Nappy Britain

A Government watch dog has recently concluded that the police are making unjustified searches of white members of the public to give “racial balance” to stop and search statistics. Lord Carlile the independent reviewer of terrorist legislation said that he’d come across cases where suspects were stopped despite their being no evidence or suspicion against them. Such “unmerited searches” were an invasion of civil liberties and “almost certainly unlawful”.

Nearly 90% of the searches made under anti-terror laws were carried out by the Met which recorded a 266% increase in the use of its power. Give police more power and they will certainly use it.

Jacqui Smith comes clean; 

Of course it was that upholder of our hard won freedoms Ms Smith who was responsible for the shift towards a police state. Writing in the Sunday Times even that bastion of socialism Rod Liddle found it hard to mourn her passing. He wrote “At last the mystery of Jacqui Smith’s resignation as home secretary has been solved. Interviewed recently by the BBC Jacqui thought that she’d been a terrific home secretary who had suffered quite unjustly at the hands of the press, largely because she was a woman.

Being called “stroppy” by a journalist was the tipping point, it seems. All credit then to Ms Smith for not letting the other stuff get to her – the Labour Party opinion poll that suggested she was by far the worst cabinet minister; the criticisms over the £116,000 second home allowances she claimed while she designated a room in her sister’s house as her primary residence an act which Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the committee on standards in public life described as “nearly fraudulent”; her catastrophic legislation to lock people up without trial for 42 days, described by the House of Lords as “fatally flawed, ill thought through and unnecessary”; or indeed her husband’s claim for porno films. Bravely she was entirely uncontrite about all that stuff.  It is a terrible thing when political giants are brought low through sexism, isn’t it?”

And finally…. 

So interfering is this government on every aspect of our lives that schools are now required to write and implement A Community Cohesion Policy.  How silly of me to think that their role is to teach youngsters how to read and write.

Today a report by the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council confirms the commonly held belief that we should use more common sense in assessing risk.  Spokesman for the Council, Rick Haythornwaite said “the public is taking an increasing interest in the rules and restrictions that control our lives. Of course the Government sets the tone but what the public say is that ‘if we understand the risk and know how to mitigate it leave it to us to manage it’”.   Hurrah to that.

However we have, for some time now, lived with this culture of fear (propounded by those with vested financial interests such as ambulance chasing insurers) that changing it will be very difficult.  As the following example demonstrates there is still a long way to go:

Stepladders, that for 400 years have allowed students to reach the top shelves of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been removed because of safety fears. But the library says that the books must remain in their “historic location”, out of reach, while students travel as far as the British Library in London to find other copies.

Article in The Daily Express

The Tyrany of the on-the-spot fine

Ross Clark

Remember when police officers used common sense to deal with minor offenders-litter bugs, cyclists without lights, and so on – with a quiet word?  Today you are more likely to be slapped with an on the spot £75.00 fine from a so-called “accredited person”, working to a bonus system custom-made to “generate resentment”. Since they often get paid for each penalty notice they issue, these “persons” – litter wardens, security staff and the like – have a built in incentive to go for soft targets instead of tackling serious offenders. Sarah Davies of Hull, for instance, was fined £75.00 for dropping a morsel of sausage roll while feeding her daughter. Even more worryingly, magistrates warn that police are using on-the-spot fines to “resolve” serious criminal cases (including assaults and even rape) that would be better dealt with by the courts. Yet incredibly Jack Straw now wants to extend the range of offences covered. He must not.  A country in which litter-droppers are given the same penalty as violent thugs has lost all moral authority”.

Article in The Sunday Times, 10^th May 2009

Try being really tough, Jacqui – cuff PC Shoddy

Jenni Russell

“Two weeks ago Jacqui Smith was sounding particularly smug as she gave reasons for the government keeping the DNA profiles of innocent people on the national database for up to 12 years. Her justification ‘It is crucial that we do everything we can to protect the public by preventing crime and bringing offenders to justice’”.  (wrapping repression in the language of protecting the public is a characteristic of this government)

Russell continues “Recently I had my bag stolen from under my seat in a café. The next day a policeman rang to say that the café’s CCTV camera showed a member of staff taking the bag and hiding it behind the counter. Hugely relieved and impressed by this result and by this open-and-shut evidence I waited to hear more. And waited. And waited.  The officer was not on shift. He was out. He was on leave. He hadn’t entered my details on the computer. Nobody knew anything about the bag, or the tape, or the progress of the case. And that was that. 

Or there was a fraud on my bank account two years ago. Someone drew cheques of £200, £500 and then £2000 before I had seen a statement. The fraudulent cheques had been paid into a building society. This looked like another simple case. It tried to report it; so did the bank. The police told us there was no point in pursuing the individuals who had paid the money in since they were probably fronts for organised crime.  The bank paid me, the insurers paid the bank, organised crime was left undisturbed and didn’t figure in any crime statistics.

Many friends have similar stories of police incompetence or simple lack of interest.  A disabled man who had his bag stolen at Heathrow was told that the police wouldn’t look at the CCTV because security at the airport was there to prevent terrorism, not street crime. Or a man who was brutally mugged was shown pictures of possible assailants and then told “We’re just going through the motions mate – we haven’t got time to question anybody”.

