Last month, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that supermarkets will be given a year to end their reliance on "single use" plastic bags. After that they face a fine of 5p or more for each plastic bag they give to customers.
Further, in an effort to force retailers to "go green", if the shop charges customers for plastic bags they will be required to publish how they use the proceeds. This measure is designed to put public pressure on the retailers to use the money for environmental causes.
Brown, of course, is from the Labour Party which occupies the point to the left of what passes for the middle of the political spectrum outside of the US. In other words, he would be perfectly happy cozying up to the Pelosis and Nadars of the US.
Conservatives responded to Brown's announcement by showcasing Labour's hypocrisy: over the last 2 years the government has purchased almost 1.3 million plastic bags emblazoned with departmental logos at a cost of over 91 million pounds. Eric Pickles, shadow communities and local government secretary, said:
“While Gordon Brown lectures the public on the environment, his own ministers are fuelling Britain’s throw-away culture.”
But it actually much worse than mere hypocrisy. Please read on.
The campaign to "ban the bag" was recently fueled by photographs in the UK Daily Mail. One showed a sea turtle swimming along side some plastic bags which the article claims:
Cut to the haunting image of a sea turtle, thousands of miles away, struggling through the deep ocean waters as discarded plastic bags wrap themselves around its flippers and body.
The turtle hardly seems entangled, but such is the rhetoric associated with this campaign. Worse, a second photograph shows a turtle apparently eating a bag.
These majestic animals are dying in alarming numbers because they mistake the flimsy translucent bags - which could in theory come from British supermarkets - for jellyfish, a key element of their diet.
The article had more photos, and even more inflammatory rhetoric. In response, environmental groups and publicity-seeking celebrities have flocked to embrace the campaign.
But what is the truth behind these claims?
First, Brown has long called plastic bags "one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste." Yet UK's DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) website unequivocally contradicts this "fact" with real facts:
Second is the "single use" component of the war on plastic retail bags. The aforementioned DEFRA site states that "80% of UK consumers currently re-use their plastic bags at least once for a variety of purposes – such as bin liners, nappy sacks or lunch bags." Confirming this is the experience in Ireland: when a tax was placed on plastic bags in Ireland there was a massive increase of 300 to 500% in the sale of plastic refuse bags and bin liners! Note that these bags are thicker and heavier than plastic retail bags (see the next point below) and therefor the "green footprint" is much heavier. [Note to politicians: ever hear of the law of unintended consequences?]
Third, there are a whole lot of reasons to continue using plastic bags at grocery stores, from reducing energy to fighting shoplifting. And did you know that today's plastic bags use 70% less plastic than they did 20 years ago, yet are just as strong?
Fourth, the "science" used to support the fight against plastic is really the result of a a misrepresentation of a scientific study. That is, a boldfaced lie:
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.
The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”. But they admitted: “The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine.”
In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment.
Regardless, the erroneous claim has become the keystone of a widening campaign to demonise plastic bags.
That's right, there is no scientific evidence to support the outrageous claims of the granola-chomping, mantra-chanting, tree-sitting crowd (and a lot to discount it), yet the British government has embraced the plastic bag myth. As a result British taxpayer dollars pounds will be wasted and retail prices will rise, all for nothing.
Sounds a lot like the governmental embrace of global warming, doesn't it?
A survey of 3,000 under-twenties Britians found that:
When you get all your information from television, movies and video games, there's no telling what you'll end up believing.
The UK Times claims that a government study is about to be released which shows that knife-point robberies have doubled in the past two years. On average, there were 175 knife robberies a day in England and Wales last year.
And remember, not only do most crimes go unreported (up to 70%), the authorities cook the books when it comes to crime statistics.
One citizen has a three-prong approach to the problem:
Who would feel comfortable in a nation like that? Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and more than a few anti-gun liberals that I know. [Look Ma, they still grow fascists in England!]
After all, outlawing guns did sooooo much good in reducing gun crime. Oh wait, it didn't.
The UK Guardian prints a three part series written by British author Andrew Anthony. In the day reality hit home, Anthony describes how the attack of 11 September 2001 began him on a journey from "committed member of the liberal left" to a new realization of the world, as he began to question everything from the liberal left's anti-Americanism to basic assumptions about race, crime and terror.
