@WheelyGoodFun - What do you expect? It's the Daily Wail. This is the same newspaper which lambasts the Police for not doing enough about traffic crime and crime in general, and then complains when they do. Give their journalists a free meal and bottle of wine and they'd moan about the state of the shoddy crockery.
In general...
I seem to recall that there is somewhere close to 250,000 miles of roads in the UK, and 34 million motorists. I think its safe to assume that a very significant proportion of these motorists (if not all of them) will, at some point, break the law in their vehicle. This might be a minor infraction from creeping marginally above the speed limit, to much more serious offences. Some will offend only once or twice, and no harm will come of it. Some will be repeat offenders recklessly endangering the lives of others on a regular basis.
How do you even BEGIN to police such a huge thing? Obviously no officer is on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they can't possibly cover the entire road network either.
The points system is an interesting sidestep - I don't agree with it either, but imagine what would happen if drivers faced losing their licence for any infraction? 12 points on a licence in three years is not an automatic ban, although a court may impose one. If every driving infraction resulted in a court case it would become an administrative nightmare, and costly too. So let's imagine that any driving offence was an insta-ban... How many people would appeal, and how bunged up would the court system become because of that? Heck, if I lost my licence for not noticing my tail-light was busted I probably would.
