See What They Did There?

Sorry, I was going to leave it, but this has been bugging me for 24 hours now.

Millions of people in England and Wales who work or volunteer with children and vulnerable adults will no longer need criminal record checks, ministers say.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he wanted to lift the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust cast over adults who simply wanted to help.

So, let's run a timeline on this.

Government brings in kneejerk legislation to fix an emotive problem. Their solution is to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent, charging them for the privilege to pay for a brand new avenue of bureaucracy.

It is a huge success, because paedophiles are of course everywhere, and all of them - without exception - come with a handily labelled track record. There is also no collateral damage whatsoever.

The drive to create more pen-pushers make kids safe does, though, get a bit out of hand and is unpopular for many good reasons.

The coalition moves quickly to say that those who should never have been under suspicion in the first place will no longer be under suspicion.

Everyone applauds.

Meanwhile, the original kneejerk measure - which has had no discernible effect on preventing abuse - continues to regard double figure millions of the public as assumed guilty, ruining lives in the process, but providing a pointless security blanket for the small cost of £64 times 14 million.

How great art our benevolent state!

Link Tank 12/02

This week's ration of the engaging and infantile.

Obama and auto-defrosting refrigerators

How the vetting frenzy alienates adults from kids

After success in Holland, a porn channel for women looks to expand into other countries

Introducing the fly-powered clock and the mouse-eating table

Punish the innocent, lest the guilty go free

Bans on bouncy castles become more widespread in California

The protests in Egypt have been caused by ... global warming?

"Whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date"

Gulf states' e-cigarette bans will lead to deaths

Finnish food campaigners kidnap Ronald McDonald

Homosexuality is a public health crisis similar to secondhand smoke, apparently

In pictures: The ID card database being shredded

Time To Destabilise The NHS, Says Righteous Moron

Boy! If implemented, there's going to be acres of fun to be had with this.

Drunk people should pay for the treatment they receive at accident and emergency units, a patients' group has said.

A group populated by vacant pillocks with the foresight of a circus clown waving to the crowd before walking into a door, presumably.

[Margaret Watt, chair of the group,] said drunk people should be charged for using ambulances and for the time of staff who treated them.

She said that the money generated from such a scheme should then be invested in increasing NHS staff numbers.

I'm just trying to imagine the meeting where, having come up with such an empty-headed idea, she looked round the table and asked if anyone could see any potential problems, only to be met with furious head-shaking and heroic ignorance. Anyone with something between their ears more substantial than silly putty, of course, would have been throwing their hand in the air and shouting "ooh, ooh, Miss!" (or Ms, it would seem) at this point.

Let's start with the obvious one. What happens if someone is injured badly and decides to tough it out instead of getting this newly-chargeable treatment? Alcohol is well known to impair judgement and to increase a sense of invincibility, after all (though admittedly such a concept is likely alien to these stupid purse-lipped crones). Is a bit of time spent treating a patient - who may well have already paid plenty into the system by way of taxation - preferable to, say, their dropping dead from subsequent haemorrhaging?

Too far-fetched? Oh I don't think so, chummies. I'd give it a month before we hear of the first fatality.

Charging for the ambulance is a great idea (sarky alert), but the same scenario applies. If the patient knows that there will be a bill at the end of A&E treatment, many will refuse. What's the answer to protect them if the paramedic suspects their injury to be serious? Are they to be forced to hospital against their will? I believe there's a law against extortion and 'extracting money with menaces', isn't there? That's some pretty important primary legislation to be drafted to avoid the NHS being dragged to court even more than they are already.

This is without asking how drunk is drunk enough to be charged? There really isn't any definition except the one currently used to define too drunk to drive, and I truly believe that a public sector which is itself intoxicated on other people's money will find such a level extremely attractive for this purpose.

"Sorry Mrs Prunehat, you've had three sherries, so we'll be charging you £261 for accidentally falling down your staircase tonight. You can pay in instalments out of your weekly pension, OK?"

And, naturally, once this precedent is set the same will inexorably follow for the overweight, smokers, drivers in 31mph+ accidents, and everyone else Ms Watt and her dozy ilk disapprove of.

