Posts by David S 1

Appalling...

...manner in which the people stopped get threatened and entrapped into committing arrestable offences by the police:

1. Photographer is stopped and questioned, being asked to give name, show permit, show the police the photos they have been taking, etc, just for the reason that they are taking photos. They may be challenged by "security people" or PCSOs.

2. There is no reasonable suspicion that they are engaged in terrorist activity, and so there is no reason for the stopped person to answer the questions. This is particularly the case if the person stopped them is a security person or a PCSO.

3. Person stopped objects and argues about it.

4. If it is not a policeman/policewomen who has stopped the person so far, the police are alerted, and we go back to step 1, with the police asking the questions this time round. If it is a policeman/policewoman, carry onto step 5.

5. For not complying with the request, stopped person is then threatened with being charged with a different offence (eg, obstruction) which would be easier to pin on them.

6. Stopped person has now been entrapped intop apparently committing this new offence which has resulted entirely from the police's unreasonable request to begin with.

It is useless expecting government officials to say something and the police to modify their behaviour: the police will just carry on until there are real consequences arising from entrapment activities and over-reaction to stopping people from taking photographs. Photographers will have to risk arrest, and having their DNA taken, etc, leading to failing future CRB checks and so on in order to try to mount successful legal challenges to all this that are not guaranteed to succeed unless there is specific protection under law to taking photos, which I don't see happening. The problem is compounded by the risk that, if journalists are at the forefront of this, then a "quick fix" will be carried out (as in the case of showing a journalist card when being asked to show a non-existent "permit") which will protect journalists and not other members of the public.

GroupThink

One could almost imagine that there are now offiocial government or civil service posts with titles like "MindGuard" whose job it is to undermine and cast doubt on any report critical of them. They probably have a point about the reports failing in this case, but the manner in which the rebuttals have been phrased suggests that the same kind of "MindGuard"-like language would have been used, albeit with different arguments, if undermining a better argued report was required. How about the government being more open to criticism and just more open for a change? No chance of it, and not much chance of any other government being any different, it seems to me.

accountability

On moral and ethical grounds, the severity of the punishments meted out to this criminal in China seems to have been matched by the leniency with which misbehaviour has been dealt with in the UK in its banking crisis. In the Chinese case, accountability seems to have been pursued, though we don't know whether it was completely pursued, meaning we don't know whether there were others who failed to supervise matters in a competent manner to help prevent this criminal initially succeeding. The person concerned has certainly been held to account by suffereing consequences of the most severe kind. In the UK case, accountability may have been identified imperfectly, but there have been little or no consequences, and outright incompetence seems to have been ignored or punished by what seems to be an obscene award of retirement money to ease the people out of the way.

One might say that the two cases almost cancel each other out in terms of proper investigation of intent, competence, and accountability leading to consequences. However, in this case, the overall end result is most definitely not a "happy medium"!

Responsibility

So, rather than putting the onus on parents to supervise their children appropriately, the bill aims to take the anus away from games manufacturers! It seems to me to be arse about tit.

I think

Mr. Thompson seems to have too much spare time on his hands. He probably also needs to get out a bit more: I hear walking in the countryside can be very helpful.

sowing and reaping

We are now just beginning to reap the harvest that has been sowed by the tabloid paedo-hysteria over the past few years. It as led to situations where a man has almost been unable to even glance at any child by chance in the street without being thought of as a potential child abuser; where injured children have been left for fear that helping them may lead to a charge of child abuse; and where people have been told that they cannot take photographs in public places because the risk is that the photographers are child abusers. All of these would effectively ruin lives. Up to now, only a few people have realised that these are ridiculous over-reactions on the part of the public and police, largely whipped up by the tabloid press and others who attempt to justify it with the "if only one child is saved, it is worth it" specious argument. This latest spasm may be the turning point, but I wonder whether it may be the turning point only because we now have two *policewomen* become the victims of this brain-dead application of an ill-thought out piece of legislation.

Conflict of interest not disclosed by MPs?

Given that the wording of these bills are often obscure, capable of being challenged, etc, then any MP who also has connections with legal work (either themselves or their spouses) really ought to declare an interest if the legal work could possibly be done by themselves or their relatives. It is not beyond the pale that some MPs would not work hard at writing clear unambiguous bills, without the inherent ambiguities of subjective terms, and so on, in the knowledge that it would likely send extra well-paid work their way or the way of their relatives (or even close legal associates) Such is the utter destruction of any views about MPs' integrity and honesty that the expenses scandals have brought about that these matters must have a bearing on all of this.

Entrenched self-importance and corruption

The problem is that corrupt practices can, if perpetuated for a long period without challenge, become seen as normal behaviour and not corrupt at all. That is the problem of profesional groups that obtain great amounts of power and which largely regulate themselves: look (or think carefully) about aspects of the medical professions for other examples of this!

The constant over-use of the adjective "honourable" to refer to each other is amusingly ironic for the miscreants of this lot of MPs, and its over-use seems to be a desparate attempt to make it difficult for people to root out the wrong-doers amongst themselves, as well as being a blackly humorous example of the practice of giving something a desired label often and loudly enough, whereupon the label becomes a reality.

Groupthink writ large is at work here within the bosy of MPs and the Houses of Parliament. A good starting solution is total and open public scrutiny: if an MP doesn't want that, then he or she is clearly unsuitable for the position, and voters should ideally vote accordingly (so selection committees should ideally take note.)