Justice Fingers

While The Twitter has gone for over-egging yesterday’s ovarian assault on beleaguered Ed Miliband under the #EggMiliband hashtag, the bit of news I’m focusing on today is the assertion by one ivory-towered Andrew Ashworth that we shouldn’t jail thieves and fraudsters. In The [not] Independent he states, “The law says that a prison sentence should not be imposed unless the offence is so serious that neither a fine nor a community sentence can be justified.  My argument is that for pure property offences like theft, handling stolen goods, criminal damage or fraud, prison should not be used; fines and community sentence should be imposed instead.”

I'm sure the many victims of multiple repeat offenders will be delighted to hear it. Long before anybody gets anywhere near a custodial term for such offences as burglary they will have to have been up before the beak many times. Each time a huge cost to the public purse, each time any fines or costs levied will have been unpaid and any community sentences will have been ignored. The career criminal already knows jail is an unlikely outcome so, brilliant idea Andy old son, let them know up front that they'll do no time.

They must be quaking in their boots. Some are so recidivist that the ONLY preventative measure that can be applied is a restriction of their liberty, but one of Ashworth’s justifications is that imprisonment is our most extreme punishment and it should be reserved only for crimes against the person. Well, apart from the fact that there are already different tiers of incarceration, there’s an easy way to solve that problem – introduce some harsher penalties. I’d ask the victims what they think should be done, if I had the time, but here are a few ideas to throw into the mix.

First off, reintroduce the death penalty - as a clear majority of ordinary voters back the idea, this would also be democracy in action - that takes care of the ‘most extreme punishment’ argument right off. Second, get prison right. We could bring back ‘hard time’ and ‘corrective training’; remove all the prison reform do-gooders and get right back in there with some retributive justice. They won’t pay fines, they won’t stop robbing, but they will cost the country a fortune in ineffective rehabilitation so fuck ‘em. Sod the ‘brutalisation’ theories - make prison really hard and, if necessary, break them. Just like their activities have broken many lives.

For every long term prisoner who gets to write a book and become a celebrity amongst the simpering liberal softies there are a thousand, ten thousand nasty, antisocial animals who are being told they can get away with pretty much anything. Prison CAN be used to deter crime and to redirect the wayward but society also needs to be able to remove and restrain those who won’t behave and yes, there is a very definite public appetite for prison to be a plain and simple punishment in some cases. In fact, taking the temperature of the public mood, reformers like Andrew Ashworth and the whole human rights brigade might well need to be incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, for their own safety.

Are there any women here?

Of course none of this matters very much because in a generation or so it’s quite likely we’ll be having public executions and the hacking off of limbs live on national television. Under Sharia Law there are already some very effective non-custodial remedies for wrongdoing. Including blasphemy. “All I said was, that bit of Halibut was good enough for Jehovah!” Which way to the stoning?

All's Fair

In response to the so-called Go Home Bus, bearing a billboard advertisement offering assistance for illegal immigrants to voluntarily give themselves up, a wag has photo-shopped a van bearing the legend “Fuck off back to Eton”. Funny because it reflects the generally held view that the generally held view of our ruling elite is far out of touch with the rest of us. And funny as hell because they used the word ‘fuck’. Even the ordinarily prissy can get behind a good fuck if it is levelled at unearned advantage.

There is a natural envy of those born into privilege. It doesn’t matter what good they do with it; from most people’s perspective it is easy to be good if it costs you little. It is also so easy to be seen as nasty if you don’t ostentatiously use your power and wealth to help others. That seems to be the stance of those on the left – we should share it out. But of course it simply doesn’t work that way. You could give it a try but within a generation the imbalance would be back because once you have gained an advantage you will naturally pass it on to your own.

We are all born with equal (that is, zero) inherent knowledge, but we are also born with unequal abilities to acquire knowledge and character both in quality and quantity. A council house kid could easily outperform a silver-spooned toff and go on to do great things – as the Grammar School system used to demonstrate so well. It does seem odd that the socialists in power tore it down, effectively pulling up the ladder behind them once they’d got to the top.

They claim they want a democratic meritocracy with equal opportunities but somehow they don’t want to give those with a poor start in life the tools to better themselves. Oh my, did I say “better themselves”? That’ll be me packed off to the re-education gulags. For under the doctrine of whatever name you’re giving it today nobody can be seen to be ‘better’ than anybody else. Rather than encourage people to exploit their potential it does rather seem their energies are directed at punishing those who have done so.

No wonder Labour are in such a mess. Give the poor a leg up, but chop it off once they get ahead of themselves. They seem to recognise the fairness of meritocracy but don’t like it when that same system produces unfairness. “Equality!” they cry meaning equality of opportunity, but secretly wishing for equality of outcome.

