To wonder how so many people are comfortable breaking the speed limit?

Try living in Australia with our huge distances between cities and the max you can go for most of the country is 110km/hr. On top of that speeding is pretty heavily policed with small margins and large fines.

No wonder most people fly between cities here.

Red lights, signalling and stopping back from the cycle box appear to be optionals where I live, why should speeding be any different?

If you want to drive through Brum on the A38 through the tunnels, then you need to stay in the right hand lane all the way through at 30mph for about 3 miles.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

4x4 drivers or Mercedes/BMW/Jaguar etc types you forgot Audis, who were the subject of a v funny Clarkson jibe about people driving too close to your bumper.
It's a limit not a target etcetcetc is my POV and cruise control is your friend. I'll be glad (long dead) when cars are automatically restricted to the speed limit by internal technology.

No idea! I suppose there's some dual carriageways with junctions and unavoidably slower traffic which increase the tendency for right lane cruising - it's wrong of course, that's just the why of it. But why they don't see lights coming up behind without a flash... IDK. Perhaps some have flipped their mirrors down because of the unfortunate increase in overly bright and/or misadjusted headlamps? (I'm not trying to excuse, just wondering why!)

You clearly don't drive the dual carriageways or motorways near me.

Your lucky if anyone in lane 1/2 (and 3 if it's 4 lanes) is comfortable doing above 50!

It's actually pretty dangerous - probably more so than it's annoying!

When I was an Institute of Advanced Motorists observer, we had a fundamental rule that you should never do anything at all that makes any other road user change speed or course, and that would include changing lanes on motorways, regardless of whether the other driver was doing something illegal like speeding or using the wrong lane.

The latter wasn't what the OP was describing doing.
However, doing 'anything at all that makes any other road user change speed or course' absolutely describes what is being attempted by some knob is either flashing their headlights at me or driving up my arse (or both) while I wait for a big enough gap to move across

So, hopefully everyone is 100% agreed with her on that?

You don't drive around the M25 during peak hours a whole lot do you

Or long sections of the M6.

You don't drive around the M25 during peak hours a whole lot do you

All lanes full

And maybe start a discussion in an open forum about whether this behaviour being seen as “normal” Is a good thing for society?

i did get out of the way the moment it didn’t mean moving into a narrow gap in a long chain of lorries (where by narrow I mean 15-20m - also not a safe stopping distance and then it would be a 40 ton truck rather than a bmw that was threateningly close). That doesn’t mean I can’t talk about how they are there dangerous drivers, not the stream of people overtaking two lanes of lorries at 70mph

You'd probably fail your advanced driving test if you changed lanes causing them to brake (depends on severity) or change lanes themselves and definitely fail if you tried to enforce them to drive legally, i.e. brake tested them or stayed in the overtaking lane ahead of them for longer than necessary to complete your immediate overtake.

this isn't what OP did from what I understand.

Same happens to me sometimes, overtaking a slower car and someone comes speeding up behind and either gets really close or flashes even though there is no room to pull in until I get past the car I'm overtaking. Just to be clear this doesn't involve pulling in front of a car, the lane could be completely empty when the manoeuvre is made.

Wouldda, couldda, shouldda...

@taxguru is absolutely right here.

Defensive driving is what 'advanced driving' is called where I live. It is the only safe way to drive.

Policing other people speed is not on.

Other people's bad driving is going to happen regardless of training and laws.

Your role on the highways and byways is to drive safely, and if that means letting eejits belt past everything including you at 90mph, then that is what you need to do. Trying to slow them down is not safe. Tipping your brakes is not safe. Forcing them to change lanes is not safe.

Get home safely, put the kettle on, and relax. Human bar or two of "Let it go".

Perhaps an advanced driving test should be obligatory before you can drive a car with more than a given amount of power. A bit like how motorcycle licences work. It would also stop young men being given cars with more power than they have the maturity to handle.

Good idea.

There might be more minor bumps in low speed areas, but far fewer fatalities.

Congestion is worse with higher speeds because vehicles have longer gaps between them. That's why variable speed limits are used on motorways to bring everyone down to 50 when it is congested - it results in a smoother traffic flow without the start-stopping.

Everyone knows the outside lane on a motorway is the crime lane. No-one in the crime lane has time for the 70mph speed restriction.

As I said in my OP- when I’m in the outside lane it’s because I’m going faster than the cars in the middle lane.

You're assuming Mumsnetters are able to comprehend Written English. There is very little evidence for that.

Perhaps an advanced driving test should be obligatory before you can drive a car with more than a given amount of power. A bit like how motorcycle licences work. It would also stop young men being given cars with more power than they have the maturity to handle.

Why do you bring "a mine" into the conversation, you are just digging a hole for yourself.

Off to see if I can find a thread where people are arguing black is white; might be easier to engage with.

They all got killed on a zebra crossing.

Aaarghh! But if everyone was going that bit slower, there would be no bottleneck!

You can’t use current situations to try to disprove my entirely hypothetical situation. Yes, a slow outlier will cause a problem now because they’re an outlier.

Look, if you filmed a major junction on a motorway and then slowed the footage down by 10%, you could watch all the cars move slower but still interact in exactly the same way with the same level of congestion. That’s the scenario I’m talking about. It hasn’t happened, so your experiences on the A3 are entirely irrelevant!

But if all the traffic were moving in the same way but slower, people would have slightly more reaction time and less severe collisions.

Off to see if I can find a thread where people are arguing black is white; might be easier to engage with.

No. Two cars travelling at 60mph with a gap of 10 metres between them will remain at 10 metres apart if they both change their speed to 55mph. No bunching up.

Unless you are one of the afore mentioned tailgaters you will not be hanging 10m behind the driver in front of you while doing 60mph, would drop back and allow a greater breaking distance. At slower speeds people feel more confident being closer to the car infront.

People love to trot out this ‘slow drivers cause accidents’ nonsense because I think it makes them feel powerful in some way.

Not really. I often commute down the A3 in London which is a 50mph dual carriageway. When vehicles in both lanes are travelling at 50 the flow of traffic is pretty smooth. It takes just one person to drop to 40-45 for a bottleneck to form and vehicles having to converge on one lane to overtake the slow driver. It is most definitely an added risk.

I suspect that rather than extending the network of cameras they have their eyes on other methods that will come to pass.

When electric cars meet self driving cars and we remove the "it's all about me" barrier to progress (the faster horses paradigm) then it will all be fairly academic. That was how I called it 10 years ago, and I stand by it.