Politics and Policing Where Do They Divide?

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In the wake of the riots we are bombarded with competing claims about who controlled them. The police are sure that the successful tactics were evolved by them while the politicians say that it all got sorted when they returned from holiday. I think that the riots stopped because the weather turned bad, but there is a serious issue about who should do what in keeping us safe from crime.

 

The government have said that they will scrap the costly and useless police authorities and replace them with elected commissioners. Well OK, but what exactly is a commissioner? The chief of the Met Police is called the Commissioner whereas the people who run all other UK police forces are called Chief Constables. If the Metropolitan Police Authority is to be replaced by an elected commissioner they are going to have to sort out the titles.

 

The real issue, of course, is what part of policing should be decided by politicians and what is decided by the police chief. The standard answer is that policy is for politicians and operational matters are the responsibility of the uniformed cops. But where exactly is the line drawn between these? Many libertarians support the idea of directly elected police control in some form because they want policing priorities to be responsive to citizen concerns and they also wish t oget policing to be closer to specific community conditions. These are legitimate aspirations, but I would suggest that focussing on election of a figurehead does not address the right issue.

 

Britain is unlike most other countries in its insistence on having a single police service in which personnel deal with everything from dropping litter to multiple murder, parking infringement to complex fraud. This is all done through 43 different police forces, roughly relating to counties, that are far too big to provide genuine local accountability and much too small to address large scale, organised crime.

 

The apprehension of criminals and even the prevention of crime is a technical process which most people would agree requires skills, experience, training and a high degree of efficiency. Quite obviously these are things which require stability and are not compatible with the turnover resulting from elections or the absence of appropriate background that election candidates are likely to have. Whatever title you give them, the operational head of any level of policing cannot and must not be determined by popular election.

 

At present, Police Authorities do not perform any worthwhile role. They are meant to be the means by which Chief Constables, or the Met Commissioner, are accountable for the performance of themselves and their force. The reality is that the Authority is composed primarily of Councillors selected by the local authority who have no knowledge of policing and no idea how to hold the professionals to account. Serving on the Police Authority is just another little source of responsibility allowance and a diverting couple of hours from time to time.

 

An elected person with specific responsibility for setting policy frameworks for police and holding the Chief constables to account would have more focus and authority and might gain sufficient insight to be able to probe the effectiveness of the force if s/he held office for long enough. The problem is that this doesn’t deal with the problem of getting policing organised on an appropriate scale to deal with the whole range of crime and public safety that is required. Also, in those places which have an executive mayor, particularly London, the elected Police Commissioner is going to be a competing figure to the mayor and a dilution of the executive mayor role.

 

A few years ago it was unquestioned that only the state could run prisons and handle prisoners. Now we have many privately owned and run gaols and prisoner transport is largely contracted out. Tiny steps have been taken to improve policing by de-criminalising some traffic management roles and introducing Police Community Support staff to deal with anti-social behaviour and petty crime. Even these micro moves have been met with implacable hostility from the Police Federation which, although they are prohibited from organising industrial action, is one of the most intransigent and powerful trade unions in the country. Apart from the rank and file union, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is a formidable barrier to reform. ACPO is the senior officers trade union, but at the same time it gets large amount of taxpayers money so it is one of those strange hybrid organisations by which the state extends its tendrils where they shouldn’t be. Financial pressures brought about change in the prison system and that will go further. The present economic constraints should be an aid to breaking the massive institutional barriers to police reform.

 

The way forward is to go ahead with abolition of Police Authorities. In those areas with an executive mayor policing should become part of his/her responsibility. In the rest of the country an elected police commissioner would be OK.

 

The real job though is to get the right sort of policing. Major crime and the contingency arrangements for large scale incidents must be coordinated nationally and internationally. All motoring offences, which does not include such things as manslaughter by use of a vehicle, should be de-criminalised. The task of enforcing the civil motoring laws needs to be contracted out to private providers. Local crime and crime prevention needs to be separated into its specialisms of theft and burglary, rape and sexual offences, fraud, etc. and delivered in the manner chosen by the communities they serve.

 

It is my view that the vast majority of policing and public safety would be best handled by private contractors, but there is no reason why mayors or commissioners should not keep it as a directly employed service or a mixture of public and private provision.

Evicting Rioters

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Among the many knee jerks following the riots is the proposal that those convicted of rioting offences may be evicted from council housing.

