Throw Away The Key

Posted on August 29, 2007
Filed Under Welcome To Great Britain, Politics, News | Leave a Comment


“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was one of ex-celebrity Tony Blair’s catchphrases. That was in the days when politicians thought that if they said something, it made it so.

We then had the fiasco of the Home Office not knowing how many dangerous criminals had been let out to wander the streets of this great land of ours (which are probably paved with gold) when they should have been deported. Charles Clarke resigned over it after he was sacked:

On 25 April 2006 it emerged that 1,023 foreign prisoners had been freed without being considered for deportation. Among the offenders, five had been convicted of committing sex offences on children, seven had served time for other sex offences, 57 for violent offences and two for manslaughter. There were also 41 burglars, 20 drug importers, 54 convicted of assault and 27 of indecent assault. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett commented that “Heads should roll” over the scandal, despite the fact that many of the releases occurred during his period as Home Secretary.

John Reid acted tough over the whole concept of criminals, queueing up a fleet of prison hulks along the length of the Thames, then he resigned.

The prison population was growing faster than a colony of rabbits in Mr McGregor’s cabbage patch and soon, every town and village was going to have to have a prison the size of the Bastille planted on its outskirts just to cope with the battalions of jailbirds being sent down by legions of modern Judge Jeffreys impersonators.

Or so we were led to believe.

The fact is that a single mother who forgets to pay her television licence will probably be given twenty years’ hard labour, whereas a drug-crazed hoody who mows down the population of a shopping precinct will probably have twenty minutes’ community service commuted to a pub lunch and a few ounces of smack or skunk or whatever is the drug du jour.

Anyway, the prison officers are revolting about the pay and conditions, especially the threat of violence from inmates who are now called ‘clients’ and have to be treated with deference by the warders, who are actually their private servants.

Jack Straw, who is probably called the Minister for Justice until the title Minister of Truth becomes available in the near future, says it is all illegal and the prison officers will all have to “do a spell in Wormwood, your honour”.

The Telegraph may have a slightly different take on the matter:

Prisons in England and Wales have been thrown into crisis after officers called an illegal, immediate strike in a dispute over pay and the threat of violence at work.

The surprise 24-hour walkout - which has left many prisons with just a skeleton staff - began at 7am.

The Justice Ministry is considering seeking a court order to force the strikers back to work.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, described the strike as “unlawful” and “wholly unjustified”, and attacked unions for only informing the Government half an hour before the action began.

“This is no way for a responsible union to behave”, he said. “The way to resolve these matters is by negotiation, not by an unplanned and unlawful strike.”

The Prisoner Officers Association (POA), which called the strike, said it believed 25,000 wardens across all 140 prisons in the UK would not turn up for work.

Asked what impact the strike would have on prisons, a spokesman told The Telegraph: “No-one will be there”.

The lightning strike is reportedly causing most disruption at local, low-security jails, although larger institutions are also said to be affected.

It is probably time to go back to the old policy of just letting prisoners out willy-nilly and paying them compensation for mental distress caused by a hard yolk in one of the eggs of their full English breakfast.

That’ll teach them a lesson!


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Only Celebrity And Political Children To Be Kept Safe In UK

Posted on August 27, 2007
Filed Under Welcome To Great Britain, Politics, News | Leave a Comment


This is an old story which was not picked up properly at the time. It concerns the fact that when Tony Blair was prime minister, with his endless enthusiasm for celebrity and belief that politicians were just unattractive celebrities, a database was set up to keep track of all UK children.

That is, of course, all children in the UK except those of celebrities and politicians, in case the system turned out to be so leaky and insecure that it let any old pervert and paedophile have access.

And so it came to pass.

The BBC:

Senior social workers have warned that a database designed to protect children in England could be exploited by paedophiles, a newspaper has reported.

The £224m Contact Point System will contain details of the 11m children in the country. It goes live next year.

But the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) has outlined “significant” concerns, The Times said.

However, the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted the system would be secure.

The system was set up after the official inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie concluded the eight-year-old’s murder could have been prevented if there had been better communication between the professionals involved.

[…]

Around 330,000 approved users, including head teachers, doctors and social workers, will have access to the database, The Times said.

