Many of us have felt a howling sense of outrage after having suffered some perceived injustice at the hands of an over-eager or spiteful traffic warden. We have tales to tell of wardens who wait for us to step out onto the pavement and close the car door, before leaping out from a hidey-hole to slap a ticket on the windscreen. We have mystery stories of tickets that arrive in the post demanding our presence at a tribunal hearing for an offence supposedly caused in some obscure street at an unearthly hour when we are tucked up in bed. We have horror stories of wardens marching determinedly towards us as we struggle to load heavy shopping into the car outside the supermarket, brandishing a ticketing machine and wearing a menacing smirk. But what can we do? We are powerless against the rage of those with the machine. If they decide to be nasty rather than humane, then that’s it.

Whether we are right or wrong, we are still required to drag ourselves to a tribunal hearing to defend ourselves. Because this takes the best part of a morning, most of us decide that it’s not worth wasting our holiday leave or interrupting the working day, so we pay our Lm10 fine and try to control ourselves. The strange thing is that even those who have lots of money to spare become enraged at what they think are undeserved fines and tickets – and that’s because it’s not about the money. It’s about injustice and unfairness.

There must be a large number of pleasant wardens – the job can’t possibly attract only nasties – and I have met a couple of them. Yet there is a reason why they rank among the nation’s least popular people, alongside aggressive bus drivers, and that’s because so many of them appear to be totally devoid of what are known as “people skills”. They seem to be sent straight out onto the street without proper training in how to handle people.

Other problems derive from the fact that the minimum educational background is required for the job, and the jobs have to be filled. That’s one of the reasons why so many bad situations are created and so many people believe that they have been ticketed unjustly: there are wardens who don’t have the intelligence required to make the correct decisions.

I can give at least one case of spectacularly poor judgement from my own experience. I was accused of “dumping rubbish in a public place” by a warden who saw me get out of my car to add my rubbish-bag to a pile of other rubbish-bags that the rubbish-collectors had gathered together at the side of the road to wait for the lorry. When I refused to give him my identity card number and told him he was being completely ridiculous, he stood across the passenger door and stopped me getting into my own car. He ordered me to put my rubbish-bag back into the car-boot. It was all I could do to stop myself from emptying it all over his head. He moved away only when I brought out my telephone to ring the police. There’s nothing that petty authority fears more than superior authority. I immediately drove off and the ticket arrived in the post. Identity card or not, he had all he needed from keying in my car number. When I went to the tribunal hearing, it was the warden who got ticked off and not me who got fined. And still he couldn’t see why he was wrong.

Putting up with these individuals in the course of a stressful day only makes things worse. I thoroughly endorse Jean Paul Sartre’s maxim that hell is other people, but there is a particular kind of hell that can be caused only by the thoroughly stupid who have an overweening sense of their own cleverness and importance. Arm such people with authority over others and you have created the potential for untold misery.

The situation was crystallised in a court case a few days ago, in which a magistrate cleared a man of perjury and of falsely accusing a traffic warden of committing a crime. The man had gone to a traffic tribunal to defend himself against the accusations of a warden who had ticketed him. He told the tribunal chairman that he had seen the warden reach into his car through a broken window. The warden denied this – not surprisingly – and in this “warden’s-word-against-victim’s-word” scenario, the chairman chose to believe the warden. But he went beyond that, and ordered criminal action to be taken against the man for perjury. The man was duly arraigned in court by the police, but the magistrate dismissed the case because another person had witnessed the warden reach into his car.

Unless both the man and his witness were perjuring themselves, the warden was. Yet we shall probably hear no more of this, and in any case, it’s not the point. Why on earth are the citizens of this country being exposed to situations in which traffic tribunal chairmen decide whether to fine them on the basis of a traffic warden’s word against theirs? Police officers come from a disciplined force, but wardens do not. It is wrong to invest them with more credibility than that of their victims. There are clear-cut situations in which this can be done legitimately, but more murky situations in which tickets are not justified and the warden seeks to justify them. There are even situations in which the more unthinking wardens behave appallingly, as with the one who tried to stop me getting into my own car, and we are left without redress.

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As I write this, I receive news of more speed cameras. The government minister for transport says that local councils require his approval for their installation. He should have the good sense to ban them altogether except at points where speeding really does cause a danger. He should have the even better sense to ban their installation and operation by local councils, restricting this to central government. There is an extremely good reason for this. Local councils do not install speed cameras to deter people from speeding. They install them to provide a bountiful source of revenue.

Speed cameras pay for themselves very quickly, and the plentiful revenue after that is all profit. The more people speed, the more money the council makes. This means there is a built-in disincentive for the council to deter people from speeding. If people stop speeding, they lose the revenue. I am not saying that councils want people to speed so that they will earn more money. I am simply stating the obvious: that if people stop going over the speed limit, council revenues will take a serious knock, and that won’t make the council too happy.

If local councils really do want this huge number of speed cameras that they have applied for, then the ministry of transport should say: “OK, you can have them, but the government will install them and the government will take the revenue.” That should change their minds pretty fast. King Solomon would approve. Malta doesn’t need speed cameras. You couldn’t speed even if you wanted to in a country where traffic is back-to-back and roads are short and twisted and full of holes. But then it’s a matter of defining speed: apparently, Maltese speed starts at 45km per hour.