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Labour: Shameless & Despicable

Tony Blair, when arguing in favour of the authorities being allowed to lock terrorist suspects for three months without charge, made the case, over and over that the move was vital for “security”. Three months was a bit much, even for Labour and this was eventually knocked down to 42 days pre-charge detention.

The police demanded it, he said, and the police are all-knowing. They never fit up the local suspicious dusky-looking odd-ball for high profile murders, and would never, ever use flawed intelligence to allow them to lock up, or even better, shoot the local suspicious, heavily bearded religion enthusiast. Intelligence, especially in the hands of those tireless and incorruptible public servants is always faultless, and the police cannot therefore be denied any power they ask for. It’s for the public’s own good, and of course, if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear. Despite the Government’s watertight case, Parliament in one of its occasional fits of contrariness, disagreed. The “compromise” was for suspicious-looking dusky types to be banged up on the police’s whim for a mere 28 days without being told why, if a nod from a judge could be obtained. 28 days is of course many, many times longer than in any other free democracy.

This was of course, never about “security”. Indeed the powers were never used. The plan was transparent. To create such an outrage against civil liberties that the Tories would be compelled to oppose it, thereby allowing Labour to campaign against them as “soft on terror”, because in Labour’s white working-class heartlands, “terrorist” means, “dusky, bearded religion enthusiast” and definitely not “us” or “people like us”. This case would be handy in a fight against the BNP, as the subtle difference between being locked up and being locked up WITHOUT CHARGE is lost on the majority of Britain’s spectacularly stupid electorate.

Now, in opposition, Labour need back their wet-arsed, mewling, pinko former supporters who hated the Labour government’s outrageous and savage assault on civil liberties. When in opposition, there are no “difficult decisions” just voters to placate, and lefties, who are so brainwashed into believing that Tory=Evil, and Labour=Righteous that they have forgotten, and forgiven Labour in a mere 6 months, whilst not seeing any irony in still blaming Thatcher & the Tories for everything else wrong with the country. At best, this is naive, at worst dumb, lumpen tribalist stupidity. Labour has admitted its mistakes, and the thuggish Ed Balls has said he MIGHT support a move to drop the detention without charge to the still-outrageous 14 days, which is still much longer than in any equivalent free democracy.

Labour, having run for 13 years one of the most savagely authoritarian regimes in the free world in which they systematically and comprehensively demolished most of the safeguards protecting the people from the misuse of executive power, cannot be taken seriously when they say “whoops, sorry! Our Bad!”. I would need to see a lot more evidence of a change of heart before I forgive the party. I suspect Labour’s U-turn is as transparently political as the policy when they were in Government. Their U-turn is welcome, but I don’t trust them nor should anyone who claims to have any love of freedom, until they expunge anyone who voted in favour of 42-day pre-charge detention.

Yes, that means you, Mr Balls. I make much of Labour’s catastrophic economic mismanagement, but it is the profound destruction of freedoms that will be the legacy of the Blair & Brown years long after we’ve paid the financial bill.

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The Student Protests

I’ll defer to someone who was there or thereabouts: Guido sums it up well, but in offering my opinion, I’ll ask ‘will everyone stop being so po-faced about it’.


Of course the NUS routed the march past Millbank, and of Course the NUS was involved in the violent as well as the non-violent bits of the protest. So I take the Student leadership’s condemnation of the invasion of CCHQ with a pinch of salt. It’s about as credible as those coming from Gerry Adams – and for the same reason, if rather less lycanthropic and scary. The political process must maintain the fiction of non-violence, but you get further with a kind word and a gun, than you do with a just kind word. The NUS knew the green-haired rock-chuckers of Class War and others, the same idiots who attend evey climate camp, G20 summit and protest would tag along yesterday too. The student leaders have a hard-on for the Soixant-huitards, and they need serious rioting to be taken seriously. “There are, like, you-know, some SERIOUSLY angry people, actually.”

Finally, the police, facing cuts of their own, were only too happy to be “overwhelmed” by a bunch of limp-wristed Celia & Tarquins as they gained access to the building where police budget cuts were decided, hence the rather paltry police numbers.

