Yourmedway and Yourmaidstone news editor Simon Robinson offers up a way to end all crime overnight.

Crime rates across Kent are on the decline, new police figures have reportedly shown.

This is undoubtedly good news and a step in the right direction.

But while progress is slowly being made, I feel there is a pressing need to eliminate all criminal acts now.

This could be achieved instantaneously be locking up the UK’s street-dwelling hoodies, savage granny robbers and all sorts of other nasty delinquents before they commit their heinous crimes.

This idea was introduced by author Philip K Dick in his 2002 collection of short stories Minority Report, later made into a sci-fi thriller of the same name starring pint-sized Scientologist Tom Cruise.

For those who have neither read the book nor seen the movie, the basic premise is that would-be criminals are identified, arrested and incarcerated before they actually strike. 

Which comes as somewhat of a relief to the would-be victims, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Sadly, both novel and film are not readily implementable; the film, for example, is set in the year 2054 in which three mutated humans with precognition powers, known as ‘precogs’, lead the arrests.

What we here in the relative Dark Ages of 2009 need is a more lo-tech equivalent.

Luckily for mankind, I have it.

All we need to do to eliminate all crime is build a driving simulator, in which the ‘motorists’ are charged with the simple task of driving their ‘car’ along a stretch of the motorway.

And anyone who chooses to limp along in the middle lane when not overtaking a slower-moving lorry or otherwise is taken immediately from the simulator and thrown in jail.

Forever.

It’s as simple as that.

It is an indisputable fact that all Middle Lane Drivers are criminally insane. Why else would they take up the middle lane when not overtaking?

It makes no sense. They simply must be future axe-murderers, faeces-throwing psychopaths and so forth.

The beauty of the test is that it would only take two minutes to establish the participants’ undiagnosed homicidal tendencies.
“OK Mr Smith, sit yourself down and when you’re ready take the next left, a slip road on to the motorway,” the examiner would say.

“Rightio,” thinks Mr Smith, “Let’s see here, I’ll just pull out onto the motorway. What a stroke of luck, there doesn’t seem to be a single other car on the motorway.

“I think I’ll take up the middle lane, thereby forcing anyone behind me to swerve across three lanes to overtake me and then again once they go past me.

“That makes perfect sense to me and doesn’t affect any other road users.”

At which point the examiner administers a swift baton blow to the back of Mr Smith’s head and drags him off to the cells.

The test could be administered to all UK citizens on a regular basis, thus ensuring anyone who develops middle-lane driver syndrome, as I’m sure they’ll call it, is swiftly banged up.

The beauty of the system is that everyone’s a winner; residents get to live their lives safe in the knowledge that anyone who has interests on their belongings, plunging a knife into their chest or otherwise is locked up, the police force are free to pursue other interests and, more importantly, the motorways are free from thousands of dribbling, barely-conscious, selfish middle-lane driving idiots.

On top of all that, it might make a good film. Someone give Tom Cruise a call.