me to the main point of the post.

We have a fixed penalty system in Britain for minor motoring offences. If, for example, we’re caught doing 40 mph in a 30 mph zone, we get fined £60. Everybody gets the same fine. That’s fair, isn't it? Well, no, actually it isn’t.

The purpose of the fine is to punish and act as a deterrent. To a rich person, of course, £60 amounts to a bit of loose change; but to somebody struggling to get by on the national minimum wage, £60 is a substantial sum of money. It’s a week’s worth of food to a family of three. To put it simply, the severity of the ‘punishment’ decreases in proportion to a person’s wealth. Or, to put it another way, it’s a further example of how the system is designed to favour the rich over the poor. And that isn’t fair at all.