Still, the private sector will naturally step in and we will see a new market in insurances for any such event. In fact, the more choosy the NHS becomes as to which behaviours they are willing to treat out of the huge extorted funds they currently enjoy, the bigger the insurance industry will get. And the more who feel obliged to pay insurance premiums for NHS care, the louder the call will be for a refund of NI contributions which were paid over their lifetime, in good faith, on the promise of healthcare which is "free at the point of delivery".

Oh my! Are we talking about a system of healthcare where those who are financially able will take out insurance for potential health mishaps, whereby those who are less well off suffer the consequences? I think we are, you know.

What a fucking great idea, Ms Watt. You're in effect advocating moving towards a slow break up of the NHS in favour of personal responsibility and insurance-based treatment.

Congratulations. Idiot.

Tesco, The Police, And Trevelyan's Corn

A woman was handcuffed and 'treated like a hardened criminal' after she helped herself to food worth £200 that had been thrown away by a Tesco store following a power cut.

But she was stunned when police arrived at her home and arrested her for suspected 'theft by finding' and took her to the station in handcuffs.

Now, I realise the details are sketchy, that Tesco still technically owned the food and that the police had no choice but to act if the business complained. But ... I'm pretty sure that Tesco would have almost certainly been unable to sell the stuff, and that their concern was not so much one of theft as the fear of prosecution under environmental health regulations or litigation should someone become ill.

So what we have here is a business throwing out useless stock, and the consequences of state legislation forcing them to refuse its consumption by someone who was quite willing to take their chances. Rules is rules and government knows best yadda, yadda, yadda. The result of course being a right old mess and piss poor PR for the state's enforcers.

While reading the article though, I was minded of the Irish anthem The Fields of Athenry.

For you stole Trevelyan's corn
So the young might see the morn
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay

The Trevelyan referred to being quite a nasty piece of work whose main contribution to the Irish famine was to make it a lot worse including - relevantly for this story - denying starved 19th century Irish the relief of commodities which were only going to be ditched anyway.

The song tells the story of Lord Trevelyan who brought a supply of corn back from America in a bid to battle starvation during the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately it was Indian corn too hard to be milled, so useless. However, local people thought it would save them and so broke into the stores, were arrested, and subsequently deported to Australia.

Trevelyan's memory to this day is still reviled in Ireland, and his immortalisation in song has continued to whip up anti-English sentiment for four decades or so. Likewise, the reputation of Essex Police isn't exactly going to be enhanced in light of such a case, is it?

Especially since Sasha Hall, the woman arrested in this instance, was merely doing exactly as we were ordered to do by politicians recently.

On the bright side, there are now just a few more people who may be waking up to the fact that big government is hypocritical, doesn't do things very well and - for our own good - often makes life stupidly more difficult.

The more, the merrier.

Hirst Impressions

Things are busy at Puddlecote Towers tonight, but in case you haven't seen this, here is a convicted killer talking of how "control is in Europe" and lauding rules forced on a public who don't want them, while quoting the Guardian, deriding right of centre media, and refusing to apologise for calling someone who disagrees with him a 'paki'. I'm sure the left are extremely proud.

Vintage Truth Suppression

One of the first UK laws to establish the state's right to legislate 'for our own good' was the Transport Act 1983 which rendered a driver punishable if not wearing a seat belt for their own safety.

It's no surprise, then, that mandatory wearing of seat belts is now regularly cited as a precedent by politicians - when they lack public demand - wishing to further interfere in our daily lives. It has been quoted to justify all manner of illiberal schemes including (I know my audience) the pursuit of smoking bans, minimum alcohol pricing and, increasingly, climate change measures, as skilfully illustrated by Tim Yeo here.

The Government's response also claims that public support for personal carbon trading is "limited", but that has been the case with all sorts of desirable changes that have taken place. Ten years ago, public support for banning smoking in public houses would have been limited. That does not mean that it was the wrong thing to do; it was an opportunity for leadership. Going back further, before seat belts in cars were compulsory [...] support for that measure was decidedly limited in the 1950s, just as support was fairly limited for the breathalyser. All those changes needed leadership from the Government. To run away from an idea because support for it is limited seems an unsatisfactory justification.

The reason for this is that the benefits of seat belt laws are seen as indisputable. A perfect example of government being proven, by subsequent evidence, to be wiser than the public.

