Sólo en Inglaterra

Jesus wept. And so should any decent human being to read one more egregious example of the police state created by NuLabour and very carefully NOT dismantled by a coalition containing the supposedly civil libertarian LibDems.

Mrs McIntosh (76) and her 46 year-old daughter were ARRESTED for feeding pigeons in their own back yard. We have empowered the nosy neighbours, the kill-joys, the whiners and the oi no moi roights brigade at the direct expense of common sense, and we are deservedly regarded with contempt by the rest of the world as well as by a large proportion of our own population.

Britishness? The right to make everybody else as miserable as you are. The Big (pile of shit) Society, with history's hand hovering over the lever to flush it away for the betterment of humanity.

Demophrodisiac

Since many of the po-faced MSM commentators must have experienced the last wave of student demos when they had waists and hair, I wonder that none has dared mention the main attraction, namely that the girls get all aroused and the boys get to fuck them.

Forty years ago a bunch of Cambridge students, wound up by Gottfried, brother of the German Rote Armee Fraktion terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, attacked the Garden House Hotel because it was staging a Greek Week. The youths wanted to register their disapproval of the military junta then ruling Greece, got into it with the cops, and seven of them were successfully prosecuted and sent to prison or borstal.

A somewhat roseate account of it appears in Cam (page 22 of pdf), the Cambridge mag. A shorter version in the dependably chicken-shit Independent identifies Gottfried Ensslin only as "a West German student".

What is perfectly clear from the full article is that some, maybe most of those involved had no previous experience of demo-excitement and just got carried away by the moment.

There was, as I recall, great satisfaction among the citizens of Cambridge that "the gown" was at last being treated the same way as "the town" would have been. The stunted careers of the individuals involved does a lot to explain why political activism in Cambridge took a forty-year sabbatical.

In 1968, when asked to express solidarity with rioting students, the communist Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini replied that in any conflict between the children of the working class - the police - and the children of the bourgeoisie, he was unreservedly on the side of the children of the working class.

Street kids

Last night's Channel 4 Dispatches was a jolting piece of unsentimental reporting about kids who are driven to live on the street by intolerable domestic circumstances or by adolescent revolt. It showed, pretty clearly, that the kids had made a bad situation for themselves - or a bad situation much worse - by their personal choices, even though in some cases those choices were conditioned by deep psychiatric problems

Despite being invited to do so, they bravely refused to claim the status of victims, prizing their autonomy above offers of help and shelter from the Welfare State apparat. Yet right at the end the programme makers threw in a  line about "savage cuts" in the welfare budget that will make the kids' situation even more hopeless. There was no evidence given or even suggested to indicate that the money is currently being well spent. 

That was followed by Coppers, an equally unsentimental piece of real life as seen by the police. I know in principle that they are social garbage collectors, but it was humbling to see how they preserve their sanity and even a modicum of cheerfulness when dealing with an endless procession of self-destructive human jetsam. 

Ecuador - the personal perils of populism

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is a brave man. Quite apart from kissing Hillary Clinton, which takes nerves of steel, yesterday he decided to face down mutinous police officers in their barracks. "I'm not taking one step back", he said when they advanced on him. "If you want to kill the president, here he is, kill him if you have the guts."

So they pelted him with stones and tear gas canisters, and Correa's bodyguards had to carry him from the scene to the nearby police hospital. The police surrounded it, still apparently wishing to take the president at his word, until an army unit came to break the siege.

The rebellion spread through the country, accompanied by widespread looting, but although some air force personnel tried to take over Quito international airport, the armed forces so far seem to be remaining loyal.

The cause of this unrest? Correa's attempt to reduce the cost of public administration by passing a law that, if implemented, will end the automatic award of medals and bonuses with each no less automatic promotion, which would take place every seven years rather than the current five.

Drinks all round at Britain's Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Danny Alexander - Kant

Seems my post of 4 May about Enabling Acts is very much a live issue. I reported that HM Revenue and Customs had drafted new laws penalising ‘deliberate wrongdoing’, defined as an act capable of causing a ‘loss of tax.’ This in turn was defined as ‘relief, reduction, repayment or credit of any kind.’

In other words, the HRMC turds wanted to make legitimate tax avoidance illegal. Having created the most complex and inefficient tax code in the world, HRMC wished it to be a crime for anyone to advise another how to mimimise tax within the laws HRMC itself has created.

