December 22, 2005
Random Thoughts.
I've been awake since 4am and I can't now go back to sleep as I have too much to do. It's a strange experience to be wide awake and tired at the same time...
...There's some stupid bitch on Radio 4's Today programme claiming that the few positive 'blogs in Iraq PROVES (oh yes) that all the stories about the war going down the crapper are overblown. A suicide attack nearly every day and an Iranian-backed Theocracy in the making? Oh yeah, there's lots to be positive about...
...Now I hear that slime-encrusted cock Blair has flown in on a surprise trip to Basra. They may be planning to withdraw. But why go all the way to Basra to talk to the officials there? He could have just tele-conferenced or sent a lackey instead...
...But it looks good in front of the cameras, innit? The World Leader, flying across the world to undo bad things that he helped cause in the first place. Even now, when he's flat on his arse, he keeps making all these grand gestures to an audience that isn't interested any more.
...There's some stupid bitch on Radio 4's Today programme claiming that the few positive 'blogs in Iraq PROVES (oh yes) that all the stories about the war going down the crapper are overblown. A suicide attack nearly every day and an Iranian-backed Theocracy in the making? Oh yeah, there's lots to be positive about...
...Now I hear that slime-encrusted cock Blair has flown in on a surprise trip to Basra. They may be planning to withdraw. But why go all the way to Basra to talk to the officials there? He could have just tele-conferenced or sent a lackey instead...
...But it looks good in front of the cameras, innit? The World Leader, flying across the world to undo bad things that he helped cause in the first place. Even now, when he's flat on his arse, he keeps making all these grand gestures to an audience that isn't interested any more.
December 11, 2005
Blair Needs An Asbo...
Tony Blair, still in denial of the inevitable, has 'written' an article publised in today's Obesrver. (By 'written', I mean 'ordered a lackey to ghost-write it', of course.) In it Blair defends the odd practice of ASBOs, a means of punishing people in all sorts of surreal ways without actually taking them to court or discouraging the real toerags. A way to do next to nothing except bullying people otherwise protected by the law? Cool...
And with that in mind, here's that article in full, complete with my blow-by-blow retorts...
In advance of the publication of new proposals on anti-social behaviour and organised crime, we will once again, as a government, be under attack for eroding essential civil liberties. It is right to set this argument within a more coherent intellectual and political framework. It is not just about tough versus soft but about whose civil liberties come first.
Tony seems to think that civil liberties can be switched on or off. If they are not commonly shared, then they are civil privileges. That is, something the state grants and which are so anything but liberties.
Britain, by 1997, had undergone rapid cultural and social change in recent decades. Much of this was necessary and good. Rigid class divisions and old-fashioned prejudices were holding Britain back. But some social change had damaging and unforeseen consequences.
Social change? When Blair came to power, it was plain he was still a public schoolboy from Fettes. Necessary and good? Go to an old mining village and say that in the pub, if you really believe it. As for damaging and unforeseen consequences, see under ‘truisms’ in the dictionary you seem not to have…
Family ties were weakened. Communities were more fractured, sometimes as a result of desirable objectives like social mobility or diversity, sometimes as the consequence of mass unemployment and failed economic policies. Civil institutions such as the church declined in importance. At the start of the 20th century, communities shared a strong moral code. By the end of the century this was no longer as true.
This assumes that communal values equate necessarily with morality. Not so – only obedience, with the result that when they go tits up, so does the veneer of moral behaviour. Individual responsibility doesn’t get a look in.
As society changed, so do did the nature of crime. There was an explosion in crime and, in particular, violence fuelled by drug abuse.
...Caused by a booming black market that the Labour party has done little to remedy by lacking the guts to prescribe narcotics, wiping out the black market en route.
There were far more guns in circulation and far less reluctance to use them.
This trend started, curiously, in 1997, when Labour banned the private ownership of handguns, instantly making them THE fashion accessory for wannabe gangsters and yardies.
We saw the growth of new crimes such as people trafficking, computer fraud and mobile phone theft. Organised crime became a major international operation.
Has ‘become’? I guess the Mafia and the Yakuza only recently got started in 1983…
As for people trafficking, again Labour’s lack of balls in dealing with a sane immigration policy is a major cause. How about green cards and a more efficient processing of asylum applications?