Security concerns were heightened by the disclosure that the details of the children of politicians and celebrities were expected to be excluded, the newspaper added.

At the height of BSE, John Selwyn Gummer force fed his daughter a beefburger to “prove” that it was safe to eat infected meat. New Labour cannot even be bothered to pretend that it can create a secure system. It just says there is one rule for the plebs and another for celebrities and politicians. That will really help social cehesion and trust in Gordon Brown’s new “moral compass” government.

Note also that in Australia the government has spent millions on anti-porn software to protect children on the internet. It was cracked in half an hour. So they gave the cracker another software. He cracked it in forty minutes.

Makes one feel very confident about any government database.

Timesonline:

Senior social workers have given warning of the dangers posed by a new government register that will store the details of every child in England from next year.

They fear that the database, containing the address, medical and school details of all under-18s, could be used to harm the children whom it is intended to protect.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ACDS) has written to officials outlining its “significant” concerns about the new system, called ContactPoint, The Times has learnt. Confusion over who is responsible for vetting users and policing the system “may allow a situation where an abuser could be able to access ContactPoint for illegitimate purposes with limited fear of any repercussions”, Richard Stiff, the chairman of the ADCS Information Systems and Technology Policy Committee, said.

The security fears are fuelled further by the admission that information about the children of celebrities and politicians is likely to be excluded from the system.

[…]

Regulations governing the system, which is costing £224 million to build and a further £41 million a year to run, were rushed through parliament without publicity last month, despite the warning of a House of Lords committee. “The enormous size of the database and the huge number of probable users inevitably increase the risks of accidental or inadvertent breaches of security, and of deliberate misuse of the data (eg, disclosure of an address with malign intent), which would be likely to bring the whole scheme into disrepute��?, the Lords’ Select Committee on Merits of Statutory Instruments concluded.

[…]

Concerns have been intensified by the admission that, while every child under 18 in England will have a record, ministers have allowed some children to be given extra protection. The “shielding��? mechanism will mean that information on the offspring of some politicians and celebrities could be left off the main database.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) said that shielding would be available for “children whose circumstances may mean that they, or others, are at increased risk of harm��?. She added: “These decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis and will be based on the level of threat posed if their information becomes more widely available.��?

Children’s rights campaigners and computer security experts say that this amounts to an acknowledgment that the database will not be secure. “The Government acknowledges the risks by instituting these protocols on celebrity and vulnerable children but all children are potentially vulnerable,��? Terri Dowty, of Action on Rights for Children, said.

Ian Brown, a computer security research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that the scale of the database posed huge risks. “When you have got more than 300,000 people accessing this database, it’s just very difficult to stop the sale of information.��?

Remember how successful the government was in publishing the personal details of junior doctors, including addresses and contact details and sexual preferences, on the internet for all to see when they set up an employment database for them?

The problem is also that although the number of people allowed access (at 330 000) is already the population of a large town or small city, this will inevitably grow to include local traffic wardens and park-keepers and every other jobsworth in the employment of the state or office junior within a company in a cosy relationship of sucking money out of the state.

If you want to tell your MP that you would prefer not to have the details of your child available to all and sundry TheyWorkForYou.com would be a good place to start.

If you are planning to visit Great Britain for trade or tourism and want to keep your children safe: leave them behind.


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Share This Tags: celebrity | fiasco | lies | product scares | stupidity | uk

Bush And Brown: Bully And Swot

Posted on August 26, 2007
Filed Under Politics | Leave a Comment


Remember when the school bully met the classroom clown at Camp David all those years ago? The school bully swaggered and drawled, while the classroom clown skipped and frisked around his ankles, pretending to be a little puppy trying to poke its paws into the pockets of those funny trousers someone had made it wear?

The school bully is still there, trying to make people respect him. The classroom clown has disappeared, stomping off in a tantrum when people got tired of his antics. He has been replaced by the school swot, who seems grumpy and could be more of a bruiser than the school bully.

The word in the playground is that there might be a fight on the cards.

The Guardian:

It was brilliant while it lasted. Since he joined George W Bush for a press conference on the lawn at Camp David a month ago, Gordon Brown has managed to have the best of both worlds, convincing the Americans that he’s a true believer in the ’special relationship’ and reminding Britons he’s no Tony Blair. But the game may soon be up.

