I have just found an anonymous, one sentence comment on my blog. It reads: “Your campaign against seat belt wearing has already borne fruit: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4411639a6479.html .”
The link takes you to an interesting story from New Zealand with the headline “Seatbelt subterfuge kills driver”. The driver who was killed, according to the story, was opposed […]

On the first of February 2008 I sent an email to the Department of Transport at - road.safety@dft.gsi.gov.uk. It said:
“In your press release of 31 January you state: “Seatbelts have prevented an estimated 60,000 deaths and 670,000 serious injuries since 31 January 1983 when seatbelts were made mandatory for drivers and front seat passengers.” […]

Anniversaries are convenient occasions on which to reinforce myths. Twenty five years ago, 31 January 1983, it became compulsory for occupants of the front seats of cars in the UK to wear seat belts. Today Britain’s Department for Transport has posted a press release announcing that in the 25 years since the seat belt law […]

Britain’s Liberal Democrat History Group provoked a mid-summer controversy with its search for the greatest British Liberal of all time. Its short list, to be voted on at the party’s annual conference in September, consisted of William Ewart Gladstone, David Lloyd George, John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. The front runner for most of […]

In most countries arguments about seat belt legislation are dead. But it remains a live issue in the United States where such laws are a matter for individual states. As a consequence there exists in the United States a variety of laws and levels of enforcement, and considerable debate about their effectiveness and moral legitimacy.
A […]

The BBC’s Today Programme is running a competition called Christmas Repeal in which listeners are invited to nominate an existing law that should be repealed.
I nominate Britain’s seat belt law.
[Update 23 December. Despite my high hopes and much encouragement, my Immodest Proposal did not succeed. It did not pass through the Today Programme’s editorial […]

Letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal, 26 June, 2006, commenting on Unsafe driving behaviour and four wheel drive vehicles: observational study, by Lesley Walker, Jonathan Williams and Konrad Jamrozik.
EDITOR — Walker et al show convincingly that drivers and other occupants of heavy four wheel drive vehicles are safer in crashes than those […]