The articles are extracts from his new book [The Fall-Out: How a guilty liberal lost his innocence, available next month]. Although Anthony's articles cover a range of topics, I find his realization that something is wrong on the streets of Britain the most compelling. From part 2:
Empiricism and emotion are never more uncomfortable bed partners than in the matter of crime. Figures in Britain, for example, suggest that crime is going down but at the same time the chance of being a victim of crime appears to have gone up. Also crimes that directly affect people, the kinds of incidents that dramatically change our perception of danger, such as rape, street robberies and gun crime, have been increasing. In the 10 years between 1995 and 2005, serious woundings rose by 50 per cent in England and Wales. And it is estimated that up to 70 per cent of violent crime goes unreported. Perhaps this is because victims have little confidence in gaining justice, as the conviction rate for these crimes has been falling. According to Home Office figures for 2006, only 9.7 per cent of all 'serious woundings' reported to the police led to a successful conviction. For robberies the figure is 8.9 per cent and for rape, it's 5.5 per cent. In any case, few would dispute that there is an increased anxiety about crime and much of it, I think, is a reflection of waning communal relations, seen most starkly, but far from exclusively, between adults and youths.
For years, the British authorities played games with how crime statistics were calculated. Now that they've been found out and the public is demanding the truth, the statistics are disconcerting. For instance, how can gun crime be increasing on an island which has such strict gun laws?
It's a surprise to liberals, but comes as no surprise to those of us who know that taking guns out of the hands of the law-abiding citizens does little more than disarm the innocent.
Because of a "bizarre distortion in the Government's flagship crime figures," three million crimes per year don't get reported by the UK government. At fault is a decision to ignore all crimes in which the victim has previously reported five incidents in the year.
That's right. Get robbed for the sixth time and the government just pretends it never happened.
So how bad can this be?
Violent crime is 82 per cent higher at 4.4 million offences compared with 2.4 million in the BCS, the survey claims, including a 156 per cent rise in " acquaintance violence" from 817,000 incidents to 2.1 million.
Domestic violence is 140 per cent higher, up from 357,000 incidents a year to 857,000, the authors said, while there are nearly three million common assaults a year rather than the 1.5 million estimated by the BCS, a rise of 98 per cent.
Burglary is 20 per cent higher than currently estimated, at 877,000 a year, and vandalism is 24 per cent higher, the report calculated.
Robbery is 7 per cent up on the official estimates, or an extra 22,000 crimes bringing the yearly total to 333,000.
That's what I call creative accounting.
Salford council has expanded the use of "hat cams", that is, video cameras mounted on the hat of a police officer, to include allowing privately-employed parking attendants to wear them. But these are not your run-of-the-mill parking attendants, these 20 guys not only write parking tickets but are being given authority to ticket "anti-social behavior", including loitering, flyposting and letting your dog poop on the sidewalk.
We have 20 parking attendants walking around the city and we decided that they might as well look at more than just cars. One of the biggest issues on people's minds is the disrespect that some are showing to our environment. The police have not got the resources when they are chasing criminals so this makes a lot of sense.
How long before there's a camera on every authority figure and public building in Britain?
Shahid Malik, a member of the British Parliment, wrote an article in the Sunday Times titled If you want sharia law, you should go and live in Saudi:
As I have repeatedly said, in this world of indiscriminate terrorist bombings, where Muslims are just as likely to be the victims of terrorism as other British and US citizens, we Muslims have an equal stake in fighting extremism. Hundreds of Muslims died on 9/11 and 7/7. But more importantly, given that these acts are carried out in the name of our religion — Islam — we have a greater responsibility not merely to condemn but to confront the extremists. In addition to being the targets of terrorism, Muslims will inevitably be the targets of any backlash.
Well said.
But the article is about demanding sharia law. Muslims in both Britain and Canada have been demanding this in the last few years. Malik reminds them:
When it comes to sharia, Muhammad ibn Adam, the respected Islamic scholar, says: “It is necessary by sharia to abide by the laws of the country one lives in, regardless of the nature of the law, as long as the law doesn’t demand something that is against Islam.” It is narrated in the Koran that the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “It is necessary upon a Muslim to listen to and obey the ruler, as long as one is not ordered to carry out a sin.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, no 2796 & Sunan Tirmidhi).
This is a great quote to tuck away for the future.
HT to Outside the Beltway via High Country Conservative.
Technorati tags: War on Islamofacism, War on Terror, Moderate Muslim, British Politics, Sharia Law.