But while the world had moved on, the criminal justice system was stuck. By 1997, it was failing every reasonable test that could be applied. Crime had doubled. Trials were ineffective, witness protection was poor and the courts were very inefficient. There were huge delays, for example, between young criminals being charged and coming to court.
Nothing much has changed. While crime as a whole has come down, this is due to a buoyant economy – care of Gordon Brown, rather than Blair and his home secretaries. Meanwhile violent crime has shot up, and it still takes ages for the CPS to get through all its cases.
We thus inherited a system that was increasingly unable to deal with the problems it faced. Anti-social behaviour was becoming a very serious problem on some estates but the courts were too cumbersome a process to deal with it expeditiously. The system was failing.
'Still is.
The choice was stark; either we accepted that nothing could be done, that we would allow the rights of victims routinely to be trampled on, or we granted new powers to local authorities and the police. This was, and is, the rationale for all the so-called summary powers that we have introduced.
Or you could have made the police more efficient, dealt with social problems at a local level and actually ran the courts service effectively. Did you? Did you bollocks.
These powers have a strong philosophical justification, from within the Labour tradition. Social democratic thought was always the application of morality to political philosophy. One of the basic insights of the left, one of its distinguishing features, is to caution against too excessive an individualism. People must live together and one of the basic tasks of government is to facilitate this living together, to ensure that the many can live without fear of the few.
‘Too much individualism is bad’ – good to see Tony Blair and Fidel Castro have so many views in common…
That was why it was important that rights were coupled once again with responsibilities. As Tawney once put it: 'what we have been witnessing ... is the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations'.
Not enough control and obedience, dammit! Mother, get my belt!!!
On the left, by the 1980s, we had bent our argument too far in the opposite direction. We had come to be associated with the belief that the causes of crime are entirely structural. In defiance of our own traditions of thought we had eliminated individual responsibility from the account. We had lost sight, too, of the fact that it was those who depended most on a Labour Government to improve their lives who suffered most from crime and anti-social behaviour and were most insistent that we do more to help them.
So individuality is a bad thing but individual responsibility is a good thing? Err, thanks for clearing that one up for us.
This, of course, did not mean we could ignore the divisions in our country. Instead of record unemployment, we now have record numbers of people in work.
Either via pork barrel non-jobs in the public sector or in a service industry propped up by dodgy debt and unrealistic house prices…
Sustained investment in schools is improving education for all.
Then why can’t so many school leavers read? How can all that extra form filling you imposed have helped teachers to do their jobs better? And why did your education minister decide to ‘redesign’ how literacy is taught last week YET AGAIN? Hardly a sign it's all going well, is it?
The New Deal has helped one million youngsters off the scrapheap and into work.
…Into low-paid jobs they would have probably got anyway, given the economy right now.
Sure Start and the New Deal for Communities are making huge differences to the most deprived neighbourhoods.
Hang on, I thought you said these hard-done-by places were falling apart? Again, you also see solutions lying in collective rather than individual assistance.
However, it wasn't just a question of matching legal rights with legal responsibilities. It was about changing the legal processes by which such rights and responsibilities are determined. Traditional court processes and laws simply could not and did not protect people against the random violence and low-level disorder that affected their lives. Yes, you could, with Herculean application, remove the drug dealer living in the street. But the reality was, because of the Herculean effort required, it wasn't done. Now, by giving more so-called summary powers, it can be.
What a load of unconvincing tripe. Drug dealers aren’t exactly on the run right now, are they?
We have provided new tools including Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, acceptable behaviour contracts and dispersal orders and will enable them to take tough action against the pubs and clubs fostering drunken violence.
Ooh, a bit of paper telling a chav who has no respect for rules in the first place how to behave. That’ll show ‘em!
Police have further tools such as fixed penalty notices and penalty notices to tackle disorder. Where these new powers are being used effectively they are making a big difference and restoring public confidence that the criminal justice system is supporting the law-abiding majority. These measures are already starting to work. Tomorrow I will unveil some new research that shows the progress that we have made.
Which, despite being done by a team you chose yourself, will no doubt define itself by its probity, honesty and objectivity. Honest.
We will continue by providing a uniformed presence in every community through neighbourhood policing.