Labour were formed to fight for workers’ rights. Now they seem to be there just to defend their own right to office, as privileged a position as any in the land. Plenty of Labour millionaires out there, all climbing the same greasy pole; doing the very thing their muddled policies would discourage others to do. It doesn’t seem fair somehow, does it?

How to have brilliant kids

I have had a most excellent idea. Are you fed up with your kids lounging about, getting under your feet during the holidays, when they should be outside in the fresh air?  Do they tug on everybody’s nerves during school time, running you ragged and abusing the neighbours? Do you despair, knowing that they won’t get their grades, you’ll be constantly dragged down to see their heads of year and ultimately you just dread that thirteen-year old Speshal-Bru  is going to be pregnant before she sees her GCSEs?

Do you blame ‘society’ and the bad influences they come under for the way things turned out? Have they metamorphosed into your worst nightmare despite all that you have done to give them everything they demand and bring them up well? Or are you able to admit that you just weren't really up to it as a parent and you need a break from it all?

Well how about if your kids weren't the listless layabouts you have now but instead were bright-eyed and eager to please? How proud would you be if every day they brought home examples of yet another small achievement; some art, high marks in the homework they actually did by themselves, or complimentary letters from the headmaster? Would you be thrilled if they had a sense of purpose and knew what they wanted in life but didn't expect any of it to be handed to them on a plate and were determined to go on to high-flying careers?

Well there IS a way you can have all that – because, let’s face it, you deserve it, innit? Across Eastern Europe there are millions of children who wake at dawn and carry out household chores before walking five miles to school where they sit in attentive rows because they understand that education is a way to a better life. Raised in nuclear, two-parent families they understand the value of strong family ties and the timeless logic of the work ethic and would not dream of treating their parents as servants. So here’s what you can do.

Let’s say you have brought three lazy, fat, good-for-nothing wasters into the world through ‘no fault of your own’ and you've had enough of them. Well don’t waste another ounce of investment on them because they’ll never amount to anything. Instead, adopt three ambitious, polite and industrious Latvian kids and raise them as your own. You’ll be able to feel that swell of pride as they cross life’s finishing lines and achieve all those wonderful things your own don’t deserve to. There you go, simple.

British skools for Brutish kidz

What’s that? What happens to yours? Oh you still have to keep them under your roof; nobody else wants them after all. Yes, yes, feed and shelter them, buy them smart phones and trainers and all that guff and no, you don’t get to have a bigger council house. You see, what you now have is a working model of British-style Socialism scaled down to domestic level so you can understand it. Overcrowding, the displacement of your own by more worthy incomers and the knowledge that when the new kids grow up and strike out for independence you’ll still be left with a bunch of idle layabouts to feed.

If only Chris Bryant had explained all that properly yesterday, he might be carrying a wee bit more credibility today. Still, good luck in the job hunt Chris.

Thanks for the memory

Memories fade, often faster than we’d wish. Chris Bryant seems to have very quickly forgotten that it was his party, the Labour Party, who flooded the UK with millions of low-skilled immigrants in order to change the nation’s demographic forever. He must have forgotten this because he is now bemoaning the fact that companies, whose job it is to make profits for their owners, are employing low-skilled migrant workers in order to do just that. LINK

Of course, a more cynical man might claim that politicians employ selective memory loss as a simple tool of government, but we all have defective memories. For instance, I distinctly remember Ted Heath promising, through his piano-toothed, shit-eating grin, that membership of The Common Market would not involve the loss of even the tiniest piece of UK sovereignty. Given that a federal Europe was always the plan, right from the very inception, I must simply be mistaken.

I have other examples of my own memory loss. I don’t remember when compulsory EU number plates appeared, yet I do remember that we were never consulted about it. And I do remember that when our nice, blue authoritative British passports were swapped for European Union ones, we had a hell of a fight to retain the royal crest, but I don’t recall the vote to retain a European Defence Force.

I don’t ever remember being asked to vote for or select an EU flag or anthem and I certainly have no recollection of the British public being asked if it was okay to replace British birth certificates with European Union ones. It seems that in three years’ time no more British citizens will ever be born, just EU ones. 

This little nugget must also have slipped past Shiny Dave Cameron's powers of recollection because his referendum will post-date that event, thus render the outcome of the referendum irrelevant. If Britain ceases to exist, for that is the plan, where would we go if we voted to leave the country stated on our birth certificate? We would effectively be banishing ourselves.

History, you see, has little to do with the past and all to do with the narrative requirements of the present. Around about the time that the nice Mr Heath was lying through those big white teeth of his I read Ray Bradbury’s seminal work “Fahrenheit 451”. For those who don’t know, that temperature was said to be the point at which paper spontaneously burst into flames and government ‘firemen’ were employed to destroy all the books, the records of the past and with it the memories of what had gone before.

