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Monday 30 June 2014

Drink drive. Scotland to lower the bar on its biggest voting block?


I am not an advocate of drinking and driving but what I am continuously opposed to is ignoring genuine accident causes to focus on the wrong accident causes and thereby miss the chance to save lives, penalise drivers more and make more money for the road safety profiteers. It's all part of the relentless lowering of the bar on UK's drivers.


See this story of Scotland's intent to lower the drink drive limit to nearly half the current level. From The Mirror

I have noted now how the media will always refer to the failure to pass a drinks test as an automatic cause of an accident when reporting. The question should always be, 'was the drinking the direct and primary cause of an accident?' before citing it as other than coincidental. It's exactly the same for 'speeding'. 'Speeding driver kills pedestrian': We know that 'speeding' cannot cause an accident but other acts and other causes; speeding if present will always be coincidental. That of course will not always be the case with drink driving (as opposed to drunk driving) but never the less, in most cases, the failure to pass the drink test will still be coincidental and not the primary cause of the accident.  So in both examples we are likely to fail to address the real cause of an accident.

It's no service to road safety, with drinking and driving, if the the media and officials don't determine if the drinking was the cause of an accident before saying that it was.

On what Ministry of Guessework figures do 'Doctors' say that the move could save 30 lives a year?  How many accidents have they analysed to determine that these accidents would not or may not have happened below 0.5mg per 1ml? For that matter, how many current accidents are determined to show that they would not have happened at 0.8mg per 1m or below? None so far as I am aware.

Scotland is now very close to lowering the bar on drivers' drinking so that a head cold, the flu, a poor sleep would be more dangerous. I think the current level of 8mg is already below them too.
Kenny MacAskill Scotland's Justice Minister

Before any politicians lower the bar on UK's 33 million drivers, they should ensure that their research is robust enough to justify it. Drivers are a massive voting block in Scotland. Are you sure you must do this Mr MacAskill?

1 comment:

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