Another voice
Drink to me only
Auberon Waugh
One of the least pleasing aspects of the British press is its extraordinarily sanc- timonious attitude towards allegedly `drunken' drivers. We all know that most, if not very nearly all, journalists have a weakness for the occasional tincture, or the cup that cheers, or whatever. We all know that most of them (in fact I should again say very nearly all, apart from those lucky enough to have an abstemious wife or girl friend) occasionally drive around in their motor cars with a blood-alcohol level over the permitted limit. We also know that the permitted blood-alcohol level is ludicrously low. It was possible to extrapolate from figures supplied last year for the proportion of those who, on a random check, were driving when technically 'drunk', when set against figures supplied for the proportion of those involved in fatal road accidents who were also technically 'drunk', that one has a better chance of avoiding fatal road accidents when `drunk than when sober. At the very least one was forced to conclude that figures supplied by the Ministry of Transport for road accidents involving one or more 'drunken' driver were seriously misleading, and that alcohol was not a significant factor in a large proportion of them.
As against this, one must obviously agree that it is a very foolish thing indeed to drive a car when seriously or hog-whimperingly drunk, and that criminal sanctions can reasonably be applied as a deterrent, especially against confirmed alcoholics. In partial mitigation, for all except persistent offenders, it might be observed that the decision to do this foolish thing is taken at a time when judgment is impaired. Among the logical and intelligent Japanese, I have been told, it was a defence against any charge of dangerous driving until well into the 1960s to prove that you were drunk at the time, and therefore not responsible for your actions.
Of all the offences which decent, law- abiding people can commit, `drunk' driving is surely the one which in most circum- stances (although admittedly not all) the British journalist should find it easiest to forgive. Yet when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, recently called for even stiffer penalites, almost the whole of the British press welcomed his words and at least two newspapers — the Mirror and the Standard — said his suggestions did not go far enough, calling for even stiffer sentencing than he proposed. For some reason the press has decided to give these unfortunate `drunk' drivers the treatment usually reserv- ed for sadistic child murderers, pederasts generally and certain kinds of drug-pusher.
While it is easy to understand popular resentment against these other offenders as reflecting the anxieties so many parents feel for their children, I cannot see that the same applies to `drunk' drivers. Perhaps the resentment against them reflects a general hatred and terror which should more properly attach to the internal com- bustion engine. Masses of metal hurtling around under fallible human control inevit- ably cause appalling havoc when anything goes wrong.
Whenever I write about this subject I always get letters from people who have picked up slaughtered children and preg- nant mothers in every conceivable posture of distress — their bones protruding piteously to the sky, or decapitated, their bowels strewn over hundreds of yards of motorway. Do I condone this, they ask. In fact, I have had one or two similar experi- ences, although I had no reason to suppose that the accident which caused the injuries was itself caused by drunkenness. Even by the MOT's unreliable figures, only a very small proportion of road accidents involve drivers with a blood-alcohol level above its derisory allowance. The truth is that these hideous injuries are caused by the nature of road transport, where every lethal machine is controlled by a different person in whatever state of sorrow or joy, health or sickness, alcoholic exaltation or teetotal depression he may find himself. Anybody who avails himself of the benefits of road transport must inevitably accept its risks.
Another explanation for this fury against `drunk' drivers, especially in the `popular' or lower-class newspapers, might be that editors imagine they are catering for the anxieties and resentments of those who do not own cars — the poor defenceless bicyclist or pedestrian, as he goes about his lawful business, drunk or sober, in the nor- mal course of events. If so, these editors are out of touch. According to the latest General Household Survey, 59 per cent of households now own cars. Few of these households wish to see their breadwinner locked up for two years on a spurious, press-incited charge of 'drunken' driving. Editors are annoying more of their readers than they are pleasing by these silly cam- paigns, and I wish their proprietors would point it out to them.
But the most obvious explanation is that these editors have been deliberately misled and manipulated by the temperance brigade about the evils of alcohol. They feel guilty, like so many Britons, about their own self- indulgence and feel they can exorcise the guilty by expressing exaggerated outrage against the tiny proportion of 'drunken' drivers who are caught.
Time and again in these pages I have pointed out the extraordinarily high pro- portion of Scots Presbyterians and Calvinists (I am not saying they are all members of Moral Rearmament) in the Ministry of Health, and the lying propa- ganda they feed to ministers and press about an 'epidemic of drunkenness'. A survey published last month, which was conducted independently of the Ministry of Health by the Central Statistical Office and involved the stupendous number of 21,000 inter- views, reveals the true facts: abstainers from alcohol are more likely to develop chronic illness than drinkers, while even heavy drinkers have a much longer rate of absence from work through sickness than abstainers. Just how many billions of pounds, I wonder, are these wretched abstainers costing the country in lost work- ing days — and how many further billions are they costing the Exchequer (that means your hospital facilities, your kiddies' educa- tion and old people's welfare accommoda- tion) in unpaid excise duty?
But the temperance fanatics are everywhere, and as drunken driving might seem to be the weakest point of the anti- temperance case they press their advantage remorselessly. To measure the extremes to which these anti-drink fanatics are pre- pared to go, one must look across at the other side of the herring pond where the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled by a six to one majority last month that a host who gave his guests liquor was liable (no less than a publican) for injury to other parties caused by the guests' subsequent drunk driving. As the one dissenting voice from this absurd ruling (Judge Marie Garibaldi, God bless her) pointed out, it means that hosts will in future have to monitor their guests' drinking.
Even more alarming, both houses of Congress passed a bill forcing States to pro- hibit sales of drink to those under 21 on pain of losing some of their Federal Highway subsidies. The National Safety Council estimates this will save 700 lives out of 43,000 road fatalities in 1983, the lowest for 20 years. The law will discriminate against women, who scarcely feature at all in drunk-driving statistics for the age-group of 19-21, and it will discriminate even more viciously against non-drivers — two out of three New Yorkers aged 19 and 20 do not drive.
Perhaps these absurdities and injustices pale into insignificance beside the decision of our own Mr Justice Woolf in the High Court who awarded £45,750 to a convicted rapist against the drunken driver from whom he had accepted a lift on the grounds that, having been a 'small-time crook' with a mistress before the accident, the man only started committing rape as a result of his injuries.
What, one wonders, has happened to the Providence which is supposed to look after fools, drunks and Americans?
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