Sunday 27 May 2012

Prohibition drives on

So “Wee Eck” is to press ahead with his plan to reduce the drink-driving limit in Scotland from 80mg to 50mg. This seems to me essentially a plank of his general anti-alcohol agenda rather than having much to do with road safety, and another way of driving a wedge between Scotland and England. And it would be exceptionally unreasonable for an English driver to be banned from driving in England for doing something in Scotland that was still entirely legal south of the Border.

And will it do anything to stop this kind of behaviour, which involves being well over the current limit? Might it even to some extent legitimise drink-drivng?

12 comments:

  1. It would be exceptionally unreasonable for a driver from one legal system to face punishment for breaking the law in a different legal system? Do you want to consider how ridiculous that statement is?

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  2. I've always said that reducing the existing limit is a cheap way of appearing to do something about a problem while doing absolutely nothing at all. It is therefore the ideal politician's solution.

    In reality, the problem has been wrongly identified: it is not the person who carefully sups within the limit; it is, as you point out, the person who will drink and drive irrespective of any limit, even if that limit were reduced to zero.

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  3. It ought be our free right as Englishmen to get as pissed as we like and run down as many kids as we like, anything less might send a pub to the wall which god forbid is just plain wrong.

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  4. "Do you want to consider how ridiculous that statement is?"

    Not ridiculous in the slightest. The Scots can punish people all they like in their own country, by fining, banning and imprisoning them. But to ban people from driving IN ENGLAND, for doing something that is legal IN ENGLAND, seems a bizarre form of extra-territorial jurisdiction.

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  5. You are talking cock again Mudge. You can already lose your licence if you get pissed and go for a drive in France. You have to follow the law of the state your in.

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  6. I don't think you would necessarily get a ban in the UK for a foreign drink-driving conviction. And foreign countries can't put points on UK licences either, just as we can't put points on the licences of foreign drivers. We can ban them from driving in the UK, but not from driving in, say, Poland.

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  7. Maybe I'm talking cock, then, Mudge, but lets face it. The jocks have to do something to keep the natives off the sauce.

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  8. Cooking Lager: just because an elected politician decides on a particular course of action, it doesn't mean he or she is right. We know the Scottish Nationalists - to be accurate - have decided to do something to reduce problem drinking in Scotland. The question is: will this help in that aim? I believe, as does Curmudgeon, for rational reasons we have both given previously above and elsewhere, that it won't.

    Curmudgeon has a point that I haven't seen addressed anywhere else: that you will be penalised in Scotland for an activity that will remain perfectly legal everywhere else in the UK. Thinking beyond the confines of drink-driving law, this is potentially a very significant constitutional and legal point.

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  9. It's not that you'll be penalised in Scotland, but you'll potentially be penalised in England, even though what you're penalised for is legal in England.

    To make a possibly slightly extreme analogy, it's like being put on the sex offenders' register in the UK for being convicted of committing adultery in Saudi Arabia.

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  10. Logically, Scottish driving bans for a level of alcohol that would be legal in the rest of the UK should apply to Scotland only.

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  11. I reckon wee Eck has just noticed - a few months before Cameroon does - that the EU is about to impose its own limits.

    He's jumping before he gets told to.

    Independence my a**.

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  12. I've written to the Department of Transport. I'll let you know what they say.

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