Excuses for Riots

A large number of our politicians are showing that they are not much better than the Rioters them selves, as rather than just condemning the riots they try and twist them to their own political ends.

Link to Guardian

The original Riot in Tottenham may have started out from a legitimate protest (the full results from the IPCC has not been released yet), but no riot is excusable - and the spread of the riots was just Thuggery.

Various left wing social commentators are finding excuses for the Rioters, despite them committing inexcusable offences against their communities. They had no placards, they gave no protest and half of the ones who have been interviewed cant come up with a coherent excuse.

"We did it to show that we had no money today

"We did it to show the police we can do what we want"

when they pointed out the police wernt hurt but it was the shop keepers

"We did it to show the rich we can do what we want"

didn't they notice that most of the shops hit were small locally owned businesses.

We have brought up a generation with a large number of people that think that the rules do not apply to them, that there are no consequences and that they can do what they want. When looking at the causes of the riots we need to look at that as well, not only the current situation that led to the riots but also the failings of our society that led them to feel it was OK to do it.

There has been a bright side to all this though - the communities coming together to condemn the rioters and to clean up and rebuild. Both young and old coming out and helping each other and giving shining examples of true British spirit that haven't been seen in years.

Now if we can just build on the positive, maybe there is hope for our society yet.

London Riots spread country wide.

The side effects of the policy allowing young people to run riot has brought riots to the entire country.

For years we have pandered to our kids, allowed them to ignore the police and teachers and attacked authority figures that have stood up to them. Punishments have been reduced to meaningless in schools so our youth feel there are no consequences to their actions. The result is Riots, Mass looting and the death toll to several communities.

They are about to learn there are consequences, when no jobs or businesses return to their communities for fear it happens again. The scars will remain as no one comes to repair the damage, and the number of jobless and impoverished families will grow.

We need to stem the tide now, the government needs announce that they will name and shame those guilty, so they face the wrath of their friends and family. Any over the age of 14 need to be treated as adults in the face of the law with the consequences that come with it. We need to announce the punishments now to prevent further spread.

More importantly we need to take a long look at our society. We need to show our children that there are consequences when the consequences are minor, long before they get to this stage. Discipline needs to come back in to schools and respect for the police needs to be rebuilt. 

We need a society where common sense wins, rather than instant reaction. Where when a parent hears that their child is in trouble - they find out why rather than immediately believing either side. Then stand up for the side that is in the right. In 'The good old days' parents immediately believed the Teacher or Police - now they immediately believe the child. 

Neither is right, but it is the lack of consequences caused by the latter that have enabled the current problems to arise. Our society has had a habit of jumping from one extreme to the other, where the middle ground is needed, and hopefully after the dust has cleared and the rebuilding commences we will not see more knee jerk reactions but a constructive dialogue to rebuild a safer, fairer and stronger society.

Hacking scandal shows a society in crisis.

As more details of the hacking scandal emerge - the amount of power the media has over our society is shown in its full light.

Details of senior members of the police force allowing the prior investigation to remain unchallenged, and the head of the original investigation now being a well paid columnist for News International in The Times (Link).

David Cameron having ignored people from all sides (including the now Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Lord Ashdown) to employ Andy Coulson as his Director of Communications and until the last day or so refusing to try and stop their take over of BskyB.

Tony Blair and Gordon Browns governments were equally in bed with the media, with memo's being leaked showing them trying to silence questions from with in their own party.

News International have lied to the police, lied to parliament and there is evidence that there was a deliberate cover up on behalf of News International (Link).

That a single section in society, and one that should be there to protect has run so rampant shows the peril we are in. The media's ability to hold people in prominent positions to a level above the norm led us down this track. 

MP's are supposed to represent real people, but we try and hold them to unrealistic ideals. Reports on their personal lives don't effect their ability to govern, but do have real effect on their friends and family, people we all strive to protect. We need to crack down on the media, while giving them the freedom to report - they need to be able to be held to account, and prove that what they do to people lives are in the public interest, not just in the interest of selling more papers.

Currently the only party with out immediate and direct links to the Media, and specifically news international are the Liberal Democrats. We are the only ones that can bring about this change with out bias or Rupert Murdoch pulling the strings behind our backs!

Nick Clegg agreeing to back Labour in the defeat of the BskyB deal is a start down this road - hopefully the other partys will follow us towards a fairer and more open society.

When is enough enough?

