Via Mr E, it appears that Dorset Police are scared of riots if a guy runs around in his underpants.
WHEN Swanage Town and Herston football club player Jamie Holland lost a bet that he'd be the season's top goal scorer, he was ready to take his punishment.
He'd promised fellow striker Aaron Corby he would run into Swanage wearing just his underwear before the club’s presentation night at Days Park.
But Swans were left disappointed after Dorset Police advised them to forget the idea.
Inspector Chris Weeks, Dorset Police’s Purbeck section commander, said: “A Police Community Support Officer with the Swanage Town Centre Safer Neighbourhood Team spoke with the club.
“He explained that good natured events of this type have the potential of getting out of hand and he advised the club the runner should wear shorts.”
They should have got the righteous Cancer Research UK involved, as one is instantly immune to civil unrest in such circs. He could even have dispensed with the jockeys but Plod still wouldn't have thought to interrupt their taser training for unruly cows.
There's little chance of the Prime Minister agreeing to call an election, though. He doesn't do democracy if he thinks he can possibly avoid it.
Aha, got you there, didn't I? Bet you thought I was going to pick this bit ...
When I turned up at White Hart Lane for the last home game of the season on Saturday, the usual suspects were assembled outside the gate. Thanks to Labour's demented smoking ban, they're not even allowed a cigarette in the car park these days.
I hadn't seen a gathering like it since I covered the car industry more than 30 years ago. It needed only a brazier and a few placards and we could have been back on the picket line at Longbridge, waving a copy of the Morning Star and sharing a mug of soup with Red Robbo.
It's a sad indication of how de-sensitized to local authority loopiness I have become that, despite an 'Oh god, no. Really?' headline, my red mist-o-meter didn't get much past pastel pink when reading the early part of this article.
Restaurant owner facing fine for sweeping dirt into gutter
A restaurant owner is facing a fine after he was filmed by a Poole Council road sweeper - brushing dirt into the gutter.
It's all becoming depressingly familiar. Local power-crazy morons taking national diktats too far and shitting on the public. What's new?
Shaun Robson, head of Poole council's environmental and consumer protection services, praised the unnamed road sweeper for using his initiative in order to "protect the people of Poole."
Oh shit. Scarlet with the ferocity of Mount fucking Etna in a foul mood.
Protect them from what? Gangs of marauding litter, mugging old ladies and stealing mobile phones with menaces? Surely we are into Monty python territory here.
He added: "They had the sense to gather evidence and supported their observation using their initiative, using their personal mobile phone to record the event.
"This falls within the normal range of enforcement activities that council staff carry out to protect the people of Poole and their environment."
Gather evidence? Normal range of enforcement activities? He/she is a fucking road-sweeper. What do you do in Dorset? Give them a stab vest and an ASP baton?
He said: "The officer was not conducting surveillance, they were rightly gathering evidence of a potential offence."
According to Poole council, a road-sweeper secretly filming on a mobile phone is 'not conducting surveillance'. Err ...
sur·veil·lance (sər-vā'ləns) n.
1. Close observation of a person or group, especially one under suspicion. 2. The act of observing or the condition of being observed.
Catching up on my RSS, Thunderdragon carried an interesting piece at the weekend on Liberal Democrat election leaflets in London Boroughs.
This leaflet for the EU elections on June 4th very much suggests that the electoral system for those elections is first-past-the-post rather than the actual proportional representation party list D’Hondt method approach. They reproduced the last Westminster election result rather than the last EU election one, which would have been far less favourable to them as in 2004 they got only one seat in the London region.
What the Lib Dems Socialist Democrats have been doing is producing literature deliberately designed to mislead voters into believing that a cross for Labour or the Greens is a wasted vote on June 4th, which it would be if they were talking about a general election or council elections ... except that London Boroughs are holding neither next month. Just the Euro elections where a Labour or Green vote is anything but wasted.
It's the classic ploy of not comparing like with like. How this is not punishable by the electoral commission is beyond me. It is a fraud perpetrated on the electorate, pure and simple.
I'm grateful to TD for flagging this up though, as it helped me to put my finger on a mystery nagging unease that I had for the much-derided recent Labour Party Election Broadcast. Notice something missing?
Maybe I'm just slow on the uptake and it has been commented on before, but there is not a single mention of Europe. Isn't that what we are all voting on in just over a fortnight? Banging on about what Cameron would do if he were PM is completely irrelevant.
This is precisely why our politicians are in the gutter of public opinion. The expenses row has merely focussed anger, almost literally through a magnifying glass, onto a singular issue. The contempt has been brewing for quite some time as the onset of career politicians, motivated purely by power and not in the slightest by the concerns of their voters, have led us to a point where discussing policies relevant to the upcoming election is deemed secondary to conning the public with personal attacks or misdirection.
Although I've seen no Tory promotion yet, it's hard to be confident that it will be much better. It really is time to send a message to the big three that we have had enough of this shit. If they can't act responsibly, we'll not vote for any of them.
Dan Hannan has been desperately searching for someone who will admit an intention to vote for Brown's shower of shit on June 4th. He eventually found one.
She was a pretty, friendly, gently-spoken single mother in her mid-thirties, and she had voted Labour all her life. "What, even this time?" I asked, genuinely startled. "I suppose it's like a marriage," she said, loyally. "You shouldn't walk out just because you're angry about something".
An interesting analogy.
We can assume, then, that she would stay with a hypothetical spouse who lied about his intentions in order to move in, then proceeded to take as much of her money as he could grab to give to his mates or the next door neighbours. She wouldn't leave when he dictates how she should live her life, by banning her from doing things she enjoyed, and taking more cash off her if she wished to continue doing other things she has always done. She'd also not pack her bags if he decided to watch her every move and demand that he know exactly where she was at any minute of the day or night, and if he was suspicious of her, to be able to keep her locked up in the basement for up to 42 days. She wouldn't even run bawling to her mum's place if he racked up huge debts on her credit card but, instead of economising, decided to spend his way out of it, thereby putting her in debt for the rest of her natural days. And she'd still snuggle up to him of an evening even when she realised that, while she was eating beans and dry toast during the hard times, he was raiding her bank account to gorge himself on chateaubriand and champagne.
Not really a marriage, is it? More like domestic abuse.
