Whose points were they?
A Leveson inquiry into the Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce speeding points case would recommend statutory regulation of all married couples.
The call would be backed by academics who were no longer married or who no longer drove (or both) and a celebrity campaign group called Driven Off. And the Leveson report would state Pryce’s name was Price (with an i) changed to sound posh – because an un-verified Wikipedia page said so.
Not all guilty
By way of balance, the report would briefly mention the fact that there are 21.2 million married people in the UK and that there are fewer than two million speeding offences a year.
It would probably also identify a number of key groups of married people who have never even had speeding points between them let alone swapped them. It would probably highlight married couples who do not drive and could not commit such an offence.
Divorce: the solution
But Leveson would then ignore all those and focus solely on the speeding points swapping of a tiny minority to demand regulation of all married couples. And he would leap on the fact that such crimes only come to light after a marriage has ended, promoting divorce as a road to honesty
Opponents of the freedom of marriage would make loud, ignorant statements calling for the report to “implemented in full”. They’d claim married couples opposed to regulation had something to hide.
Even some married people would be fooled into backing Leveson, claiming they had “nothing to fear”.
Labour Lords a leaping
Labour would opportunistically introduce an amendment in the Lords to an unrelated bill that had cross party support to stop forced marriages, causing that bill to collapse and thousands of women to suffer unnecessarily.
Of course, it couldn’t happen here.
