A reader drew our attention to a highly amusing comment left by one Andrew Horsman on an UnHerd article about potholes. Andrew has a plan for dealing with potholes that takes its inspiration from SAGE’s successful handling of the Covid crisis.
Here’s a plan for the PM to consider. Declare a national ‘novel pothole’ crisis. Tell the country that potholes are a mortal danger to us all and that no-one is safe until everyone is safe and the last pothole in the land is filled. Point out that potholes pose an especial threat to the poorly, elderly, disabled and other vulnerable groups. Put pressure on coroners to ascribe every road death to potholes. Make sure ‘pothole’ is on the death certificate of anyone who died within 48 hours driving over, past or around a pothole. Close any roads on which any pothole is found, immediately. Also close any nearby adjoining roads, just to be safe and as a precaution. If you live within 500 metres of a pothole you must stay at home to keep everyone safe. Require councils to put signs up everyone reminding everyone of the pothole danger and plaster the message across all forms of media – “one in three potholes are invisible”, that kind of thing. Create a hugely expensive national pothole tracking service. Give daily press conferences at which the numbers of reported potholes and pothole-related deaths are intoned by solemn-looking officials who project future increases in pothole deaths unless stricter measures are taken. Make the public’s life such a misery that they are desperate for a ‘way out’ of the pothole crisis. Demonise any pothole-deniers who think it’s all gone a bit too far, and don’t let them go shopping.
Then… find a mate, let’s call him Tony, who runs a tarmacking business. Or any business. Your local pub landlord, maybe. Give Tony multiple billions of pounds of public money and tell the public that only Tony can solve the awful pothole crisis. A moonshot! Give him three weeks to flatten the roads. Watch him fill some potholes with something that looks a bit like sand, but which he assures you has been proven to be totally safe and effective. Don’t ask any awkward questions or probe too deeply about what’s actually in his concoction, and watch Tony swan off to Switzerland with your cash, boasting at international conferences how he worked at the speed of road-surfacing to solve the crisis. Quietly ignore anyone who points out that most potholes appear not to have been filled, and those that were filled reappear within two or three months. Question the sanity and integrity of anyone who dares to point out that there appear to be more potholes, and road deaths and injuries, than ever before. Declare the pothole crisis over. We’ve just got to learn to live with potholes. Sign up to an international pothole treaty so that if another pothole crisis occurs we can get Tony and his mates in to do the business much quicker next time – and this time no roads will be open until he’s filled them up with the latest version of his specially patented filler.
Hope to high heaven that no-one will hold you to account, and live the rest of your life in utter fear and trepidation that a day will soon dawn when all of your moral cowardice, corruption and callous indifference to human suffering will come back to haunt you.
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Love it!
“..worked at the speed of road-surfacing..” 
I’m sure we had a dodgy politician in the UK at one time whose first name was Tony….???
To be fair, its not the worst idea I’ve heard this week…
Eventually, Sadiq Khan will declare all of London an ULPOZ[*] where everyone who dares to own a car that’s more than five years old and thus, wasn’t built to the latest EU pothole avoidance standards, gets fined for driving there. The money collected in this way will be spent on reports detailing why the Met needs more diversity training and on Greater London achieving Net Zero Pothole — every time a new pothole appears somewhere, an old pothole will be scheduled to be repaired once enough EDI managers have been hired so that training a modern and diverse pothole filling task action force can commence. After this task action force has actually been recruited (if ever), ensure that they spend at least 50% of their time caring for streets with trans-potholes, ie, potholes declared to exist despite they don’t. This will also help to save a lot of tarmac. In the meantime, collect statistics about pothole distribution by predominant neighbourhood ethnicity to determine if the problem is perhaps really that tarmac is structurally racist and if so, create a national plan for unsurfacing all tarmac-covered roads and resurfacing them with something else instead.
All it takes to avoid filling potholes.
[*] Ultra Low Pothole Zone.
I’m digging your idea as that Khan is definitely holier than thou.
Khan is a Next Tuesday.
Genius. Totally inspired.
Now they don’t need to build speed bumps everywhere. Brucy Bonus.
Brilliant ! The Roads are knackered !
Inspired, bravo!
However it’s even more surreal – he forgot to mention that, prior to the pothole crisis, Tony had been conducting gain of pothole function research, and he was even granted a US patent on a key part of the pothole itself.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-worst-atrocity-in-the-history
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full
“Act as if you’ve driven into one”
This is excellent, but we must also mount a campaign to forgive the pothole profiteers, now mostly resident in Mustique and Monaco, on the grounds that they did the right thing at the time, according to the information then available.
(Spped-of-road-surfacting – brilliant!)
Funny thing is wherever I go driving to golf, cycling or visiting friends/relatives there’s ALWAYS bloody roadworks but they never fill in the potholes twenty yards away. The A6 going out of my town is an absolute disgrace. Just about sums things up as a nation.
Perfect, funny, but sums it up perfectly.
Brilliant!
Great humour. They do say mockery is a powerful weapon to use against authority gone mad.
Produce posters that say “Look him in the eyes and tell him that pot holes aren’t real”.
Excellent, I love a bit of satire. You could take it one step further and explain how the new, novel, tarmacadam filling applied to back filling the potholes caused a chemical reaction, resulting severe vehicle damage and even death to drivers in some cases.
When more potholes appear tell the public that electric cars are safe and effective way of driving over potholes.
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Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
–
Dunno of I missed it but was
Oops. Dunno if I missed it but was there encouragement to stand by our cars every Thursday evening to beat out a rhythm on the bodywork in support of the selfless heroes in pothole filling teams who give so much of themselves so save our National Hole Service?
(NHS)