I have just read a new report about and incident in London.

link

The police's comment at the end shows that they no longer regard stop and search as anti terrorist powers but part of every day policing. Searching people for no reason other than targets or the fact the officer feels like it is bad enough, but in this case the targets of the stop and search were children.

The spiralling abuse of these powers shows the result of what happens when you give people broad unregulated powers. The Labour government has already stated that it's policy is to wait till the horse has bolted before locking the stable door when the Home Secretary said that they would regulated the abuse of the police car tracking system (using every cctv camera in the country) when it happened. With little concern for the fact that it it has already happened by that point.

This attitude has been prevalent with the current government, providing more and more power with little or no regulation.

The Magistrates Association is up in arms at government plans to give police the power to give instant fines (3 points and a criminal conviction on you record) for 'Dangerous Driving' allowing them to be both jury and sentencer. What constitutes dangerous driving can vary widely, and be effected by the mood and attitude. This will have 2 side effects, more fines will be given out as it saves the police the time and paperwork of going to court and people will end up with a criminal conviction with out realising it. In court you can get as much as a £5000 fine and 9 points, so for the worst cases they will be too lenient, and for milder cases they will be too strict.

Link

The government has plans for another 21 offences to be dealt with in this way, but they have been delayed for further consultation - something the government has a habit of ignoring anyway if it goes against their plans.

Paul Holmes the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman pointed out that

"The police have been given wide-ranging powers without adequate debate."

Note that it is the Liberal Democrats commenting not the Conservatives, who them selves have been frequently known to increase police power rather than curtail it.

This is becoming a serious issue as Britain becomes more and more a police state, we can only hope that the Liberal Democrats are successful enough at the next election to have some say in fixing the situation.

Distroyed Data and Swine Flu

This morning has brought 2 issues, More deaths due to the misdiagnosis of Swine Flu and the Police wanting more control over our information.

The news of a mother who died from meningitis when it was misdiagnosed as swine flu over the phone is another tragic example of the state the current has gotten the NHS in to. Where under trained staff man phones, and pretty much everything is classed as swine flu.

The result of this is people are told not to leave their home and too avoid contact with others, this has caused several deaths, with one sixteen year old dying from Tonsillitis, something that I have not heard of killing anyone in the UK in recent years. Now rather than seeing a doctor the NHS has been gotten in to the state where you call a call centre and someone reads questions and diagnosis off the screen, the same way you would with IT support. I have never found this worked particularly well in IT, so I doubt it performs in health issues either.

After a comment in an American paper saying if he was British and used the NHS he would have died, Dr Stephen Hawkin spoke out saying he has received most of his medical support on the NHS - I wonder if he would get the same level of service today he did then, or whether we would loose one of the worlds most brilliant minds.

A shake up of the funding and structure of the NHS is desperately required, not just with the IT budget the way the Conservatives suggest but across the board, the Conservatives put accountants in charge rather than doctors and this has caused a huge degradation of the system, what is needed is a hybrid where you have mangers dealing with the business issues at the behest of doctors rather than telling the doctors that more cleaning staff would cost too much money and the occasional case of MRSA is a reasonable risk when offset against the cost. Tell that to the patients who's lives are ruined by it.

Also in the news is a piece of software that causes data on the internet to 'self destruct' after a specific period of time, after which no one can recover it.

The Police don't like this, note I said Police not the security services, the Police are supposed to be there to protect us, but more and more this comes from limiting our freedoms and keeping us under close surveillance. The assumption is we are guilty till we prove to them otherwise.

The comment from a police forensics expert is that it that data should work like the police being able to enter a persons home and search. If this is the case though I can shred or burn any correspondence I don't want others to see so Vanish would actually be supplying what he is asking for (somthing I doubt anyone has pointed out to him).

The more we become reliant on the internet and data, the more we need the ability to protect our selves, not just from 'Over enthusiastic policing' but from hackers and criminals wanting to use this against us.

Should the Liberal Democrats get in to power, privacy and human rights are high on the agenda, not only with plans to protect the privacy of the individual, and to implement a permanent right to privacy in a bill of rights, but increasing the rights of the victim rather than the criminal.

The world we are heading towards is a very scary place where our every movement is monitored by the government in case we do something wrong, the Liberal Democrats will not only move direction away from this, by try and prevent future governments from heading in that direction again, giving us what I see as our only chance to keep Britain as a free nation.