Yesterday Danny 'Beaker' Alexander, the LibDem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, delivered himself of the following, which has the Bitchy Boys squeezing themselves with delight:

As it is right to ensure that every benefit is fully justified, so we must ensure that every tax bill is paid in full. There are some people who believe that not paying their fair share of tax is a socially acceptable lifestyle choice. Like the benefit cheats, they take resources from those who need them most. Tax avoidance and evasion are unacceptable in the best of times but in today's times it is morally indefensible.

So - the LibDems are keen on stripping the uniformed police of the civil liberties-infringing powers given to them by the Blair-Brown regime, but they are all in favour of giving the fiscal police the right to prosecute people who have obeyed the law but failed to act in accordance with what they regard as an absolute and universal moral obligation, as per Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

I always suspected the LibDems were Kants.

Hair-splitting as an art form

The following from the second leader in today's Times sets the bar very high indeed. The editorial is about the murdering bastard James Chesney, a Roman Catholic priest we let walk back in 1972 even though we knew he was responsible for a daisy-chain of car bombs that killed nine people in the village of Claudy.

Claudy's sole "offence" in the eyes of the Provisional IRA, the fascist* organization created by Chesney and other Catholic priests with the backing of future Irish premier Charles Haughey, was that Protestants and Catholics lived there peacefully side-by-side. Five of the dead were Catholic, the other four Protestant.

Anyway, here's the hair-split:

The temptation to draw parallels between Father Chesney and more recent preachers of Islamic terror is strong, but should be resisted. There is no suggestion that Father Chesney was a religious terrorist. Rather it is thought that he was a political sectarian terrorist who happened to be a priest.

How can anyone write such drivel?

*I am using the word with historical accuracy. PIRA was an ultra-nationalist, religious sectarian movement formed in opposition to the Official IRA, which was Marxist and secular. Haughey was the most corrupt Irish politician since De Valera, who made independent Ireland a Roman Catholic theocracy.

Police forensics

Deeply disturbing report in Reason about an investigation of North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) crime lab that found evidence of systematic perversion of justice, including in death penalty cases.

The report found that SBI agents withheld exculpatory evidence or distorted evidence in more than 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those cases resulted in execution. There was widespread lying, corruption, and pressure from prosecutors and other law enforcement officials on crime lab analysts to produce results that would help secure convictions. And the pressure worked.

The SBI crime lab scandal is only the most recent story of forensics malfeasance. In recent years there have been forensics scandals in Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nebraska, California, Michigan, Texas, and at the FBI. And this is only a partial list. At some point, it becomes sensible to conclude that these scandals aren't the result of isolated bad actors, but of a system that produces them.

Given that I have very low expectations of any state agency, why do I find it disturbing? Because the British police depend more on forensics than any of the US police forces or even the FBI. It was what the British police turned to after judges stopped tolerating their "fitting up" of suspects in the late 1970s. Science, not undependable detectives and their sleazy informers, would ensure safe convictions.

The emphasis on DNA in crime solution, in which Britain was a world pioneer, led to the police recovering some of the prestige - although considerably less of the public trust - lost to the overturned convictions and revelations about senior police officers living cheek-by-jowl with notorious gangsters on the Costa del Dosh.

So the question that now forms in my mind is: did the leopard change its spots? Did forensics drive out the culture of corruption in the police forces of Britain, or did that culture find a way to corrupt forensics?

The problem is that there is no form of independent oversight in this country, and not the smallest chance in hell that any Minister of Justice would order the sort of investigation by qualified outsiders that Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered in North Carolina.

In the absence of such oversight, it is a racing certainty that the crime labs of our police forces and the Met are every bit as corrupted by pressure to produce convictions as their peers across the pond.

Justice in the wild

An anecdote from my sister in Texas:

A Mexican family were on their way to the States when they were stopped by armed men who took their pickup truck and everything they owned. They were walking along the highway when a truck stopped and the driver asked them what they were doing in the middle of nowhere with small children in tow. They told him what had happened and he said he would give them a ride.

After a while the driver turned off onto a country trail, eventually stopping at an isolated ranch where armed men greeted them. The jefe asked them to repeat their story and then took them to a place where there were dozens of parked trucks. He asked them which one was theirs. Hesitantly, they pointed at their vehicle. The jefe then asked which of the men present had stolen it. Even more nervously, they identified one of the men.

The jefe swore angrily that he had given orders that nobody over the age of 50 was to be stopped. He then drew a pistol, shot the man who had carjacked the family and told them to take their truck and leave.

Works for me. Those operating in lawless environments still need to enforce rules: a little lacking in nuance, perhaps, but swift and salutary.