Face it, this was a good result for all concerned: Fighting is fun. The crusties got to kick off, the police got to break some white, middle-class heads for a change, whilst allowing the Conservatives in their HQ to suffer a bit of criminal damage, which can’t hurt when the home office budget is discussed. The Labour party somehow have got away with their policy being essentially identical (and staggeringly hypocritical). Finally the Government gets to say “we don’t give into violence”.

No-one was killed, and apart from the couple of dozen who were arrested, and the Liberal Democrats, everyone goes home for tea and medals feeling very satisfied with themselves following this rather predictable piece of political theatre. Who says violence doesn’t solve anything?

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From Tiny Acorns, Mighty Oaks Do Grow…

Revolutions like 1917 don’t come very often. Revolutions don’t normally come from people who usually think of themselves as revolutionary: idiots like Plane Stupid, Climate rush or any of the alphabet soup of Marxist wankers smoking in east-london pubs whilst calling each other “comrade”. Revolutions instead usually happen when someone from the broad mass of working and middle class people says “enough” and makes a stand. Someone in authority overreacts, but the public back the person making the stand, rather than “THE LAW”. The governing authorities either catch the mood or get swept aside. Rosa Parks springs to mind. I’m not going to compare the myriad small injustices of British jobsworthery with the civil rights struggle in the southern USA – the latter clearly is a moral absolute, whereas the former is grumbling by people who are in any historical context, enormously wealthy and lucky, but I am going to compare the process by which change happens. Rosa Parks defied the law, and eventually the law caught up with the people who backed her. Today, in the UK, Every day, working and middle class people break the law. Speeding (remember 80mph on an empty motorway is “speeding”), Running red lights on a bicycle, smoking pot, snorting coke, enjoying a lock-in at the local, taking or offering a discount “for cash”. Next year, millions of us will write “none of your fucking business” on a census, risking a £1,000 fine. Maybe one or two of us will be prosecuted. Buglary and robbery are decriminalsed, and it’s only possible to get the police interested in rape, murder and strict-liability motoring offenses.

The law has already become arbitary, ridiculous and widely ignored.

Given the fact there are going to be a lot of people losing their (mostly parasitic) livlihoods in the next couple of years as a result of benefit changes and public-sector cuts, those of us in the majority, paying for the whole shooting-match ought to see some benefit, but probably won’t, and will endure ever higher taxes to pay for it all. There are going to be a lot of pissed off people. At what point does the dissatisfaction with shitty services, rapacious taxation, jobsworths abusing their positions, turn into politicians dangling from lamp-posts on lenghts of piano wire? Instead of remaining small acts of rebellion like a commuters wandering across an area roped off by workmen?

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A Rhetorical Question for Inspector Gadget.

And if there’s no point in arresting “Wayne“, for failing to attend his community service, why bother flagging down “Colin” for speeding?

Oh. Right. Colin has something to lose and can therefore be forced to co-operate with the criminal justice system in pursuit of the sanction detection target.

True, it’s the criminal justice system’s fault, not the beat bobby. In that I agree with Gadget. But the police can lead, by patrolling, and arresting (for this does indeed have a deterrent value, whether or not there’s an custodial sanction at the end of it) or they can admit defeat in the face of the underclass and a pathetically dysfunctional criminal justice system. The underclass, who have long since worked out that co-operation is a mug’s game, will still respond to force judiciously (and legally) applied. Eventually either the police will work out who they serve – the respectable working people who pay their taxes (and parking & speeding fines), and act accordingly, or there will be a revolution when even the middle classes cease to co-operate with the law.

So. The police can either do their job, and get out from behind their warm, safe desks or walking in large groups around safe areas where there might be pretty tourists, and get in to the grotty estates and start putting it about a bit. Aggressive patrolling in the shitty areas on foot will work – it’s what we mean by “bobbies on the beat”, and it’s fiercely resisted by the police because they would have to deal with uncooperative scrotes or even members of the public, instead of watching their arses grow in a flash motor. Car chases, you see are more fun for the police than foot races.

Inspector Gadget has admitted defeat. I sincerely hope there are some police out there with balls, because gadget clearly blames the people he serves “the few remaining law-abiding citizens” of ruraltown should be offended, and if outed, Gadget should be quietly retired for this contempt for the people who pay his wages, and generous pension.

