One of the books I have been reading lately is “Scared to Death” by Christopher Booker and Richard North. First published some years ago but more recently updated it covers the public scares from BSE to Global Warming including speeding on our roads and why scares are costing us the earth.

To quote from the Introduction: “In the past twenty years, Western society in general and Britain in particular has been in the grip of a remarkable and very dangerous psychological phenomenon. Again and again since the 1980s we have seen the rise of some great fear, centred on a mysterious new threat to human health and wellbeing. As a result, we are told, large numbers of people will suffer or die. Salmonella in eggs; listeria in cheese; BSE in beef; dioxins in poultry; the ‘Millennium Bug’;DDT; nitrate in water; vitamin B6; ‘Satanic’ child abuse; lead in petrol and computers; passive smoking; asbestos; SARS; Asian bird flu – the list is seemingly endless.

Indeed, we are currently in the grip of the greatest such fear of all: that of a warming of the world’s climate which, we are officially told, could well put an end to much of civilized life as we know it. The price we have paid for such panics has been immense; most notably the colossal financial costs arising from the means society has chosen to defend itself from these threats. Yet, again and again, we have seen how it eventually emerged that the fear was largely or wholly misplaced. The threat of disaster came to be seen as having been no more than what we call a ‘scare’”.

The book certainly covers the ground well and shows how these scares arise and are promoted by the ignorant. Popular media and even the supposedly responsible press love a “bad news” story that helps their circulation (or their on-line media “hits” that helps their advertising income).

But the financial cost to the public can be enormous with no cost/benefit justification for the chosen solutions to the perceived problems. Indeed in the case of road safety the chosen measures (speed cameras) have not only been financially damaging but have diverted funds from effective road safety measures and meant that the UK no longer has a lead in reducing accidents and deaths (KSIs).

Some of the scares, such as that for AIDS, did turn into a serious problem only the worst outcomes being averted by advances in medical science and simple contrary public health measures. But other scares just disappeared because they turned out to be unreal – such as the Millenium Computer bug. However many millions of dollars and pounds were spent on curing imaginary problems.

One issue I was personally involved with was the “speed kills” issue which has resulted in the proliferation of speed cameras and speed humps. It is covered in Chapter 10 of the book.

As the book says, during the early years of the last century the death rate from road accidents in the UK consistently fell. By 1993 it was below 4,000. Britain’s roads were the safest in Europe. In France and Germany, the annual death toll was over 9,000. In Portugal the death rate was well over three times as high. Then the rate of decline suddenly slowed. Over the next decade the total fall was smaller than in any of the years between 1990 and 1993. On five occasions the yearly figure actually rose. So what had changed? Road safety policy as promoted by the Government changed.

The book says: “Undoubtedly one important factor in the steady fall in the fatal accident rate in earlier decades, despite a doubling in the number of vehicles on Britain’s roads – from 12 million in 1966 to 25 million in 1994 – had been the technical advances that made vehicles themselves much safer. But this could not have explained the slowing in the fall of accidents in the 1990s, when new regulations had made vehicles safer still”.

In reality the automated speed enforcement and reduction in speed limits created a financial incentive for the police to invest in speed cameras, speed awareness courses and enforcement when they had very little impact on road casualties. Over 2 million people are now issued with speeding fines every year in the UK at enormous cost to themselves and a whole industry has been created to support this mistaken policy due to the scare that “speed kills” when excessive speed is one of the less common factors in the cause of road accidents.

Expenditure on road policing and other effective measures to reduce accidents such as local road engineering were reduced in favour of more enforcement by cameras in the hope that would cut accidents when it did not.

See this web page for some of the articles I have written on this subject: https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/road-safety

As regards the book “Scared to Death” although the authors have documented well how such scares arise and are promoted by the misinformed they unfortunately have not tackled the issue of how to stop us wasting money on false solutions. But the book should be essential reading for all politicians.

Roger Lawson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London