ASBOs

Richard Sennett, a decidedly lefty professor of sociology at LSE and professor of social science at MIT, has a dynamite article in the Guardian titled "The ASBO is an icon of New Labour negligence". He celebrates the abolition of the Anti-Social Banning Order, Tony Blair's flagship policy to deal with youth pre-criminal disorderly behaviour by - umm - criminalizing it. 

Blair thought social behaviour could be "reformed" top-down, and in this, exactly missed the point of my work. Cultures hold together or fall apart for reasons that transcend power. On the housing estate in Chicago where I lived as a child, frail African-American grandmothers and Italian grandfathers issued something like ASBOs and these were likely to be obeyed: the grandparents commanded a moral authority which no policeman or social worker will ever possess. Of the 17,000 ASBOs issued from 2000 to 2008, 55% have been breached, so the new government is looking for something else.

Good social behaviour among adolescents is all about family countering peer pressure. This is not quite a matter of family "values": kids who routinely go to the pub with their parents get a different education in drinking than teenagers who only swill with each other. So too with meals: working-class adolescents who regularly eat meals with their parents have proved less likely to fall into crime than kids who clean out the fridge on the run. "Values" arise from the habits of everyday life; they are not abstract imperatives: no law could command people when to eat and drink, and with whom.

Note the typical lefty parentheses around family "values". You can just see him doing that stupid American thing with hooked fore and middle fingers wiggling to show disdain for non-PC terminology.

Problem is, you sad old lefty, your argument coincides exactly with what those you dismiss as right-wing have been saying for decades. The matriarchs and patriarchs you recall no longer exist because their function was utterly - and deliberately - subverted by "progressive" social policies designed to turn the lower classes into clients of a state apparat manned by a new lower middle class of parasitic government employees.   

Boys in Black (part 3)

Police Constable Stuart Davidson wrote an anonymous blog about police abuses and the wastefulness of British police bureaucracy and therefore became the target of a statist man-hunt before revealing his identity in 2007 after emigrating to Canada, where he swiftly found  job with the Edmonton police.

Writing as David Copperfield, his article in today's Telegraph identifies all the fundamental ways in which they do things better in Canada. Best to read it in full. 

Boys in black (part 2)

Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, makes a strong defence of the proliferation of CCTV cameras and the retention of the DNA of all ever involved in a police inquiry on Critical Reaction. The article is titled "For the Record" and sub-titled "Is there a case against CCTV and the DNA database, or is it a case of feeling good about oneself?"

BS, my good sir. The case against CCTV and the DNA database is that the assault on civil liberties by the Blair-Brown regime has persuaded quite a large proportion of the public that the government is their enemy, and that the police are a self-serving instrument of oppression.

Davies' argument draws on the standard false dichotomy between security and liberty. The first depends on coercion, the second on consent. No surprise to find a Tory favouring coercion, but it sits ill with the "trust the people" line of his party leader.

Not the least of the transformations of British public affairs over the last decade or so is that defence of civil liberty is now seen as "right wing", and that the reflexive police statism of persons like Davies represents the oh-so respectable middle ground of British politics.   

Boys in black (part 1)

Yesterday the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that no charges would be brought against the policeman who struck and knocked down Ian Tomlinson (video here), who died a little later. The incident took place while the usual yahoos were demonstrating against the G 20 summit on April Fool's day last year.

Tomlinson's offence appears to have been a surly unwillingness to get out of the way of the riot police and their dogs. Police Constable Simon Harwood, who resigned from the Metropolitan Police in the late 1990s following an incident of road rage, and faced a charge of excessive force when employed by the Surrey police, has been suspended ever since the Tomlinson incident. Coroner Mohmed Saeed Sulema Patel, who found COD to be heart failure despite evidence of internal bleeding, has also been suspended.

The real scandals here are that Harwood was ever re-employed by the Metropolitan Police, let alone assigned to riot control, and that Patel was still employed by the Home Office. He was disciplined by the General Medical Council in 1999 for telling reporters that Roger Sylvester, a 30-year-old who died in police custody, was a crack cocaine user, and has 26 charges pending before the General Medical Council relating to four post mortem examinations carried out between 2002 and 2004.

It follows, does it not, that whoever appointed Patel to perform the autopsy on Tomlinson surely knew there was a good chance he would make such a mess of it that, whatever his findings, the DPP would be unable to proceed to a prosecution of Harwood with any hope of a conviction. 

I don't know how anyone can summon up genuine indignation about this latest manifestation of police impunity. The creation of reasonable doubt around the illegal actions of its members has been standard operating procedure for the British police for as long as I can remember.