Government foils new wave of al-Qaeda terror attacks

The government has today defended its new Road Safety Bill, arguing that it is nothing to do with penalising the honest British driver, but rather is intended finally to close a legal loophole that would have allowed al-Qaeda to kill thousands of innocent people with impunity.

A leaked MI5 memo, seen by The Rockall Times and every other news organisation that the Downing Street press office could get it to before last night’s publishing deadline, reveals that the evil plotters were arranging a Canary Wharf-centred repeat of the September 2001 attacks when they spotted a much simpler way of killing the same number of people.

According to the memo, a telephone call between two terrorists who “accidentally got a crossed line with a receptionist at GCHQ” involved one vile plotter describing to the other how running aeroplanes into people is taken very seriously by the UK government, who make great efforts to ensure that it can’t happen, but that the government doesn’t seem particularly concerned about people running cars into one another, and indeed are perfectly happy to give barely qualified drivers complete control over how fast they travel even though three-and-a-half thousand people are killed on the roads every year. “Three-and-a-half thousand?” the other terrorist is reported as saying. “We’ll have a piece of that action!”

Al-Qaeda’s plan, which was devastating in its simplicity, was to forget the aeroplanes and instead take to Britain’s roads in specially unmodified Range Rovers and Transit vans. That way, they could kill innocent Britons at will without anybody really doing anything to prevent them, or indeed notice, because although there would be just as many deaths, they would be happening one at time, which as everybody knows isn’t as bad.

The filthy scum were even planning to employ children to steal cars and do some of the killing for them. “That way,” the accidentally overhead terrorist is supposed to have said, “even if they’re caught they’ll only be punished by being sent on holiday, or a day out driving racing cars.”

But these plots have all come to nothing thanks to the new “get tough” Road Safety Bill. Road safety minister David Jamieson described at a press conference how lowering the penalty for driving too fast past a bright yellow speed camera marked with a string of blinking neon signs saying SLOW DOWN – THERE IS A SPEED CAMERA RIGHT HERE! would, rather than indicate a certain lack of attention on the part of the motorist, “make roads much safer by… well, we’ve not quite worked out all the details just yet. But we’re definitely getting tough on really serious speeding.”

“You mean, given that it is never legal to drive at over 70 in this country, you’ll stop car manufacturers from selling cars that can do more than twice that speed?’ asked one journalist.

“Thanks,” said a grinning Mr Jamieson as the laughter eventually died down, “I think we all needed something to break the tension there!"

“But seriously,” he continued, “there are people in Britain today who, no matter what we say, will never give a monkey’s about other people’s safety. Punishing them with a six-point penalty and a hundred-pound fine will completely end the problem of road deaths for ever. When someone shows that they are grossly reckless and irresponsible about public safety we’ll take their driving licences away. As long as they do it at least twice and we catch them both times,” he added. “Confiscating their licences will make it physically impossible for them to get behind the wheel of a car for the duration of their ban, just as they are physically incapable of driving without insurance at the moment.”

“Is this really all about the rumoured al-Qaeda plot?” we asked.

“The minister couldn’t possibly comment on that,” an aide interjected quickly.

Previously

• Revealed: Those new traffic calming measures in full
• Rockall product test: Safety Cameras
• Cops caught on video actually doing job