No doubt these are yet more of those invisible policemen I’ve been hearing about. God only knows, I haven’t seen that many of them…
The 'Respect' action plan which will be published in January will set out in more detail the new suite of powers and policies to go further and faster to tackle the problems. We will continue to review powers available for the Serious Crime Agency to ensure maximum disruption for those engaged in organised criminality. There will be a stronger focus on re-offending with sentence plans for offenders. We will have renewed focus on the most persistent drug users.
Why go to the effort of announcing this? Why not just do it and then we’d notice. Or is being seen to do something more feasible than actually doing it?
Our critics, who usually do not live in the communities most affected by crime and anti-social behaviour, often describe these measures as overly punitive and a threat to basic legal principles.
This is rather rich coming from someone who lives in a steel bubble, with a 24-hour police guard and a worldview moulded by whatever Alasdair Campbell tells you to believe. It’s also a good example of a weak argument – rather than engage with your critics, just ‘slime’ them and hope everyone is too distracted to see how crap you are.
We are criticised for introducing rough justice and removing courts from the sentencing process. In fact, we are very sensitive to the need to preserve accountability. Authority always has to be exercised with due restraint. We will ensure that good appeals processes are always built into new structures. The powers we have extended to the authorities can, and do, come under legal challenge.
If you’re so concerned with due restraint, then why aren’t the courts involved? Don’t you trust your own judiciary?
But this is not a debate between those who value liberty and those who do not. It is an argument about the types of liberties that need to be protected given the changing nature of the crimes that violate them. And it is an attempt to protect the most fundamental liberty of all - freedom from harm by others.
Ah, more abuse of meaning. Again, Tony portrays freedom as something that needs to be constrained, regulated, authorised. But freedom is freedom is freedom.
One could argue that a hamster in a cage is free from being eaten by the ginger moggy from next door, but that’s not exactly freedom in the ‘give me liberty or give me death’ sense.
And what about the basic liberty not to have the government breathing down your neck? Or is it only those naughty ‘individualists’ who abuse their rights? What about freedom from harm by over-zealous local authorities and police?
Critics of our response need to face the following question squarely. If the criminal justice system was failing people, as it clearly was, what ought to be done about it?
Err, more police, faster prosecutions and more resources for dealing with offenders? Oops, pardon me, that would cost money…
To do nothing is one option.
Sticking a cucumber up one’s bottom is another. Thanks for stating the blinkin’ obvious…
But surely it is to do better by the British people to devise relevant powers, limited by the right of appeal, to ensure that communities do not have to live with unacceptable levels of fear and intimidation. The basic liberties of the law-abiding citizen should come first.
Perhaps this Christmas Cherie will get Tony a dictionary so he can find out what the word ‘liberties’ actually means. (While he’s at it, he could also look at the definitions of words like ‘retirement’ and ‘anachronism’.) But for now, Tony really ought to realise that if liberties aren’t equally shared, then neither will ‘responsibilities’. If we are not all equal in terms of our rights then how can we be a just society? Chavs are twats, but any system that is unbalanced, unfair and unregulated by the courts is every bit as anti-social…
Still, thanks to Asbos, at least rogue farmers no longer menace the streets of Norfolk with wayward pigs. At least 88 year old men can’t now be sarcastic to their neighbours. And, just to put our minds at rest, at least suicidal young women can’t drown themselves in canals anymore. We can all sleep well in our beds now!
And with that in mind, here's that article in full, complete with my blow-by-blow retorts...
In advance of the publication of new proposals on anti-social behaviour and organised crime, we will once again, as a government, be under attack for eroding essential civil liberties. It is right to set this argument within a more coherent intellectual and political framework. It is not just about tough versus soft but about whose civil liberties come first.
Tony seems to think that civil liberties can be switched on or off. If they are not commonly shared, then they are civil privileges. That is, something the state grants and which are so anything but liberties.
Britain, by 1997, had undergone rapid cultural and social change in recent decades. Much of this was necessary and good. Rigid class divisions and old-fashioned prejudices were holding Britain back. But some social change had damaging and unforeseen consequences.
Social change? When Blair came to power, it was plain he was still a public schoolboy from Fettes. Necessary and good? Go to an old mining village and say that in the pub, if you really believe it. As for damaging and unforeseen consequences, see under ‘truisms’ in the dictionary you seem not to have…
Family ties were weakened. Communities were more fractured, sometimes as a result of desirable objectives like social mobility or diversity, sometimes as the consequence of mass unemployment and failed economic policies. Civil institutions such as the church declined in importance. At the start of the 20th century, communities shared a strong moral code. By the end of the century this was no longer as true.
