HAS not the manifestly dangerous practice of drivers using mobile phones in effect been approved by the Government after it rejected Rossendale and Darwen MP Janet Anderson's bid to outlaw it - on the dubious grounds that a ban would be impossible to enforce?

So if the Government baulks at making it a specific offence, won't it be wasting the £250,000 of taxpayers' money it is to spend on a publicity campaign urging drivers not to talk on mobiles?

Ludicrously, Road Safety Minister David Jamieson said that to ban their use by drivers, mobiles themselves would have to be banned.

It's an unsafe practice - one that has already cost lives - and one that could easily be policed against if Mrs Anderson's Private Member's Bill not been immobilised by a government evidently more afraid of unpopularity among the millions of mobile-using drivers than with improving road safety.

If 35 other countries have banned the use of hand-held phones at the wheel, we could easily do so, too.