More than nine decades after Britain curtailed pub hours to get wartime munitions workers back to their jobs, round-the-clock public boozing is about to become a fact of 21st-century life. ...Keeping the pubs open longer will not change yobs into sophisticates. Mr. Blair needs to champion victums rights, arm the law-abiding citizens so they can defend themselves and get tough on the yobs that are running wild in the streets.Paradoxically, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government is promoting the change as a solution to "binge drinking," a national problem that leads to city streets and town lanes being awash in vomit and urine nightly from alcoholic overindulgence.
Mr. Blair and his ministers hope the relaxation of the drinking laws will lead to a European-style cafe culture in which patrons linger for hours over a bottle of wine as in Paris or Rome, or a couple of steins of beer as they do in Berlin.
But police, judges, doctors and other critics fear they will, instead, get a quantum leap in the binge drinking that -- along with loutish behavior, street fighting and related crimes -- already plagues the land.
But on 20 October 1805 Admiral Lord Nelson led his fleet against a numerically-superior force and won a stunning victory, changing the course of history.
As Napoleon's armies tramped at will through Europe, he tried to amass a flotilla capable of transporting his troops to Britain. The tiny island nation fended off the tyrant by ruling the waves.
Two French and Spanish fleets combined to create a force of 33 ships of the line; Nelson had only 27. Rather than engaging in the traditional tactic of forming his ships in a long line parallel to the enemy and trading broadsides, Nelson divided his force into two columns and attacked the middle of the French/Spanish line. In this fashion Nelson, confident of his sailor's superior gunnery (the Brits could fire at twice the rate of the enemy) and seamanship, forced individual ship-to-ship action.
In the light breeze the ships moved no faster than a slow walking pace; it took six hours for the two armadas to close. The enemy formation stretched for four miles across the horizon.
Nelson's flagship, the 100-gun Victory, led one column and suffered more casualties than any other ship in the Royal Navy, with 57 killed and 102 wounded. Because the column headed directly for the enemy as it crossed in front, the Victory was under unanswered fire for 40 minutes before engaging the small French ship Redoutable. Nelson himself fell to a sniper's bullet and was carried below. Three hours later he was told that the battle had been won and he uttered his last words, "Thank God I have done my duty!"
The courage and discipline of the British sailors was astounding. Imagine being on a ship of the line, decks cleared for action, cannon at the ready and men at their stations, approaching a hated enemy at a painfully slow pace while they fired upon you and all you could do was wait in frustrated anticipation for your guns to bear. And bear they did; Nelson's ship split the enemy column with the French Admiral Villeneuve's flagship, the Bucentaure with 80 guns, on the port side and the best captain in the combined fleet in the Redoubtable (74 guns) on the starboard:
So the Victory turned towards the stern of the Bucentaure and, as she passed the array of elegant windows lighting the admiral's and captain's cabins, she unleashed her broadside: fifty guns loaded with two or three roundshot each, blew in her stern, dismounted twenty guns and killed or wounded half her crew. Then the Victory herself was raked by a broadside from the French eighty-four-gun ship Neptune, crossing her bows. Billowing smoke hid the collision of the fleets as Hardy ordered the helm over again to steer for the Redoubtable: the ships crashed together, their yards and rigging locking; their guns firing, muzzle to muzzle. Through the smoke, Lucas could be seen assembling boarders on deck to swarm across the bulwarks until a blast of grapeshot from the Victory cut them down. Astern of the British flagship the Temeraire followed through the gap she had forced, as the two British columns, ship by ship, joined battle. At the heart of it the two admirals and their heaviest ships fought in a vortex of smoke, flame and shattered ships."Engaging the French and Spanish admirals, one on each side," wrote Thomas Johns, an able seaman in the Victory, in a letter to his parents, ''we was so involved in smoke and fire not to be seen by any of our frigates looking on for about half an hour and they thought we was blown up or sunk, having no less than five ships on us at the time, but we were bravely seconded by the Temeraire or we would have been sunk, it being their orders and intention to capture or sink Lord Nelson's ship."
At the end of the day, the French and Spanyards lost 22 ships; the Royal Navy lost none. The British lost 449 men killed and 1,241 wounded (some of whom subsequently died), the French and Spanish fleets lost 4,408 men killed and 2,545 wounded.
Among the 20,000 French and Spanyards captured was the French Admiral Villeneuve. On his return to France, he was found stabbed six times in the chest in his inn room while returning to Paris. His death was ruled a suicide.