This assumes that communal values equate necessarily with morality. Not so – only obedience, with the result that when they go tits up, so does the veneer of moral behaviour. Individual responsibility doesn’t get a look in.
As society changed, so do did the nature of crime. There was an explosion in crime and, in particular, violence fuelled by drug abuse.
...Caused by a booming black market that the Labour party has done little to remedy by lacking the guts to prescribe narcotics, wiping out the black market en route.
There were far more guns in circulation and far less reluctance to use them.
This trend started, curiously, in 1997, when Labour banned the private ownership of handguns, instantly making them THE fashion accessory for wannabe gangsters and yardies.
We saw the growth of new crimes such as people trafficking, computer fraud and mobile phone theft. Organised crime became a major international operation.
Has ‘become’? I guess the Mafia and the Yakuza only recently got started in 1983…
As for people trafficking, again Labour’s lack of balls in dealing with a sane immigration policy is a major cause. How about green cards and a more efficient processing of asylum applications?
But while the world had moved on, the criminal justice system was stuck. By 1997, it was failing every reasonable test that could be applied. Crime had doubled. Trials were ineffective, witness protection was poor and the courts were very inefficient. There were huge delays, for example, between young criminals being charged and coming to court.
Nothing much has changed. While crime as a whole has come down, this is due to a buoyant economy – care of Gordon Brown, rather than Blair and his home secretaries. Meanwhile violent crime has shot up, and it still takes ages for the CPS to get through all its cases.
We thus inherited a system that was increasingly unable to deal with the problems it faced. Anti-social behaviour was becoming a very serious problem on some estates but the courts were too cumbersome a process to deal with it expeditiously. The system was failing.
'Still is.
The choice was stark; either we accepted that nothing could be done, that we would allow the rights of victims routinely to be trampled on, or we granted new powers to local authorities and the police. This was, and is, the rationale for all the so-called summary powers that we have introduced.
Or you could have made the police more efficient, dealt with social problems at a local level and actually ran the courts service effectively. Did you? Did you bollocks.
These powers have a strong philosophical justification, from within the Labour tradition. Social democratic thought was always the application of morality to political philosophy. One of the basic insights of the left, one of its distinguishing features, is to caution against too excessive an individualism. People must live together and one of the basic tasks of government is to facilitate this living together, to ensure that the many can live without fear of the few.
‘Too much individualism is bad’ – good to see Tony Blair and Fidel Castro have so many views in common…
That was why it was important that rights were coupled once again with responsibilities. As Tawney once put it: 'what we have been witnessing ... is the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations'.
Not enough control and obedience, dammit! Mother, get my belt!!!
On the left, by the 1980s, we had bent our argument too far in the opposite direction. We had come to be associated with the belief that the causes of crime are entirely structural. In defiance of our own traditions of thought we had eliminated individual responsibility from the account. We had lost sight, too, of the fact that it was those who depended most on a Labour Government to improve their lives who suffered most from crime and anti-social behaviour and were most insistent that we do more to help them.
So individuality is a bad thing but individual responsibility is a good thing? Err, thanks for clearing that one up for us.
This, of course, did not mean we could ignore the divisions in our country. Instead of record unemployment, we now have record numbers of people in work.
Either via pork barrel non-jobs in the public sector or in a service industry propped up by dodgy debt and unrealistic house prices…
Sustained investment in schools is improving education for all.
Then why can’t so many school leavers read? How can all that extra form filling you imposed have helped teachers to do their jobs better? And why did your education minister decide to ‘redesign’ how literacy is taught last week YET AGAIN? Hardly a sign it's all going well, is it?
The New Deal has helped one million youngsters off the scrapheap and into work.
…Into low-paid jobs they would have probably got anyway, given the economy right now.
Sure Start and the New Deal for Communities are making huge differences to the most deprived neighbourhoods.
Hang on, I thought you said these hard-done-by places were falling apart? Again, you also see solutions lying in collective rather than individual assistance.
However, it wasn't just a question of matching legal rights with legal responsibilities. It was about changing the legal processes by which such rights and responsibilities are determined. Traditional court processes and laws simply could not and did not protect people against the random violence and low-level disorder that affected their lives. Yes, you could, with Herculean application, remove the drug dealer living in the street. But the reality was, because of the Herculean effort required, it wasn't done. Now, by giving more so-called summary powers, it can be.
