Thatcher signed the Single European Act.



Clearly no "surrender of sovereignty" in that.

Still, what's more important is her sounding off after the event. That wipes it all away. Just like Ed Milliband "apologising" for immigration, no doubt.

Another brainfart

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/norma ... ban-gangs/

Norman certainly forgot about rail infrastructure, so he's not a hypocrite on that point. Still, I seem to remember a fair bit of inner city crime on his watch.

He also reckons that if you have windpower, it means the electric goes off if the wind stops.

And he wants Frank Field in his cabinet. Say what you like about Norman, he did stuff. What's Field ever done?

He's got a feeling the "root of it all" re gangs is families with kids by different fathers. Asian gangs must be full of the like.

Funny, 'cos in the glorious 'fifties, that's exactly what happened to a family of a friend of mine whose dad never came back from the war and whose siblings, born after the war, were fathered by a different returning soldier.

On my dear Lord, Norm's going soft in his old age. Or perhaps not.



Because it's not a thought if Norman doesn't agree with it.

Norman's not a great thinker himself.

He merely has "a feeling" gangs are "at the root of it" down to families where kids have different fathers.

Maybe he can tell us why, if old fashioned communalism was great, he allowed mutuals to abolish themselves. And subsequently crash the economy.

Norm's never been too big on anything that smacks of elitism. In Norm's world all the education you need is the 3 Rs and knowing which bits of the globe are red. Norm speaks the language of common sense.

opportunistic much?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19643846



reconsidered so hard presumably that it'd actually come into existence.

_________________
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and a review blog: http://blindwithwoodenhands.blogspot.com/
double blog! what does it mean?

What, that famous deterrent effect that has cock-all effect as a deterrent, as shown by the US's bulging death row facilities?

It's not about deterrent with people like Tebbit and it never is/was. It's not even about the at least understandable desire for revenge from the families of victims. It's about power and the desire to create fear of that power - it's the same argument for caning children, giving unruly workers a clip round the ear, sending young men and women overseas to fight and die for you on a pretence to secure your business/political interests and of course killing people you consider undesirable rather than attempting to rehabilitate them or giving them the chance to redeem themselves.

Besides, if villains know they will be killed for killing a policeman, they're not going to stop robbing places. They'll just make sure they don't leave anyone alive to identify them because they have nothing to lose.

aside from the capital punishment bull, where does this idea come from that killing a police officer is somehow worse, and far more deserving of punishment than the murder of anyone else?
i can see the police themselves believing this, one of their own and all that, but why on earth should anyone else view it that way, which enshrining it into law would imply they should?

_________________
i have an art blog: http://procrastinationathon.blogspot.com/
and a review blog: http://blindwithwoodenhands.blogspot.com/
double blog! what does it mean?

Crabcakes is right - if this was a purely objective assertion that capital punishment is an effective way to deter crime, it would be expressed in those terms. Instead, quotes such as "the shadow of the gallows" and an "early dawn walk to the gallows" rather give me the impression that this is a mindset that derives some actual satisfaction from the idea of hanging wrong-uns.

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"Winterval is the favourite myth of the lunatic right who base most of their weekly columns on angry Brie-based dreams rather than looking out of their window." (Robin Ince)

Yes, he does seem to be positively drooling over that prospect, doesn't he?

I always think the Moors murderers provide a good answer to the argument about deterrence. The death penalty was in place whilst they were operating, but did nothing whatsoever to prevent five children from being killed.

The argument in favour of harsh sentences for cop killers was (IIRC) based around the idea that someone prepared to take a shot at a police officer would presumably have no scruples about killing or attacking a regular member of the public. That seems to come from an age when a police uniform carried with it a certain innate authority, that seems not to be the case these days. It may also be an import from overseas, particularly through movies and TV from the USA, where police regularly go armed at all times.

However I do feel that police officers do get a rough deal. They are expected to deal with the detritus of human society, to face down violent and often uncontrollable people, and are crucified in the media if they fail in this. And by fail, I'm not talking about the guy who clubbed Ian Tomlinson, or about the officers who conspired over Hillsborough - I'm talking about the officers pilloried for not having 20/20 foresight, for not being exactly where someone wanted them because they weren't bloody mindreaders, who followed procedures but were castigated for not doing whatever some hack thought police officers ought to do, who insisted on enforcing the law equally and without favour, to both inner city teenagers and to the executive speeding in his Lexus.