The truth that the whiter than white Jacqui Smith is avoiding, is that much of Britain’s policing is shoddy: let down by disorganization, bad management and huge frustrations caused by targets, tick boxing and lack of time. It’s much easier to expand a DNA database and place faith in science than reform the way the police is run. For all her tough talk, Smith avoids hard decisions in favour of easy ones”.

Incidentally here’s a question for you. When did you last see a policemen or for that matter talk to one in the street apropos of nothing.  Normally they are in pairs in the town centre engrossed talking to one another or racing away in a screaming panda car.  Last time I saw a copper wandering around Newbridge – got to be over three years ago.

Could the tide be turning? Last week the police were hoisted by their own petard via video footage which clearly showed some less than savoury behaviour. Then the case of Damian Green was thrown out suggesting that his arrest was politically motivated by that whiter than white Home Secretary, Jackie Smith.

And last night Panorama ran an excellent programme on why the historically deadly serious business of health and safety has become a laughing stock.  Under the title May Contain Nuts, it was presented by the mischievous Quentin Letts, a journalist with the Times.  The high point came when he attended a one day course in Correct Ladder usage.  (Cost £230.00).  At the front of a class the instructor was showing everyone how to scale a set of step ladders, safely.  Off he went up to the third step where he crashed his head into the ceiling.  Brilliant. 

If you have the time and the inclination it’s only half an hour and can be watched on IPlayer (BBC1).  Well worth seeing how the compensation culture has eroded the application of common sense.    

To the Daily Telegraph

The assistant manageress, who allegedly ejected a pregnant woman from a pub for drinking alcohol, seems to have acted unprofessionally. More troubling perhaps is the backdrop of unjustified official paternalism against which this latest intervention took place.  Both the Department of Health and the British Medical Association have advocated total abstention while pregnant despite the lack of credible evidence that low to moderate consumption presents any risk to the developing foetus. Indeed a 2008 study suggested that the children of light-drinking mothers might actually perform better in cognitive and behavioural tests.

The rationale offered for the current policy is somewhat perverse: any message that some drinking is acceptable will, we are told, be mistaken as a green light for wanton over-indulgence. This insults the intelligence of the responsible majority of pregnant women, who can tell the difference between the occasional harmless glass and a reckless binge.  Pregnant women have enough on their minds without contending with scientifically illiterate, public Puritanism.

Dr Colin Gavaghan. Lecturer in Medical Law and Ethics, University of Glasgow

More jobs we can do without:
Hackney Council is looking for a best use of resources programme manager (up to £50,721) to join its head of corporate performance and presumably to manage the best use of resources analyst that is also required (up to £44,334).

Food Ambassador to Leicester Market – The City Council is willing to pay up to £29,714 for somebody who will “help the market by capitalising upon the diverse food available within our city and our country”.

1. Tower Hamlets Council:  Currently recruiting a £40,000 a year principal tobacco officer to annoy smokers. Or as the council prefers to describe it “raise the profile of smoking cessation”. The council is looking for a “motivated and dedicated individual – preferably a non-smoker”.
   
2. Moray, Scotland: Currently recruiting a “Street Football co-ordinator” at £19,000 pa.
3. Braintree, Essex: “Climate change manager” sought at £38,000 per annum
4. Hertfordshire Council: “Head of participation and inclusiveness” sought at £42,000 

As Max Hastings quite rightly says “If the government wants to tackle the recession there must be a cull of these non-jobs and social projects which have become ‘a deadweight’ on Britain”.

Stick to your remit 

Roland White writing in the Sunday Times tellingly exposes the ways in which our Local Councils and Police Forces no longer stick to what they were created to do.  A couple of weeks ago there was a dispute on Bristol City Council over a £750,000 grant to teach people about the slave trade (even though a series of institutions called “schools” are already paid to do this).  If that appeared a waste of time and money just wait. The exchange in which a black councillor referred to an Asian councillor as a “coconut” (brown on the outside, white on the inside) is now being investigated by the police, presumably the crack Slightly Rude Names Squad.

Is it too much to ask that councils and the police just collect the rubbish and catch burglars?

…….and finally some thoughts on the Principal of Proportionality;

You may have read that the government is in the process of reducing the speed limit on all A roads from the current 60 to 50mph.  They have been influenced by evidence from Speed Check Services, the company that supplies average speed cameras, which shows (unsurprisingly) that the numbers killed or seriously injured has dropped by 60% at sites where they are used.

This may be true but there is more than one way of reducing the death toll. Many accidents occur at black spots; few drivers would argue with cutting speed limits at these points and policing those reductions with cameras. It is the blanket nature of the proposed changes that offends. Where does it stop – if lives are saved at 50mph, would more not be saved at 40mph or 30mph?

The principal of proportionality is increasingly going out of the window. The majority of people behave sensibly in the course of their daily lives, but they are being asked to constrain their behaviour because of a tiny minority of wrong doers and careless people. The official mind needs to look at society’s problems through the other end of the telescope. The real question is How do we intervene to prevent a troublesome minority harming themselves and others?  Universal punishment or restraint is a lazy, bad solution.