Even as we speak I imagine the history of the EU is being rewritten, sanitised and packaged up at great expense to be taught to the new generations of EU-only citizens. National identities will simply be written out of history and past glories will be evenly distributed across the regional politburos. How long before the quiet collection and burning of great historical works begins? My treasured Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, Antony Beevor’s The Second World War and all the rest will be consumed in the fires to be replaced with a slim volume claiming to tell the truth about the glory of Europe’s Thousand Year Reich. National triumphs will be portrayed as false and occurring before the great unification.

Thus we will hear about how the ancient Kingdom of Albion joined the EU in 1066 and marvel at the evenness of the medal distribution at the Agincourt Olympics. The great Fire of Paris in 1666 will have been recorded in the diary of Sébastien Pepys and the legendary King Arthur of Andalucia will have formed the first democratic round-table on which the European Parliament later came to be based. The great inventions of the Industrial Revolution will have hailed not from Coalbrookdale, but from the combined forges of all thirty-plus nations, pulling together to Common Purpose, while peasants throughout the entire continent will have revolted simultaneously during the first general Strike.

Folklore, religion and all the old wives’ tales will similarly be homogenised and belong to us all. Those with centuries of written legends will see their stories distributed evenly throughout those regions with lesser history or else discarded altogether. Some tales of course, are too totemic to be edited out. Thus the story of the brave hero of Habsburg, the skilled marksman who split the apple placed on his son’s head will survive the cull. In the Great History of Europe the name of William Patel will live forever.

Then three come along all at once...

Pfft... I missed all sorts of stories, didn't I? I’ve had a break from the blog for the last three weeks. Being too fully occupied elsewhere, I missed Caitlin Moran trying to kill cyberspace with #twittersilence – the ironic masterclass day when the self-righteous did their very best to block the thing they like to say they value the most - free speech. Zoe Williams said "bigots must not be tolerated" Honestly, nobody needs satire when the left just hand it to you on a plate, wrapped in gold foil and tied up in a great big satin bow... with a glass of champagne.

I also missed a royal birth. I say ‘missed’ but it was utterly inescapable that week. I lost count though – did she have three, or was it four? Happily, I managed to remain indifferent enough that it was another week before I accidentally learned its name. Mohammed, isn’t it? Or Jamal? Something its grandmother would have approved of, anyway. Still, at least he won’t be dependent on the state for a living. Oh…

Then there was all that ‘not-fracking’ at Balcombe, where hippies frightened the residents into forming an action group which nevertheless failed to prevent happening something that wasn’t happening anyway. I’m assuming some sort of victory for vegetablists was claimed as they protested against a decades-old technology which has been used all over the world to bring wealth, but it was ages ago now and I can’t be bothered to find out any more. Oh yes, DC promised a £1million community bribe for every drilling, only exaggerating by a factor of ten, which is quite good for politicians and numbers.

And who will ever forget the magnificent “immigrants go home” mobile billboards and Godfrey Bloom’s brilliant Bongo Bongo Land speech? These two issues combined were enough to add another deck to the top of the outrage bus, causing the lefties already sweating cobs in our little wave of the sort of global warming nobody was complaining about, to spout even more hot air into the ether – the dopey fucking planet killers! I tell you, seeing the left-wing getting angry gives me more pleasure than should be strictly legal.

Then along comes Richard Dawkins who has been scientifically slagging off all religion for years with only a mild gumming from various bits of the Anglican clergy and the Vatican, to whip up a zealous, howling maelstrom by mildly criticising a religion at least five hundred years more primitive. I’m telling you, there’s a fatwa in there somewhere from the Religion of Pieces (cut them into many small pieces).

 Oh yes, you may not criticise, cajole control or correct anybody’s belief system, be it religious, societal, sexual, racial or political unless of course they are filthy white heterosexual Christian Conservatives who must – not necessarily only metaphorically – be stoned to extinction. There’s the tolerant left for you; “"bigots must not be tolerated” Well said, Zoe!

And today Andy Burnham, former Minister for Murder begins his premature punt for getting his old job back by effectively saying that the solution to a bloated and inefficient, uncosted, uncontrolled NHS is, yes you couldn’t make it up, to make the NHS yet larger still. Not content with it being the world’s fourth biggest employer, Burnham would have every single penny of your dwindling tax money go to feed the hungry health monster created by his party. In effect completing the Communisation of the UK by co-opting every last one of you into either state dependency or state slavery. It’s the Labour Party’s long game finally coming together.

Genius stuff and all this at a time when Parliament is dissolved for summer. Yes folks, I’m back and just think what juicy delights await my purple pen come September!