As a result of Trafalgar, Napoleon had to abandon his invasion plans and eventually turned eastward in a disastrous campaign against the Russians. And the British controlled the world's oceans and seas for the next one hundred years. And on this, the 200th anniversary of the great battle, we remember the bravery of Britain as it stood steadfast against a tyrant that had nearly all of mainland Europe on its knees.
Sources:
Bloggers with Trafalgar anniversary posts:Even now, French politicians wince when they reach London by way of Waterloo station and look up Whitehall on their way to Downing Street toward Trafalgar Square, with Lord Nelson atop his vast column
This is clearly outlined in a report called The Poverty of Multiculturalism:
The report, from the right-of-centre think-tank Civitas, criticises what it called “hard” multiculturalists, who insist that no culture is better than any other and that society should celebrate difference.Given the clear lesson of 7/7, one would think that even the most lefty leftist would reconsider the policies that have led to fostering hatred in your own back yard. But London Mayor Ken Livingstone continues to exhibit the myopia and inability to learn from experience that permeates the liberal movement everywhere.“They simultaneously assert that no culture is better than another, but they will happily elaborate that Western culture is actually inferior and shy away from celebrating it for fear of causing offence,” the report says. “We are witnessing the revolt of the civilised against civilisation.”
“The fruits of 30 years of state-endorsed multiculturalism have seen increased inter-racial tension and inter-racial sectarianism,” the report, titled The Poverty of Multiculturalism, says. “The fact that the London suicide bombers were born and bred in Britain, and encouraged by the state to be different, illustrates that hard multiculturalism has the capacity to be not only divisive but decidedly lethal.”
Background: Trafalgar Square is a central landmark of London, named for the decisive navel battle of the Napoleonic wars. Admiral Lord Nelson led 27 British war ships against a numerically-superior force of 33 French and Spanish ships of the line. The French and Spainyards lost 22 ships; the British lost none. As a result, the British navy ruled the waves for more than a century.
The square is decorated with statues of busts of British heroes from a long and proud history: Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, General Sir Charles James Napier, Admiral Beatty, Admiral Jellicoe, Admiral Cunningham and (of course) Admiral Lord Nelson surrounded by lions said to have been made of bronze recycled from cannons from the defeated French fleet.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone wants to erect a 9-foot-tall bronze statue of former South African President Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square and his reasoning is classic lefty lunacy:
Shortly after his 2000 election, Livingstone suggested replacing the military statues with figures "that ordinary Londoners would know."In other words, Mayor Livingston is ignorant of his own country's history and believes multiculturalism should continue to be fostered even though his city was brutally attacked because of it."I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did," he said. ...
Livingstone said critics complaining about the statue's location were hiding their true motives.
"I actually think it's what he represents they don't want to see depicted, because in that square one Nelson signifies the birth of the British empire and 100 years of global dominance," Livingstone told Labour delegates. "Nelson Mandela would signify the peaceful transition to a multiracial and multicultural world, and I would be proud to have that in London."
A CPS spokeswoman said: "We decided not to prosecute because the victim was unable to identify any of the suspects when he was shown photographs.To be fair, the victim escaped and chased one kid down and had a fight with him, so if the kid couldn't identify that guy then something here is kinda fishy. Still, the public statement made by CPS is sheer lunacy."Seven of the suspects made no admission and accordingly there was no evidence against any of those individuals.
"Three of the boys did admit the attack on Kyle, but because of their previous good character we thought it was unfair to single them out and pursue the prosecution.
"The other three made certain admissions but, as with the others, we decided prosecution was not justified."
The mother is understandably outraged.
Hat tip and thanks to TriggerFinger. I almost cried laughing. But then again, my wife thinks I'm nuts for loving the musical remake of Reefer Madness . . .
We seem to have pulled off the rare feat of breeding suicide bombers determined to attack the very society that incubated them; and the question is why. Why does America import its suicide bombers, while we produce our own? Last summer we had a magnificent holiday driving around America, and for a cynical Brit it was astonishing to see the way the Americans fly that flag of theirs.Read it all as it attacks the multiculturalism that liberals swoon over.On every porch, on every flagpole, on every bumper: there were the stars and stripes, unabashed, exuberant, proud. Contrast our treatment of the Union Flag, which is endlessly being cited in racial harassment cases, on the ground that it is provocative merely - for instance - to stick it on your locker. ...
The Americans would be mystified by our approach to a national symbol. For them the flag is a vital agent of integration, a way of asserting that, in that vast immigrant country, each person is not only American but equally American, and has an equal stake in society.
