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Hot on the heels of Mrs Blair’s insistence that the British, in dealing with a murderous, home-grown terrorism threat should following the foreign laws of the unelected and totalitarian European Union and the equally inappropriate UN Human Rights legislation we now have the Home Office Minister telling police how to carry out their stop and search operations.
Police should not use racial profiling in their efforts to prevent further terror attacks on London, Home Office Minister Hazel Blears has said.
People should not be stopped and searched just because they are Muslim she said, before the first of a series of meetings with community leaders.
Words fail me.
If British Muslims are serious about combating this poison in our midst then they are going to have to put up with the discomfort of being the primary target of police stop and search activities. How much time are we prepared to waste frisking little old white ladies in our search for jihadists with semtex in order to placate the sensitivities of British Muslims?
If police were looking for violent football thugs I would expect them to profile the typical football thug and expend a larger proportion of their time and energy on people matching that profile. So I would expect Muslims, for example, to form a very small fraction of their attentions whilst white males between the ages of 20 and 40 - like me - to face the occasional police stop and search.
Nevertheless, Ms Blears regales us with further wisdom in the pursuit of effective policing:
“Just picking people up just on the basis that they’re Muslim is never going to get the result you want,” she said.
Of course. When looking for Muslim terrorists it’s always best to shake down a few Jews, worry the occasional Hindu and, of course, harass those godless atheists. That’s where you are most likely to find Muslim terrorists.
At least the National Black Police Association’s Ch Supt Ali Dizaei has a few more functioning brain cells:
“People do not mind being stopped and searched, provided that it is explained to them, provided they’re dealt with respect, and provided they’re dealt with courtesy, and I think that is the key, and there’s every indication so far since the seventh of July that that understanding has been taking place across London.
“These are extraordinary times and people are committed from all communities to work together with the police in order to sort this problem out.”
Now that’ s much better news. I hope it’s true that people do understand the predicament we’re in and are co-operating with the police because it’s one thing to condemn the atrocities but unless the words are followed by the necessary actions - uncomfortable as they may be - then it’s all to no avail. I personally believe that most British people are fine with polite, professional policing.
A British Transport Police (BTP) spokesman insisted the force did not intend to ’single out’ any particular community.
“Clearly if we are looking for people and being operationally efficient, we have got to target the people who we think are maybe involved,” he said.
“It is going to be disproportionate. It is going to be young men, not exclusively, but it may be disproportionate when it comes to ethnic groups.”
Good. I don’t want to be blown up and nor does any Muslim reading this. So we need to allow the police to do what’s necessary to minimise the possibility, don’t we?
Seems not:
But Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala warned the strategy could be “counter-productive”.
“While it is understandable that the police need to undertake every step to thwart would-be bombers it is crucial that they do not unnecessarily alienate and stigmatise an entire segment of society,” he said.
Ihtisham Hibatullah, of the Muslim Association of Britain, said such a policy would worsen the situation.
“It won’t help in terms of building a relationship or trust between the communities,” he said.
“It will alienate the youth and create unnecessary fear about the authorities, especially in the wake of the death of the young Brazilian man.”
What Mr Bunglawala needs to understand is that feeling alienated is partly a matter of choice. If people being stopped choose to see this as being an inconvenient but necessary means of defending ourselves against indiscriminate murderers then these feelings will not arise. However, if a person wants to regard it as an intrusion and an affront then feelings of alienation will surely follow.
Instead of pandering to these feelings these leaders ought instead to be asking their constituencies to stiffen the upper lip and accept some inconvenience for a while. Part of being British is co-operating with the authorities when the chips are down, not covering oneself in victim status and crying to the politicians.
In light of last week’s £77 million lottery win Melanie Phillips discusses her objection to the whole lottery idea. She makes this point:
The people who are most vulnerable to all this are the poor. True, everyone buys a lottery ticket of their own free will. But those at the bottom of the heap tend to have a deeply-rooted belief in their own powerlessness and are therefore much more receptive to the idea that fate controls their destiny. So they are more inclined to believe that the fate that made them poor may suddenly make them rich.
Like many I despise the nanny state and prefer to let people make their own mistakes than have the government make them for me. Oh - and I’m a gambler myself (poker). But one can still recognise when the least able to resist the lure of unlikely wealth are heading for a fall - and the lottery provides the cliff for them to fall off. Like 24 hour drinking, the least able to deal with the opportunity will be the ones most likely to make use of it.
She continues:
Nevertheless, the lottery is given moral legitimacy by the fact that it funnels billions of pounds to good causes. But this justification is also deeply flawed.
First, some of this money has been spent on causes which range from the dubious to the downright absurd. This, £630 million went to the Millennium Dome, about which the less said the better; £340,000 to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, a body that helped extremists and was described by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett as ‘colluding with terrorism’; and £420,000 to the Cusichaca Trust to help fund its bid to breed giant edible guinea pigs in Peru.
Second, the original promise that lottery money would be spent on good causes such as the arts, charities, heritage, sport and the millennium but not on core services which were the government’s responsibility has been broken. A sixth fund was added covering health, education and environment, and the government has tried to muscle in on how this money is spent.
As a result, the amount being spent on good causes has dropped while the amount being raked off to shore up the government’s shortcomings in health, education and the environment has gone up.
Ms Phillips also points out that the lottery’s status as a charitable affair takes a knock when one considers that, in fact, few people buy the tickets for the help it does others and more because of the hope of the help that it will do them. The idea of altruism slowly fades in the face of naked greed…
“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” - Tony Blair
Just a short article from yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. I’ve printed the whole thing below - no need for me to comment really. This says it all:
One of the country’s most prolific burglars, who astonished a judge when he heard how many Crown Court appearances he had made, has been jailed again, this time for five years.
Police believe that Mark Wrest, 42, a career criminal, has burgled tens of thousands of homes. After he was freed from prison this year, the burglary rate in Cambridge, his home town, jumped from an average of six a week to 50 and fell back again when he was rearrested. He made his 16th Crown Court appearance on Friday, although burglaries are usually dealt with by magistrates’ courts.
“In the 30 years I have been sitting in criminal courts, I think you break my record,” Judge Peter Jacobs said at Cambridge Crown Court. “I have never before come across a person with 16 appearances for house burglary.”
Wrest, who has 61 previous convictions, was out on licence in May when police caught him emerging from an alleyway carrying a laptop computer and Asda bags full of stolen goods.
Judge Jacobs said: “He doesn’t give a damn about people in their own homes.”
Blogsome, the hosts for this blog, were experiencing some technical difficulties yesterday and today making it impossible to get into this blog.
This means my legion of fans would have been unable to get their fix of Gary Garbage. To overcome the trauma I have set up a health line and counselling services - you’re both welcome to make full use of them.
In the meantime, normal service now resumes.
Now that is cause for trauma…
(If you’re a blogsome user and can’t access your blog the fix is simple. Go to http://blogname.blogsome.com/wp-admin/ (substituting ‘blogname’ for your blog’s name), then edit a post and save. Your blog should now work.)