[…]

In coming weeks and months, Brown will come under increasing pressure to not ‘cut and run’ from the south. Official Washington remains discreet when it comes to criticism of the Prime Minister, but cries of ‘Who lost Basra?’ fill the air as outriders for the Bush administration circle Fort Brown.

The Washington Post recently quoted a senior US intelligence official in Baghdad as saying: ‘The British have basically been defeated in the south.’ Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA intelligence analyst and early advocate of the invasion of Iraq, says British military participation in Iraq ‘has been meaningless for some time’. Last week, General John Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the US army and adviser to Petraeus, who had just got back from Iraq, told the Today programme that Basra is rife with ‘almost gangland warfare’ already and that with further British troop withdrawals, ‘the situation will continue to deteriorate’.

[…]

A pragmatist, Brown was never going to buy into the war in Iraq, much less the broader neoconservative American agenda, in the way Blair did. As he tries to move out of Blair’s shadow, and to recover the support Blair lost by his closeness to Bush, Brown is seeking to recalibrate the special relationship, not end it.

The problem is, does Gordon Brown think he is hard enough to confront the school bully and win?

The difficulty here could be in the usual somewhat facile interpretation of the ’special relationship’. The only way it can be called special is in the way Britain has been conned into believing that America would not invade it or bomb it into oblivion without a second thought if that was perceived to be in America’s best interests. In this case, British politicians can be seen as more special needs and less special friends.

Some comments from the article above:

jsbachUSA -

Screw the Americans! Do what is right for the UK, which is get out ASAP. The bottom line is there is no “special relationship” only the Americans exploiting the Brits as much as possible. The US is declining in power so why tie your ship of state to that boat anchor? It would be far better for the UK and Europe to become closer as a counter balance to the Russia/China bloc that seems to be forming. Of course as a student of Chinese history, I suspect that China will be the dominant partner.

The only time the UK should do anything with the US is when it is beneficial to the UK. Don’t help out the US unless there is something in it for the UK.

I can’t understand why the Brits are so masochistic as to let the US use them over and over and over and ….

Start acting like a real country not just a US puppet!

BTW - Yes, I am an American so I know how you are being used and abused.

Nihon -

Gordon Brown did not come to power, he came to office. As Balfour said when the first Labour government was elected, you may be in office, but we are still in power. Big business is in power. They ruun the economy and society and Gordon Brown cannot ignore this. Capitalism is not a democracy. Elected politicians cannot afford to ignore the rich and powerful in the interest of the electorate.

manilahand -

So if Brown pulls our troops out of Basra the so-called special relationship is threatened. As Catherine Tait would say: am I bovvered? My response would be Scarlett O’Hara’s: Frankly, my dear I don’t give a damn.

I spent over 20 years in Washington DC as Brit working in policy and dealing with DOD officials and State and Treasury officals on international economic affairs. The special relationship was largely one way from the UK to the US. US officials, off the record, were usually snide and condescending about their poor cousins across the pond. It was humiliating and made me angry. It has reached its nadir under the war criminals Bush and Blair.

The problem is that America is a waning economic and political power, but it will not go quietly. As it gradually sinks, it will repeatedly resurface, all guns blazing, all bombs falling on friends and foe alike, as usual. No special relationship will protect Britain then.

As far as the personalities go, Bush and Blair, the sons of bureaucrats, both pretended to religious beliefs and imagined their actions were guided by, obviously, the Christian God. Gordon Brown, the son of a church minister, makes no great noise about his belief, but must have learnt the grubby side of political pragmatism. His actions are more likely to be guided by intellect than a visceral impression of carrying out the designs of the almighty, whether of god or mammon.

The real special relationship between America and Britain is a bit like the artificial friendship concocted by the psychopath in the pub. He comes up to you and claims to know you and offers to buy a drink. Pretty soon your wallet is almost empty and when you stumble into the ill-lit car-park, there is a knife at your throat and your new-found friend is robbing you blind of all you possess.

When Gordon Brown is lying amongst the oily puddles, having been mugged by America, he will see the pale stars reflected in the cold prismatic water.


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Share This Tags: america | george bush | gordon brown | uk
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