When some nutter off his head on booze starts smashing up a pub and swinging for anyone in reach, most of us can walk away and go home, vowing to give that pub a wide berth in the future. It's the uniformed cop who has to go in and subdue the guy.

Comments along the lines of "They knew the risks when they signed up" strike me as being armchair generalship of the worst kind. Yes, a soldier flying out to Afghanistan should expect a certain amount of flying lead; but it's still not to be expected in a Manchester suburb.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

I think the argument is that because they put themselves in more danger than the rest of us, both quantitatively and qualitatively, they deserve a greater level of protection. Of course, they do anyway, since I'm not aware of any police killers ever getting released.

Good piece Andy:

Sometimes events conspire to put 2 or 3 awful events into the news within a very short space of time.
In this case the Hillsborough and then Tomlinson enquiries / cases are followed by the horrifying dual killing of two PCs in the course of normal duty.
I've personally soft pedalled my facebook contributions regarding Hillsborough and "Bent coppers", thinking that this isn't the time for generalised attacks.
Not that I've let up on McKenzie.

There's been a similar silence in the red-tops.
For a day or two after each enquiry, the dead trees rang with Bad Police (but definitely nothing to do with the press) stories.
These have ceased now, replaced by mourning for yesterday's victims.

I asked myself "Should I keep on with the Hillsborough postings?".
I don't subscribe to any kind of karma that suggests the 2 ladies who died yesterday somehow wash away the sins of South Yorkshire's police.
What horror of a world would that be? What warped kind of collective justice would it represent? It's clearly nonsense.
But I am not a trained writer (not even a trained typist).
I feared I might drop 140 words that could be twisted by trolls to imply that "They had it coming".

Nothing is further from my thought.
I have a mature world view that includes good and bad police, and even admits that the same person might do fine things one day, and later in life commit awful sins.

This got me wondering (Congratulations if you're still reading) how the red-tops handle this.
They present a simplistic world view where 40 years ago every plod was Dixon of Dock Green, then in the '80 they were still great.
But now we found out that they weren't cos there was the SPG and all those Irish people got fitted up and Hillsborough.
And now they're bad because of Leveson (and it can't have been the press).

The tabloids don't do nuance very well.
The story of the day (and probably the week) is the awful killing of 2 PCs during the course of their duty.
The tabloids appear to be unable to comment simultaneously on Tomlinson or Hillsborough.
Even the whipping boys of the Royal Protection detail are forgotten.

I wonder why trained journalists can't do a job that I'm afraid to do as an amateur.
Do the election time kingmakers suddenly doubt their powers?
Can they not report news from a complex and contradictory world?
Or, do they have such contempt for their C2, D, E readership that they simply can't tell 2 stories in one day.
It hardly sits well with their narrative of a courageous free press.

Until the 1960s, newspapers didn't really indulge in analysis of the news, as we understand it. There were news reports, and then there were a small number of opinion pieces, which rarely bothered with a 'news hook' except in the most general way (eg, during an election campaign). The tone of these opinion pieces was thunderous, and for the broadsheets at least the aim seemed to be to underline the paper's own respectability.

Then folk started getting their news from the television, more quickly and with pictures. Television news was bound by more stringent rules regarding balance. Newspapers reacted to stem their falling circulations by abandoning any pretence at reporting the news in a straight, informative way. The Murdoch papers and the Daily Mail led the move to a more commercially-focused press, where the product is sold and the brand established by pressing readers' buttons while offering them pleasurable experiences such as bingo, sudoku, and the chance to win a camper van.

The irony is that the 'deconstruction' of the idea that there is such thing as capital-N News reported by professional, capital-J Journalists was a project of the 1960s new left, yet it has been exploited and turned against itself by the Right. As is so often the case, as the very category of 'news' became unstable, readers seem to have looked for reassurance in products that sounded sure of themselves and authoritative. Hence the success of the Mail, which, for the first couple of decades after the war, had been seriously tarnished by its flirtation with fascism.