The multiculturalism that divides Britain was questioned years earlier by an educator, and it cost him his job:
In a series of articles published in the Right-wing Salisbury Review in the early 1980s, he criticised Bradford city council's policy of educating ethnic minority children according to their own culture, predicting that the move would create divisions between white and Asian communities.They should bring Honeyford out of retirement and put him in charge of the country's education. Failing that, we should bring him over here.At school, where languages such as Urdu, Gujurati and Hindi predominated over English, Mr Honeyford tried to introduce a uniform but he was opposed by the local council, which judged that such a move could be racist. Concerned that "we were getting nine-year-olds who had never sat in the same class as a white child", Mr Honeyford wanted to impose racial integration - if need be, by busing in white pupils from across the city.
His views provoked an outcry among the anti-racism lobby.
"E Pluribus Unum" — not "Una Plures".
Medics, cops, firefighters, surgeons, Tube staff and ordinary members of the public all showed amazing courage and compassion after the attacks.Trauma surgeon Professor Jim Ryan and his team treated 50 victims at University College London.
Falklands veteran Prof Ryan, a war wounds expert, said: "There was absolute calm and no voices raised, people were just waiting to roll."
Wikipedia is being constantly updated to reflect the latest (and hopefully, more accurate) information.
Pithiest comment of the day, from Europhobia who is liveblogging the coverage:
14:05 - I tell you what, if this is an "Islamic" terrorist attack, they're doing a piss-poor job. The pubs are all packed out, people sipping their pints happily, all a tad pissed off, but basically fine with it. Nice one, Al Quaeda - you profess to be from a teetotal religion, and you've given the pub trade a massive mid-week boost. Result.Runner up for pithy comment is Tim Worstall:
Yes, we'll take an excuse for a day off, throw a sickie. But you threaten us, try to kill us? Kill and injure some of us?Best anti-reactionary graphic of the day. HT to Bloggerheads who has this to say on the subject:Fuck you, sunshine.
We'll not be having that.
This tragedy will only be compounded by Blair's government using it to further strangle the public. If Charles Clarke dares to speak the words 'ID Cards' today, I will be enraged.From Davids Medienkritik:Dear God, look at the human cost of this wrong-headed approach to terrorism - where we exploit it instead of fight it.
We must first dry our eyes and then draw our swords. The time for ambivalence is over. On a day like today we need the steadfastness and fighting spirit of a Winston Churchill. We must remember his words, "We shall not flag nor fail."Maggie's Farm carries the message from the group claiming responsibility. Strangely enough, it begins:
In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate ...Watching the live coverage today one cannot help but be impressed with the grit of the British people. Shock, yes. Horror, no doubt. But no panic. The people did not go screaming through the streets. The House of Commons did not take a day off. The hard lessons of IRA and the Blitz were not unlearned as emergency services kicked in to evacuate, give aid, assess, and protect.
May they never have to go through this again.
Other coverage can be found at
The avenues England's cities are no longer safe to walk, as "yobs" run rampant through city streets from London to Liverpool, from Leyland to Leeds. "Yob" (thought to be derived from "boy" spelled backwards) dates to the 19th century and "denotes a kind of loutish, anti-social behavior associated with working-class youth in Britain's urban centers."
[Leave it to the ever-civilized Brits to describe arson and assault as "loutish" behavior.]
England is battling rising yob problems in which large gangs of youths abuse drugs and alcohol in city centers, engage in vandalism and routinely assault citizens. To get an idea of the yob culture, listen to Quadrophenia or watch A Clockwork Orange. The former describes a precursor to the modern yob movement that currently terrorizes the law-abiding citizens of Britain, the latter predicts where it will go.
One of Blair's first efforts to take a bite out of yobs was taken in 1998 with the introduction of ASBOs, or anti-social behavior orders, which are issued via civil hearings to people for disruptive behavior that is not necessarily criminal. Anti-social behavior is broadly defined:
... it is behaviour which causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more people who are not in the same household as the perpetrator.Securing an ASBO is incredibly easy with rules that allow hearsay evidence to be admissible — only one in seventy ASBO applications are turned down. Violation of an ASBO can carry a prison sentence of up to five years.
An ASBO can address anything from cursing to begging to vandalism to "harassment of residents". As one can imagine, this kind of latitude has led to many abuses by civil authorities. Examples of ASBOs include:
ASBOs have been issued to children as young as ten and to adults in their 80s. Over a thousand were issued during the first half of 2004 alone. The PM has even appointed an "ASBO Tsar". The effect has been less than noticeable.
