WHAT PRICE FREEDOM?

EU wants random breath tests (Daily Mail, May 23rd, 2004)

The Home Office is resisting pressure from Europe to bring in random breath tests to catch drink drivers.

Under current British legislation, police can only breath test drivers if they believe they have been drinking alcohol.

But the European Commission wants countries across Europe to introduce random testing to improve road safety.

The Home Office has insisted that random tests were not an efficient way of catching drink-drivers and that it saw no need for them to be introduced.
However, the president of Tispol, the European Traffic Police Network, said the European Commission would attempt to make its recommendation a directive if it is not followed.

Ad Hellemons, who is also Dutch Assistant Commissioner of Police, told BBC Radio Five Live Five: "This is the first time the European Commission has made such a recommendation.

"The vast majority of member states already carry out random breath tests. We can't understand why governments would want to protect drink-drivers.

"The European Commission has made it clear that they expect this recommendation to be followed. If not they will try to make it a directive.

This is a great example of the conflict between continental and Anglo-American notions of freedom. In most of Europe, the well-ordered state is viewed as ultimately benevolent and is measured by its efficiency in solving problems. The citizen is always expected to defer to government, whose job is to provide munificence and order, and whose only potential sins are stupidity and corruption. In Anglo-American countries, the state is a necessary evil that can never be completely benevolent and against which the citizen must be protected by common individual rights that exist quite independently of their efficacy. This is the modern rationale for the presumption of innocence, trial by jury and the rules against self-incrimination. Except for the odd blogger from New Hampshire, most do not believe the police should always be assumed to operate in good faith or that accusation is a reliable determinant of guilt.

Since World War Two, this Anglo-American ethos has been sorely tested by the explosion of bureaucracy, urbanization, social engineering, the welfare state mentality and the complexities of modern technological society. The progressive response, as reflected in the judiciary, is to discover all manner of new, flavour-of-the-month constitutional rights that have turned law enforcement into a kind of chess game ever more remote from the moral underpinnings it is supposed to reflect. This has earned us a huge, expensive legal superstructure and a growing tendency to complicate the most mundane issues (like spam) by seeing them in terms of competing, fundamental rights. There are comparatively few really important rights. We dilute them by constantly inventing new ones.

Conservatives, however, often make the mistake the British Home Office is making here and try to respond by debating the issue on the question of efficiency. That is a very unpromising tact and the reason the British will probably lose this one in the end. Of course untrammeled police powers will make our roads and communities safer–one only has to compare pre and post Soviet Moscow to know that. But, with lobbyists like MADD with their tragic stories and a sensationalist media to cope with, we find it harder and harder to state the simple historical truth, which is that there are larger, more general issues at stake and we sometimes pay a price for freedom in terms of public order and safety.

Only a fanatic would argue our drinking and driving laws should be frozen in time and defined independently of social habits and the speed and concentration of traffic. The conservative response should be to take a hard, pragmatic look at the problem and reject solutions based solely on either state efficiency or inviolable individual rights. We must take care to avoid being hidebound by the past and be realistic about the new challenges of contemporary society. Yet we must not cower before the “if we can save but one life...” crowd or let accusations that we are casual about innocent death silence us on the overarching importance of a free and inefficient society.