The John Blunt column

IN JOINING the pious, politically-correct cry for a one-pint drink-drive limit, Lancashire Police say research shows drivers' judgment is impaired when they have more alcohol than this in their blood.

Let us see, then, what havoc is being wrought in Lancashire by those flouting the current two-pint limit - the very same bunch against whom the force last Christmas launched a breathalyser blitz which involved a staggering 13,000 drivers being "bagged" in roadside tests in just one month.

Remember, their refusal to tell us the results of that campaign?

It is hardly surprising when it turns out that the number of alcohol-related accidents is actually minuscule even though the police think the breath test limit is at present twice as high as it should be.

For, according to their own figures, out of 6,355 road accidents involving injury last year, just 254 - a tiny four per cent - were alcohol-related.

That's far less than half the number of accidents caused by sober drivers, with supposedly unimpaired judgment, who were driving too fast.

I am not making a case out for boozy drivers - only that the police should get their priorities right.

They should begin chasing real criminals with as much zeal as they have displayed for breathalysing thousands of innocent drivers and, now, for seeking to criminalise them when there is hardly a drink-drive problem to begin with.

Consider the overkill of that Christmas breath-test campaign and whether it was worth it. It is now revealed that those 13,000 tests in one month amounted to two-thirds of those carried out in Lancashire in an entire year. And, though the police decline to reveal them, if the results of that blitz were the same as those for the whole year, it would mean that 82 out of every 100 drivers tested was being pulled up for no good reason.

This, of course, is a huge waste of police time and resources.

And it is not as if they do not have better things to do than hounding motorists virtually at random.

Such as, for instance, catching a few more burglars - so that the abysmal detection rate of just one in four house burglaries is improved.

What about the Ten Commandments?

HERE we go again - the Church of England does another Nineties knee-jerk.

It's the one that goes: "Everybody's doing it, so we'll change our rules to suit." Now, the trendies want to bless living in sin.

Well, after the dithering over divorce, the rift over women priests and the havering over homosexuality, it's hardly surprising.

But where does it get a church that is always watering down or ditching its beliefs?

The doctrine is quite clear - sex before marriage is a sin. That many couples don't give a damn nowadays really ought not to matter to a church that is supposed to teach right and wrong.

But, with weary predictability, along come the diluters who would take the condemnation out of Christianity.

Backed by support from fellow liberals, the rural dean of Salisbury, David Scrace, argues that the church should bless unmarried couples and recognise the value of their relationship. He calls for the introduction of a betrothal rite which he calls a "celebration of commitment and intent."

Isn't this unholy humbug - when commitment is the very thing that these living-in-sin couples are avoiding?

Equally emetic is the rite already drafted by Michael Hare Duke, former Bishop of St Andrews, in anticipation of Scrace's heretical ideas being adopted by the General Synod.

It contains the sort of claptrap that might have been penned by a New Age traveller after a meal of magic mushrooms..."As body, mind and spirit touch, two people reach beyond their limits and in imaginative play experience the dance of earth's renewal," it says.

Bilge!

Hasn't the Archbishop of Canterbury the guts to read the Ten Commandments out loud to these wreckers - especially, the thou-shalt-not bits on fornication and adultery?

Fast route to losing votes

CAR-BASHING, Jag-driving John Prescott furiously dismisses as a "teenybopper" the relatively junior Downing Street official who, in Tony Blair's name, rapped his transport ministry's plans to make millions of drivers catch trains or buses or walk or bike instead. They were, said Prime Ministerial adviser Geoffrey Norris in a memo to the Big Green Giant, Mr Prescott, going too far and were too 'anti-car.'

QQuite so. They are just another excuse - dressed up as environment-friendly - to rob motorists with new taxes and let the car-hating councils go mad with more yellow lines.

But Mr Prescott's ire is enlightening.

For it suggests to me that Downing Street is alarmed by his plans to bring in heavy charges for people who park their car at work or drive to out-of-town supermarkets and waking up to the message I have been sounding out for ages - that car-bashing is a fast route to vote-losing.

Time to find reverse gear, John - and smartish.

Lesson for the examination fiddlers

FOR all the carping by their profession about the national curriculum tests, their value in keeping teachers on their toes is surely proven by the new drive announced last week against those who resort to cheating to get better results.

Now, after an unprecedented number of claims of cheating last year, spot checks are to take place in 2,000 schools to prevent teachers opening the examination papers early and coaching pupils on the answers so their school might shine in the league tables. One suggestion to counter this unprofessional, yet revealing, swindling is for the papers to be e-mailed to schools at the last minute so there could be no such malpractice or any need for an expensive army of exam-day snoops.

Obviously, whoever thought of this idea has never heard of a computer crash.

A far better solution to the problem would be to carry on as now with only a handful of these so-called flying squad inspectors, but with the introduction of instant, automatic sacking for any teacher caught fiddling.

It is, after all, fraud - and one that slurs the vast majority of teachers who are prepared to administer the tests properly and stand by the results as a measure of their ability as well as that of their pupils.

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.