Having read the Open Letter To The British Judicial System – By Stewart Pratt I decided to forward it to my MP (David Cameron). I didn’t expect much, but it took me all of 30seconds and was worth a shot!

Having forgotten about it I was quite surprised to receive the below response this morning:

Not wishing to piss on your chips, but you sent a template letter and received one in return. Whilst I am fully in favour of all these initiatives to make cycling safer, the only thing that will make a difference IMO is punitive sentences for drivers who maim/kill cyclists – and there seems to be zero desire to make this happen. (btw no wish to denigrate the original open letter by Stewart Pratt which I thought was excellent OR your decision to forward it on which was a good move)

That’s a good example of a complete failure to address the points in Stewart’s letter. I presume you weren’t posting it as something positive?

Not wishing to piss on your chips, but you sent a template letter and received one in return.

I’ve had a couple of very similar ones from my local MP.

zilog6128 -Not pissing on my chips at all, part of my reason for posting this was to get the STW response to it. I’m not informed enough to make a decision as to whether any of the contents of the letter are doing any good or whether I’m being fobbed-off (as is my suspicion)!

Is there any evidence in recent bike death/maiming incidences which resulted in sentences similar to what his policy alluded to?

There are already legal options in place to prosecute. The biggest issue is getting the cps to prosecute for dangerous as opposed to careless driving.

There is also the “car culture” that means any jury is reluctant to find a driver guily of something with a custodial sentence because “there but for the grace of god go I…”

http://thecyclingsilk.blogspot.nl/

http://thecyclingsilk.blogspot.nl/2009/11/cycling-against-car-culture.html

I’m not informed enough to make a decision as to whether any of the contents of the letter are doing any good or whether I’m being fobbed-off (as is my suspicion)!

The latter – sorry!

Though to be fair, that’s what happens 99% of the time when you write to your MP – even if you send a more individual letter (and IME even when it’s something much more specific to their constituency which they should be able to help with).

At least it appears to be actually signed by the bloke rather than pp’d off some civil servant, so it has has crossed his desk, even if the bugger hasn’t read it.

There are already legal options in place to prosecute. The biggest issue is getting the cps to prosecute for dangerous as opposed to careless driving.

Hence why the original letter was to “the judiciary”. The worst thing about that CPS attitude is that their normal excuse is “we went for what we were more certain of getting a conviction for” – which is no excuse for not also charging with DD, given it is perfectly possible to charge somebody with both and have the jury decide in a single case (as does sometimes happen). Of course the other (and possibly bigger) issue is the tendency for judges to give sentences right at the bottom of the tariff range, despite plenty of aggravating factors which they’ve ignored.

James Callaghan (Labour Prime Minister in the 1970’s) used to say that he saw every single letter sent to him.

He did this by having his secretary wheel them past him in a delivery trolley so that, as they passed, he could “look” at them…

No room in jail for people who kill people in cars.
Must all be full with really dangerous hardcore criminals who drive cars up mountains,or who jump in rivers,or who post nonsense on Facebook or who try to walk round Scotland naked….ad nauseam
Priorities innit?

All those measures don’t/won’t change the attitudes of the drivers that are killing/harming our fellow cyclists.

It’ll take far more than few quid here, a few quid there.

I received something pretty similar from my MP, standard template response to ‘any question’ about cycling. I replied asking him to elaborate on some points as I didn’t quite see the point and questioned some of the measures and actually being that useful.

I got pretty much the same response but rearranged. No interest in doing anything, and claimed that is wasn’t up to government to create law to help change the culture on the roads. BS

He’s a tory, btw. His response didn’t surprise me.

JEngledow Good effort to get a response fronm “The Man Dave”

Dont matter if its was a template letter or not, at least you made the effort

It would probably be much more effective writing to one of the focus groups that all the parties use ( and slavishly follow?)and trying to persuade them of the blindingly obvious merits of your case.

Don’t be put off by the template letter thing – it’s receipt will have been logged, and you’ve added to the scale – regardless of whether it’s the same text or not, someone somewhere pays some attention to the level of correspondence received, so if 100 template letters are received about cycling safety, that sends a message. If 100,000 of them are received, that also tells them something – they don’t need to read what you sent to get that message.

May be it would be more productive to write to Kier Starmer and get him and his staff to show some balls instead.

May be it would be more productive to write to Kier Starmer and get him and his staff to show some balls instead.

Damn good idea.

When do we start to see the results of this £1.8BN spend?
Nothing has changed round here in the last 5 years. Cycling infrastructure is at best unusable, at worst dangerous.

I like the 1.8 billion line. They way it’s worded it sounds like it’s a positive for cycling.

Good on you for getting involved, and for reporting back to keep the discussion going. As noted above, even boilerplate letters are better than nothing. The more people making a noise, the louder the noise.

I got a broadly similar reply from my MP, albeit much shorter, having been phrased as “you’ll be aware of the great stuff we’ve done” (not especially) rather than actually pointing it out. A little disappointing as I’d asked four reasonably specific and carefully bullet-pointed questions in the hope of encouraging a proper response. Hey ho.

It’s a bit of a shame that they’re championing a prison sentence as a measure – something I think is misguided, as these incidents are not malicious or premeditated – rather than anything more progressive and preventative. But it’s early days, I suppose.

Sadly my MPS is also a PPS, which means he can’t sign EDMs. But while we’re here, those of you with MPs who can do so could do worse than to ask them to support EDMs 679 and 407.

http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2012-13/679
http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2012-13/407

Interesting point on the DPP, I’ll look into how that avenue might be pursued. I confess to being rather the lay man when it comes to legal processes and the various entities involved.

For anyone interested in this stuff, if you’re not already aware, the cross-party parliamentary inquiry starts tomorrow, so there should be some decent noise in the media from some clued-up people. See #getbritaincycling and @allpartycycling.

Additional related wordguffs at stewartpratt.com.