It seems New Labour now want to give the police powers to be able to breath test drivers on a whim and institute mass roadside checkpoints.
They appear to base this on their normal inability to understand the implications of their own skewed statistics combined with their tendency towards an authoritarian solution to anything they perceive as a ‘problem’.
It seems they are attempting to justify this with their Christmas Drink driving states. They show that the number of drink drivers stopped dropped despite a recorded increase in the number of tests (that police are measured on).
During the 1980s the number of people killed and seriously injured in drink-drive collisions in Great Britain fell from over 9000 (1,450 deaths, 7,970 serious injuries) to just less than 5,000 (760 deaths, 4,090 serious injuries).
Over the last decade or so, figures have fluctuated year on year, but overall there has been no particular trend up or down.
It is questionable if even massively increasing the number of breath tests will make a significant difference.
If the government actually wanted to reduce drink driving, as opposed to extending it's grip on the citizen, it might be better advised to reprise the hard hitting anti drink drive campaigns of the 80s and early 90s and helped make drink driving unacceptable. But this time include drugs in the message. From the figures it appears that actually worked quite effectively.
Our current system seems to have served us well over the decades, but New Labour never heard of leaving anything that works alone - and by their actions one could be forgiven for assuming they are embarked of a long term plan to undermine public trust in the police in an attempt to turn them into an occup
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