Sir – I am puzzled by your correspondents and feature writers who expect British drivers to be law-abiding.

One has only to drive at the legal speed limit in the fast lane of the Oxford ring road or on the M40 to find puzzled and impatient vehicles queueing up behind, if not overtaking on the inside.

I recall a pillar of society, a churchwarden, driving his and friends’ children home from school and, when one said “Wow, we’re going fast”, remarking “There won’t be speed traps on this safe stretch of road . . .”

But this same gentleman would have demanded the full force of the law against, for example, an unemployed single mother filching a small jar of baby food from a supermarket.

One must recognize the phenomenon that very many British drivers simply do not see highway law as being the same as any other law. Unlike all those other laws it may be flouted whenever inconvenient.

Hubert Allen, Old Marston