However, the issue of seat belt legislation is also one of the first in which incredible truth-bending and manipulation of statistics were employed to trick the public into compliance.

The truth is that there is no evidence whatsoever that seat belts have produced a net saving of lives anywhere in the world. What did happen though, is that wild claims were made before the passing of the UK Act, and wild claims were made following it, based on the same kind of flawed, or heavily-biased, studies we see in many other areas to this day. The double-counting, discarding of conflicting data, exaggeration of causality, clever couching of studies, and overt rent-seeking now endemic in statistics and epidemiology, were honed and perfected back then and are replicated every day in the modern political arena.

The Transport Act truly was a precedent. It was a textbook example for the righteous of how to lie and cheat their way to a law based on nothing but their own favoured opinions.

John Adams has been arguing expertly since the 80s against the false consensus - screamed regularly and inaccurately - that seat belts save thousands of lives a year. His evidence is not just mischief making either, it is incontrovertible. A prime reason for such strong contrary opinion being largely ignored will ring a big bell for those of us who are well aware of public health connivance in suppressing the truth.

Here, John explains the reaction of the World Health Organisation to a report they commissioned (highly recommended 4 page pdf), not long after implementation of the Transport Act, which didn't agree with their pre-determined policy.

In 1986 they had commissioned an article by me on seat belt legislation for The International Digest of Health Legislation.

The article I submitted summarized the evidence and arguments of these earlier essays. I assumed they knew what they were commissioning.

I received a prompt reply from someone with the title “Chief, Health Legislation”: “I would like to inform you that, for editorial reasons, your review will not appear in the International Digest of Health Legislation. Even though, under the terms of the contractual agreement with you, copyright in the text is vested with the Organization, we have no objection to the review being submitted by you for publication elsewhere, subject to the proviso that no mention is made of the fact that the review was commissioned and an honorarium was paid by WHO.”

From that day to this the WHO has campaigned for seat-belt legislation. No mention should be made of evidence that casts doubt on the efficacy of such legislation – that would undermine the efficacy of its campaign for more legislation.

Indeed.

The WHO being complicit in misleading the public shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, but I'm sure there are a hell of a lot of people who will be ignorant of the fact that they have been lied to, not just on a massive scale and on a daily basis, but also for such a very long time.

Whither integrity, eh?

Parents Ask Government To Hold Their Hand

BBW has highlighted the case of a mother who has been suspended from her job for leaving her 14 year old and 3 year old sons home alone for 30 minutes while she popped down to the shops. There's no law against it, but the caution she received from police now appears on her CRB disclosure hence the suspension.

Infuriating, yes, but not as maddening as this in the Express article.

PARENTS last night said there needed to be clearer guidelines over leaving children.

Err, why? Are parents so piss poor nowadays that they aren't able to work out for themselves if a child is mature enough to be left alone in their own home? Such an understanding of one's kids' personae is one of the most important aspects of parenting, for crying out loud!

[Charity officer Janet Cropper, 49, from Windermere, Cumbria, said] "I believe people need firmer guidelines."

Janet, dear, if you require government to instruct you, perhaps you shouldn't have become a parent in the first place.

[Mother-of-three Vivienne Smith, 60, from Sale, near Manchester, said] “I think it boils down to the age of the children and the teenager’s intelligence and maturity.”

And who knows the teenager's intelligence and maturity better than anyone else? Yes. The parents. Certainly NOT the bloody government!

It's called self-determination. How difficult can that be to understand?

Obviously some just don't get it and cannot function without instruction, so here's a bit of Puddlecote logic on the subject. The NSPCC state that "no child under 14 should be left home alone and no child under 16 should care for someone younger than themselves", but considering they could find danger in a pile of marshmallows, one can safely knock at least 2 or 3 years off each of those ages.

This would seem to be confirmed by the fact that TfL Oyster Cards are issued for kids aged 11+, presumably because that is the general age when kids are able to use public transport on their own. And if they can handle crossing roads and not tripping over pavements at 11, they are sure as shit able to sit on the couch, watch TV, and not open the front door while Mum gets a few groceries.

Here we are constantly being told that kids are growing up too fast these days, yet they're paradoxically also not mature enough to do things that came naturally to our generation at the same age. It can't be both, can it?

Good grief.