For those of our readers who were personally affronted by quotes from Daily Mail yesterday, here’s a suggestion I read between the lines of the Guardian a couple of weeks ago.

The columnist Alexander Chancellor was caught driving at 35 mph in a 30 zone. It appears that when your speeding offence is relatively minor, you get an option of attending a special ‘speed workshop’ instead of getting points on your license. Nobody wants points of their license, so Mr Chancellor went along to the workshop. He wasn’t sure it was that good a way to spend his time:

…there is still the question of whether these “speed workshops” are useful.

People attend them for one reason only: to avoid getting points on their licence. And those who are given this option hardly deserve to be penalised anyway. They are drivers who have inadvertently allowed their speeds to drift up slightly above the limit; not the delinquents who roar through villages with the cheerful abandon of Mr Toad.

…As it is, the workshops are presented not as a form of punishment, but as a voluntarily chosen educational entertainment that you are supposed to enjoy.

Clearly, this will not do. What Mr Chancellor suggests instead, is that ‘minor’ speeding offenders are offered an option of a flogging instead of their points.

They would go to the police station after work, be shown to a soundproof room, secured to a frame, and given a number of strokes with a strap or a birch. Although preferable for some as a way of avoiding points on their license, this punishment would be clearly severe enough in itself that the drivers would think twice before foolishly drifting over the limit.

… OK, he hasn’t suggested it in so many words, but I did say I was reading between the lines.