IS IT not disingenuous of Lancashire Police to hail their Christmas and New Year campaign against drink-driving as a huge success and yet fail to prove it with the full figures? All we are told is that of 960 breath tests following accidents, 31 were positive.

That level - of just over three per cent - may indeed suggest that the police breath-test crackdown had a marked effect because, in the past, the police have alleged a far higher proportion of accidents caused by drink.

But is the force afraid that the purge may be shown in a different light - as a huge and costly misdirection of police resources - if a more accurate measure of its value was provided by them revealing the exact number of motorists given breath tests and the number who failed?

Why are they so coy about coming forward with the overall real results?

No-one disputes that drink-driving has to be combated, but the police need to justify their action when they are provoking mounting antagonism among thousands of law-abiding motorists who have been pulled up and tested and feel they are victims of arbitrary methods that are stretching both the law and their own liberty.

In short, they believe the police are conducting random tests and in doing so are over-exercising their authority and, in hiding the results, may be doing so to little good purpose.

If the police wish to continue with this, they should first have the law clearly in support of their action - with legislation permitting random testing and so dispelling any doubt or complaint over their right to carry it out.

Secondly, they should prove and justify such action by coming out with the full figures, not cosmetic ones.

We want the drink-drivers caught and stopped and not the law-abiding public becoming hostile to police because they feel they are being unwarrantably harassed for hardly any good effect.

Chief Constable, take note and give us the full story.

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