Liddite

Liddites are people who think helmets should be compulsory. In a world of conflicting and uncertain research, their faith is unshakable. They are often spoken of as True Believers - nothing, no data however inconvenient, no argument however compelling - can contradict the Received Truth.

They preach the Gospel according to Thompson, Rivara and Thompson and when you knock that down they come up with another observational study, and another and another. Some Liddites are cyclists, but a large proportion are not. Two leading Liddites in the UK are Angela Lee of BeHIT, and. neither of them is known to be a cyclist, which probably accounts for their joint belief that cycling is so dangerous that a child should not be allowed to ride a toy tricycle in the park without a helmet - and that any adult who allows such child abuse should be guilty of a criminal offence.

Like most zealots you will never convert them, but you can have some fun pointing out the absurdity of their position to bystanders. And like most zealots they can be profoundly dangerous. In Australia they got laws passed which reduced the number of cyclists by a third without measurably affecting head injury rates. The key fact about Liddites is that they do not care that helmet laws do not result in better safety, they do not care about cycle safety, they only care that every cyclist should wear a plastic hat.

The claims they make are greatly in excess of those made by helmet manufacturers. They do not care about that either.

Why Liddites? Because they cling to an outmoded interventionist view of safety which predates risk compensation theory. Because they don't understand risk compensation, they can't even see why lid laws are doomed to fail.