What ever happened to NightJack? He, at least hadn’t forgotten the Peelian principles. Oh yes. The police machine (probably) shopped him to the media. His ideas might have led to the police doing some police work, and that would never do. Far better to harass the middle classes while sitting in the car. Gadget has also clearly drank the NuLab “Police should enforce the law” Kool-Aid. They’ve become merely the provisional wing of the Jobsworth movement, and they’ve earned our contempt – almost as much as your contempt for us, Gadget.

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Police Pay & Conditions.

Inspector Gadget delivers a description of the underclass estate in “ruralshire” which demonstrates total contempt for the community he serves, then asks for a pay rise

…You want to ‘review’ the pay and conditions of the only people left who will go into these areas? What kind of nation fights two needless and ultimately unwinnable foreign wars while its own emergency services have their pay reduced? I lost thousands last year when our SPP’s were scrapped…

My heart is bleeding purple piss for you. I’ll tell you what, take a leaf out of the Army’s book (a Private soldier in the infantry is paid much less to take far more risk than the Police). Go in and do the job out of a sense of duty, it’s what you supposedly signed up for. And don’t bleat about the “risk”. Most coppers are at more risk of a paper-cut than a bullet or knife, and you’re no-where near the top 10 most dangerous jobs in Britain. You don’t see deep sea fishermen or construction workers asking for special favours, and they’ve endured FAR worse at the hands of this recession.

The chavs aren’t Wahhabi-inspired AK-47 toting jihadists. They’re kids with nothing to do. Yet they terrify the “brave” police officers of ruralshire’s constabulary. Maybe the police will be worth a pay rise, when they go in and sort out the sink estates rather than harassing the motorist, or chasing easy sanction-detections. Again, take a leaf out of the Army’s book – agressive patrolling is good for friendly morale, and bad for the enemy’s. Get out of your cars and get seen on the ground in the areas where the problem is. Help and support the decent people of the sink estate, because they exist but with their heads down, and keep an eye on the bad apples.

The police have lost their NuLab top-cover. It’s time they started to do their job again. Just a thought…

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Shopped for Shopping on Call?

Given that the fines for motoring offences are considerably more severe than those meted for kicking the shit out of someone (generally unpunished, if the victim is me for example), it is clear that society regards illegal parking as really very serious indeed.

There are few things that give me more rage and hate for the state than a parking ticket because I take care to obey the rules, and the couple of times I’ve been caught in the past few years, has been because of a misunderstanding of which bay was residents’ and which was pay & display (whilst training, as it happened with the TA) and an unavoidable delay (I’d stopped to help a cyclist who’d been knocked off). Neither excuse washed and I was made to pay the fines anyway. Often the rules are unclear, and the parking attendents act as if they’re on comission, though I understand this is no longer the case.

Obviously though certain, public servants are granted exemption, when in execution of their duties. Clearly the police, or ambulance service responding to a call can reasonably ignore many of the rules of the road including the only crime the police take seriously, speed; and they can abandon a vehicle more or less where they like, if the circumstances demand it. So when I saw this “ambulance” (in truth a vehicle which is designed to meet targets rather than save lives) parked on the double yellow lines outside the front door of our local Sainsbury’s, I thought that someone had suffered a turn at the fish-counter in reaction to the price of Halibut, and fully expected to see a paramedic giving CPR, or at least comforting someone next to the frozen peas.

I saw no such thing.

Do we “little people” who don’t get exemptions from parking tickets when we stop to scrape a cyclist off the pavement allow paramedics or the police to leave their cars wherever they like whilst they go shopping? You could argue that “If a call comes in” she could drop everything and make a quick get away. But if speed is THAT important, should she be picking up her groceries when she’s on call?

The other question would be whether bringing this to the attention of the authorities in the local ambulance service would mark me out as an astonishingly petty twat. Because I hate the police, I’d always shop a cop for speeding if I see one, and the rage I feel when I get a parking ticket means I’m erring on the side of a snot-o-gram e-mail with these attatchments (If I can be bothered).

But I’m seeking the advice of the blogospehere first…

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