The British public are angry. They feel let down by successive governments. There is a palpable sense of decline. Tired of broken promises, voters are turning towards populism. Tension hangs in the air. Bad vibes.
Sensing the public mood, Sir Keir Starmer has grasped the nettle. A man of action with an uncanny, almost telepathic, ability to get inside the mind of the ordinary Joe, he has announced plans to consult on reducing the drink-drive limit and giving motorists points on their driving licence for not wearing a seat belt.
I wrote about the drink-drive limit last year when the hard left trade union the British Medical Association called for it to be lowered from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg per 100ml. That was in the final days of the Sunak administration and it is such a quintessentially Sunakian policy that it is surprising that it was never introduced during the era of displacement politics. Illiberal but virtuous, it is exactly the kind of ruse that grabs headlines and makes MPs feel warm inside while achieving absolutely nothing. As if that were not enough, it also furthers the longstanding but unspoken goal of every major political party to destroy the pub trade. What’s taken them so long?
Lowering the limit will bring England and Wales in line with most of Europe and with Scotland. Campaigners say this like it is a good thing. The reality is that the proportion of road deaths in the UK that are due to drink-driving is significantly lower than in the EU, and the UK has half as many road deaths to begin with (per capita). We have good evidence from peer-reviewed studies showing that lowering the limit in Scotland had no effect whatsoever on the number of road accidents, nor on the number of road fatalities. This should not be surprising since the stupid and irresponsible people who cause drink-driving accidents drink a lot more than a pint of beer and are hardly likely to change their ways just because the legal threshold has been reduced somewhat.
If public health policy-making were an evidence-based enterprise, that would be the end of the matter. The state would go after the drunks (remember when it was called drunk-driving?) and allow ordinary people to have a pint of cider in a country pub from time to time. The Scots allowed themselves to be the guinea pigs and the rest of the UK learned from their mistake. The end.
It is the usual sorry story of third rate politicians looking to bank a list of “achievements” to put on their CV
But it’s never really about health, and it was noticeable that the loudest voices supporting this policy on Monday were neo-temperance groups like the Institute of Alcohol Studies who would rather people didn’t drink at all. Pubs in Scotland have been closing at twice the rate in England since the SNP inflicted a lower drink-drive limit and minimum pricing on Scottish drinkers. For the temperance lobby, this is a feature rather than a bug of these policies.
Why is the Labour Party pandering to these people (and to the BMA, with whom the government is in a bitter dispute over doctors’ pay)? It is the usual sorry story of third rate politicians looking to bank a list of “achievements” to put on their CV while diverting attention from their failure to do the things they were elected to do. Political pygmies and single-issue campaigners judge policies by their good intentions rather than by their results. Insofar as the political class have had an ideology since 1997, it is that reforming the state is difficult whereas passing legislation to restrict the freedom of the people is easy. There is nothing more to it than that.
