On April 30 2004, Ian Davey <ian@...> wrote:

>The helmet bill was thrown out please see below
>
>
>
>A major relief all around and a victory for political apathy if not common
>sense.

Thanks Ian. I think I'll subscribe to the CTC newsletter as it will be useful to
keep up-to-date on these things and I am a member of the CTC.

Although the bill was thrown out by apathy, I think that the writing letters to
MPs etc was a good thing as in an issue such as this you can bring on a bit of
useful apathy.

My past experience of these things is that MPs do like to vote for completely
safe things that the public believes in, MPs like to be seen voting for "good"
essentially. An issue such as decreasing drink driving for example will get
quite a lot of MPs out to vote for it because they can safely vote for this
without angering any of their constituents.

I think that the danger of the helmet bill is that it appears initially to MPs
as an uncontroversial "good thing". Once MPs start receiving letters etc. saying
otherwise complicates the issue for them and they start wondering if this is a
"safe bet" after all. The obvious thing to do for them is to simply stay away
rather than get involved in it.

In this way perhaps a small portion of the apathy can be seen as a victory for
those of us opposing the bill.

Patrick