What a load of unconvincing tripe. Drug dealers aren’t exactly on the run right now, are they?
We have provided new tools including Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, acceptable behaviour contracts and dispersal orders and will enable them to take tough action against the pubs and clubs fostering drunken violence.
Ooh, a bit of paper telling a chav who has no respect for rules in the first place how to behave. That’ll show ‘em!
Police have further tools such as fixed penalty notices and penalty notices to tackle disorder. Where these new powers are being used effectively they are making a big difference and restoring public confidence that the criminal justice system is supporting the law-abiding majority. These measures are already starting to work. Tomorrow I will unveil some new research that shows the progress that we have made.
Which, despite being done by a team you chose yourself, will no doubt define itself by its probity, honesty and objectivity. Honest.
We will continue by providing a uniformed presence in every community through neighbourhood policing.
No doubt these are yet more of those invisible policemen I’ve been hearing about. God only knows, I haven’t seen that many of them…
The 'Respect' action plan which will be published in January will set out in more detail the new suite of powers and policies to go further and faster to tackle the problems. We will continue to review powers available for the Serious Crime Agency to ensure maximum disruption for those engaged in organised criminality. There will be a stronger focus on re-offending with sentence plans for offenders. We will have renewed focus on the most persistent drug users.
Why go to the effort of announcing this? Why not just do it and then we’d notice. Or is being seen to do something more feasible than actually doing it?
Our critics, who usually do not live in the communities most affected by crime and anti-social behaviour, often describe these measures as overly punitive and a threat to basic legal principles.
This is rather rich coming from someone who lives in a steel bubble, with a 24-hour police guard and a worldview moulded by whatever Alasdair Campbell tells you to believe. It’s also a good example of a weak argument – rather than engage with your critics, just ‘slime’ them and hope everyone is too distracted to see how crap you are.
We are criticised for introducing rough justice and removing courts from the sentencing process. In fact, we are very sensitive to the need to preserve accountability. Authority always has to be exercised with due restraint. We will ensure that good appeals processes are always built into new structures. The powers we have extended to the authorities can, and do, come under legal challenge.
If you’re so concerned with due restraint, then why aren’t the courts involved? Don’t you trust your own judiciary?
But this is not a debate between those who value liberty and those who do not. It is an argument about the types of liberties that need to be protected given the changing nature of the crimes that violate them. And it is an attempt to protect the most fundamental liberty of all - freedom from harm by others.
Ah, more abuse of meaning. Again, Tony portrays freedom as something that needs to be constrained, regulated, authorised. But freedom is freedom is freedom.
One could argue that a hamster in a cage is free from being eaten by the ginger moggy from next door, but that’s not exactly freedom in the ‘give me liberty or give me death’ sense.
And what about the basic liberty not to have the government breathing down your neck? Or is it only those naughty ‘individualists’ who abuse their rights? What about freedom from harm by over-zealous local authorities and police?
Critics of our response need to face the following question squarely. If the criminal justice system was failing people, as it clearly was, what ought to be done about it?
Err, more police, faster prosecutions and more resources for dealing with offenders? Oops, pardon me, that would cost money…
To do nothing is one option.
Sticking a cucumber up one’s bottom is another. Thanks for stating the blinkin’ obvious…
But surely it is to do better by the British people to devise relevant powers, limited by the right of appeal, to ensure that communities do not have to live with unacceptable levels of fear and intimidation. The basic liberties of the law-abiding citizen should come first.
Perhaps this Christmas Cherie will get Tony a dictionary so he can find out what the word ‘liberties’ actually means. (While he’s at it, he could also look at the definitions of words like ‘retirement’ and ‘anachronism’.) But for now, Tony really ought to realise that if liberties aren’t equally shared, then neither will ‘responsibilities’. If we are not all equal in terms of our rights then how can we be a just society? Chavs are twats, but any system that is unbalanced, unfair and unregulated by the courts is every bit as anti-social…
Still, thanks to Asbos, at least rogue farmers no longer menace the streets of Norfolk with wayward pigs. At least 88 year old men can’t now be sarcastic to their neighbours. And, just to put our minds at rest, at least suicidal young women can’t drown themselves in canals anymore. We can all sleep well in our beds now!