In Lancashire a man has been convicted of breaching an ASBO issued to him last year — for the 17th time. In South Wales frustrated citizens packed the Community Hall to discuss how to address the problem. In North Somercotes, the problem of yob vandalism and intimidation has grown so bad that citizens are threatening vigilante action.
But the latest craze to sweep through the yob culture is a sign that the lawlessness is escalating: "happy slapping":
Groups of teenagers approach an unsuspecting person and begin punching and kicking him or her while capturing it all on their camera cellphones. The images are later uploaded and shared on the Internet.Sometimes the attacks get out of hand. A woman describes an attack:The victims can be young or old, male or female. Bus stops, subway stations and parks are considered prime venues.
"They came from nowhere and jumped on Steve, knocking him to the ground and punching and kicking him. There were about 10 of them and they were only kids. It was horrific.But that's not the worst of it. A girl of 11 was raped by a gang of schoolboys in London while they filmed the ordeal. A 40-year-old barrister was put into a coma in an attack by a gang of yobs. Youths threw stones at passengers debarking from a train, including a woman with a baby carriage, and then 20 of them attacked a man, pushing him to the ground and kicking him. Three girls attacked a 15-year-old girl with a knife in broad daylight. A 20-year-old was left unconscious as the result of a happy slap attack. A father of four was beaten to death by teenage yobs because he could not offer a light for a cigarette. A 17-year-old thug in Bolton headed a gang of 60 yobs (some as young as 4), that was responsible for a string of assaults, including an off-duty police officer. After the thug's arrest crime in the area dropped 85%."I was screaming at them to get off. Then this lad headbutted me and a girl started smashing me in the face."
And those are just the current news stories.
Crime is everywhere:
Sapphire, 15, from Leeds, thinks that by the time she has children most primary school pupils will be carrying knives. One boy says a gun was brought into the playground at his school. Crime seems a daily reality in these children's communities.According to a recent survey of over 11,000 London schoolchildren:
... not only did one in ten teenage schoolboys say that he had carried a gun or a replica gun in the past year, but 6 per cent of the 11 to 15-year-olds said that they had fired a real gun. One in seven said that they knew someone who had “brought a gun or a real-looking gun” to school.Another problem are "hoodies", yobs who wear hooded jackets or billed caps that obscure their face from the increasingly ubiquitous closed circuit television cameras (CCTVs). The problem has grown so bad that many are calling for a ban on the jackets. One mall, Bluewater in Kent, actually did just that in May — those wearing hoods or baseball caps in a manner that obscured their face (from the over 400 CCTVs on the premises) are asked to leave. The result has been an astounding 22% increase in the number of visitors.
Even Simon Cowell of The X Factor, Pop Idol and American Idol fame is urging the British government to ban hooded tops. But this Brit, no doubt tainted by his prolonged exposure to Americans, has expressed one of the only ideas I've seen that addresses the problem: he wants to implement an American-style "three strikes and you're out" program:
"If you commit the same crime three times there is absolutely no excuse the third time you do it," he says. "You go to prison.Middlesbrough Mayor Ray Mallon also has an idea — he wants to hold the yob's parent's responsible:"Our laws allow 14-year-old kids to commit 30 or 40 burglaries. We need zero tolerance. We should be protecting the innocent."
"If a child under 18 appears in court for an ASBO hearing I want to see that child's parents alongside them in the dock.Indeed."It should be a joint undertaking, the child and his or her guarantor. If the child breaches the ASBO then the parent should also be punished," said the Mayor.
Coming next week: Crime in Britain Part 3: Even More Failed Policies
| Doubt that God exists | 3% |
| Don't believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ | 20% |
| Don't believe in the Virgin Birth | 40% |
| Don't believe Jesus turned water into wine | 39% |
Funny, I thought communion was a central part of worship in the Church of England.
Firearms registration has been a part of life in England since the 1920s, but beginning in 1997 new laws were enacted which become more and more restrictive. 95% of all handguns were banned and the remainder (.22 caliber) had to be stored at gun clubs. Several months later a total ban on handguns was passed along with a buy back, which netted more than 100,000 handguns from the homes of otherwise law-abiding citizens.
