WHERE'S all the gore, then? If you were to believe the latest surge of anti-speeding propaganda, you would be forgiven for thinking we should be up to our knees in the blood of road-accident victims in Lancashire.

For last week as fixed speed cameras in Burnley and Pendle were getting a coat of yellow paint over their sneaky, hard-to-see grey, the quango behind the £10million drive to saturate our roads with 320 of them -- the second-highest number in the country -- were once again shooting off shock statistics in an attempt to justify this overkill.

Seventy people lost their lives in road accidents in Lancashire last year, they told us. Another 1,000 were seriously injured and 9,000 less seriously hurt.

What they didn't say -- but what the police at least had the goodness to admit when an associated campaign against drivers doing only a couple of miles an hour over the limit was launched the same day in Colne -- was that only a third of this toll is put down to speeding.

So why the misleading hype? There's more of it in our Letters Page tonight from the Lancashire Partnership for Road which is behind this multi-million-pound speed camera blitz. It says more than 3,000 people are killed or injured in speed-related collisions each year in Lancashire. Get that 'killed or injured' total -- it makes it sound like the Battle of the Somme.

The truth is that just over 20 are killed and only some 350 seriously hurt because of accidents involving speeding. The other casualties are in 'non-speeding' accidents.

Why, then, the need to warp the truth with frightening and deceptive figures?

Well, how else are the police to justify the expenditure on hundreds more speed cameras and raking in ever more fines from motorists if 'saving lives' isn't put forward as the high-minded reason?

And how else could their publicly-funded propagandists in this road safety partnership justify their own jobs if the business of 'saving lives' wasn't smothered in these 'stage-blood' statistics?

Twenty-odd road deaths a year due to speeding out of Lancashire's entire population and out of road journeys amounting to billions is very, very few indeed. And throwing £10 million at what is really a minor problem, employing immense amounts of police effort on it and alienating innumerable motorists is what's really bloody about it all.