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Vhy we need seat eft legislation

17th October 1981
Page 27
Page 27, 17th October 1981 — Vhy we need seat eft legislation
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

4.1 GIVING VENT to his highlinded principles about the idividual's right to choose fhether or not to wear seat elts, Mr Ingham-Johnson (CM eptember 26) makes the iistake of attributing far more rofound motivations to drivers an they normally have.

I would suggest that hardly ly of them leave their seat belts Ff as a conscious assertion of ee will, or in the awareness of king a calculated risk of which Fey have any real

iderstanding. They leave seat alts unused because it takes -ecious seconds to put them -1'; because the belts make em feel encumbered during e journey; and perhaps above I because in spite of the Jblicity, wearing of seat belts is ill widely regarded as "soft" —

• (when used by the passenger) ; an implicit affront to the skill the driver.

For such people as these, gislation will simply force the nall effort of using the belts, or lieve them of whatever nbarrassment it might entail. Perhaps more alarming in Mr gram-Johnson's letter is his nical dismissal of the worth of dividual life. What value is irsonal freedom in a society iich welcomes "a grateful fugee from the dole queue" to place (where exactly?) the iver killed in an accident? Mr Johnson's emotive ggestion that people saved by at belts are likely to be "held ptive by a determined medical afession" in a state of semiimation smacks of pure njecture — intended

asumably to throw doubt on itistics which lead one to lieve that the belts can indeed re lives. (He chooses to ignore non-fatal but distressing ;figurements which seat belts known to prevent.) The sufferer in a motor accident is never the sole victim. Friends, family, emergency services and hospitals all share in the personal and financial cost. People who genuinely want to throw themselves into an environment of personal risk will not normally restrict themselves to that which is offered in a car.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of wearing seat belts, it does no service to the debate to confuse the preservation of positive freedoms in society with a dogged wish to preserve the negative freedom to subject oneself and others to harm which the balance of evidence suggests could be reduced. PETER ROWLANDS Enfield Middx


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