But the government's war on guns didn't stop there. Over time abuse of power became commonplace and police presence in the home became more and more intrusive:
Under regulations implementing Britain's 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Act, gun club members must now register every time they use a range, and must record which particular gun they use. If the gun-owner does not use some of his legally-registered guns at the range often enough, his permission to own those guns will be revoked.That was the situation in 1999. Since then not much has changed. Laws on the books include:Having control over rifle and handgun owners through a licensing system, the police began inventing their own conditions to put on licenses. The police practice was not entirely legal, but it was generally accepted by a compliant public....
After the 1996 Dunblane shootings, some police forces began performing spot checks on persons who already held Firearms Certificates. Apparently the home searches were done to make sure that the firearms really were locked up.
Parliament never granted the police home inspection authority, nor did Parliament enact legislation saying that a hardened safe is the only acceptable storage method. However, that is what the police in many jurisdictions require anyway. In fact, many gun owners who bought safes that the police said were acceptable are now being forced to buy new safes because the local police have arbitrarily changed the standards. In many districts, an "acceptable safe" is now one that can withstand a half-hour attack by a burglar who arrives with a full set of safe-opening tools.
Sometimes the police require the purchase of two safes: the first one for the gun and the second one for separate storage of ammunition. A Briton (p.424)buying a low-powered, £5 rimfire rifle may have to spend £100 on a safe. Likewise, a person with five handguns (before the 1997 ban) might have been ordered to add a £1000 electronic security system.[109] Added to the cost of the illegal requirement for hardened safes is the escalating cost of Firearms or Shotgun Certificates. Home inspections are expensive for the police, and thus the cost of Firearms Certificates or Shotgun Certificates has been raised again and again, far above the rate of inflation, in order to cover the costs of the intrusive inspections, as well as the cost of many gross inefficiencies in police processing of applications.[110] The net effect of the heavy security costs is to reduce legal gun ownership by the less wealthy classes, as in the days of Henry VIII, Charles I, who was later beheaded during the English Civil War, and James II, who was driven out of the country by the Glorious Revolution.
But they did just that in England and Scotland and Wales. Over time the owners of antique pistols and shotguns that had been in the family for generations have been forced to give up their cherished possessions. Sports shooters gave up their handguns and have had to be happy with rifle shooting.
And for what? The result has been a sharp increase in gun crimes, particularly in the early years as the criminal element came to realize the advantage it had against a defenseless citizenry, with an explosive 35% increase in the 2001/02 year:
The dramatic rise in gun crime had to stop eventually as the crime market became increasingly saturated, and indeed we now see that the growth has slowed considerably, with less than a 1% increase from 2002/03 to 2003/04.
Yet the latest Home Office report contains some disturbing statistics (page 79):
Even worse, figures from the third quarter of 2004 indicate a return to the high growth rate of gun crime with a 5% higher rate than the previous year's third quarter. Furthermore, there has been a huge surge in shootings across London this year with a dramatic increase in the number of young teens carrying and using handguns, some as young as 14:
The teenage gunmen are suspected of being behind a rise of as much as 146 per cent in gun crime in some London boroughs in the months since April, during which Met Police figures show a 10 per cent rise capital-wide.The worst boroughs report stunning increases in gun crime:One senior detective on Operation Trident, combating armed black drug gangs, said: "The gunmen are getting younger and younger. These kids are less disciplined than older gunmen and more volatile. The terrifying thing is they are getting hold of these guns and they are more willing to use them than older criminals."
| Borough | Increase Since April | # incidents this year | # incidents last year |
| Haringey | 146% | 69 | 28 |
| Lambeth | 70% | 61 | 36 |
| Islington | 93% | 31 | 16 |
| Wandsworth | 88% | 32 | 17 |
And in spite of the total prohibition on handguns, the pistol remains the criminals weapon of choice with 58% of firearm crimes in 2001/02 being committed with a handgun (figure 2.3). As one ex-cocaine dealer put it, high-calibre firearms are as easily available as toothbrushes.
The experiment in the UK is a failure in every respect. It clearly demonstrates that prohibition fails to keep guns out of the hands of anyone except the law abiding citizen. Indeed, the most restricted weapon -- the handgun -- is the weapon most used by the criminal element. Gun control has not only failed to fix the problem, it has failed to keep guns out of the hands of an entire new, younger generation of thugs.
In addition, police have abused their authority and treated the gun owner as the criminal while utterly failing to stem the tide of gun crime.
Next week, Crime in Britain Part 2: Yobs and ASBOs.