Cameron backs plans to ensure that council tenants found guilty of taking part in the mayhem will be evicted. Ministers are re-drafting consultation documents to ensure that councils get those powers. The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, was tightening the law to make sure that even if a rioter was convicted of a crime outside their borough they could lose their council home, something that is not possible at the moment. ”Criminal or anti-social behaviour in the local neighbourhood by a tenant or a member of their family can provide grounds for eviction,” he said. ”The government is looking to strengthen those powers and so anyone involved in the unrest should stop and think about the long-term impact that their actions will have on the rest of their lives.”

David Cameron told MPs it “should be possible to evict them and keep them evicted”. He said: “Parents have a responsibility to control the young people living in their home. If young people living in your home have been involved in the violence over the past few days, they are putting your tenancy at risk.”

Some sensibly pointed out that it would mean moving problem social-housing tenants to different areas, but there is a much deeper issue involved here. The whole idea of social housing is wrong and local government certainly should not own or let housing. However much you might try to avoid it, being a council tenant is stigmatising. Being is social housing labels people in a way that depresses expectations and and diminishes the chances of social mobility.

It will be said by some that housing is a fundamental right and it is necessary to subsidise the housing needs of poor people. Well food and clothing are just as essential needs, but not many people would say that the state should produce these needs. The truth is that the state is a very bad landlord and there is no more reason that they should be in that business than that they should be making jeans or baking bread.

There is very strong competition and highly efficient supply of functional clothing and basic food. Contrast that with long housing waiting lists, poor maintenance standards and enormous tax burden in the provision of council housing. What is required is for all housing to be privately owned and available in the same market irrespective of whether you are wealthy or poor. Supply will then meet demand, subject to it not being distorted by stupid planning laws, and people will be able to buy or rent accommodation that is suited to their means and needs.

Another aspect of the eviction proposal is the collective punishment involved. Stalin used to send the families of his political opponents to Siberia after he had shot the main irritant. This was generally regarded in the west as being a bit unfair, but it seems that we are happy with the principle. Is it really right that a woman and children could be put out onto the street because the man of a house is a looter. Not in my view.

We need clarity and to remain rational. It can be no part of a civilised justice system for a person and their family to be thrown out of their home as punishment for a crime unrelated to their use of that home. The state would not get into this muddled thinking if it understood its proper role and left housing to the the citizens who own and live in them.

Related articles

• Councils set to evict rioters (independent.co.uk)
• Evict the Rioters? (redbrickblog.wordpress.com)

Don’t Whinge or Preach – Do The Job

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A district judge in Nottingham has said people should speak to the government if sentences seemed lenient.

Tim Devas, district judge at Nottingham Magistrates Court, also told Craig Cave, 26, of Burrows Avenue, Beeston, to “sort his life out”. Cave was found guilty of obstructing the police and was fined £60. Devas asked Cave if he now felt ashamed about being one of the “hundreds of yobbos” arrested. He went on “Let me give you a piece of worldly advice. Get a life, sort yourself out. Don’t you feel ashamed that you are now counted among the hundreds of yobbos arrested and now considered as scum by the public?”

He went on to tell the court: “If there are any criticisms of sentences handed down by the courts, if you want anyone to blame, then go and speak to the government. Do not blame the judges or the magistrates who do their jobs professionally and abide by the guidelines set down.”

Since you are keen on handing out advice judge, here is some from me. The maximum penalty for obstructing the police is one month in prison and £1,000 fine. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been telling you for three days that the people responsible for the disorder that has killed people, wrecked businesses and burned people out of their homes must face the full severity of the law. Obstructing police who were there to restore order is a serious offence in that context.

Asking this criminal if he is ashamed and then whining to the public that they should complain to the government for your encouragement of crime just shows that you do not understand your role. I suspect that Cave might be rather more worldly than the judge. Sixty pounds is a penalty for parking in the wrong place or dropping a fag end on the pavement, not for contributing to terror on the streets.

OK, you take account of a guilty plea. That might justify the prison sentence being suspended, but you still fine him the full £1,000. A £60 fine is derisory and you are a disgrace Devas.

OK! I Surrender

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At the age of 63 and a life long non-smoker, I have finally given in to the welter of government and health pressure group hectoring and I have finally taken up smoking.

 

The build up has been a long time coming with many stages, but the final straw came tonight with the local news saying that the local authority in Cumbria was going to ban smoking in public parks.

 

Let’s face it, Cumbria isn’t anything other than a public park is it? A county that depends entirely on tourism wants to tell visitors that they cannot have a fag in the big open spaces of the lake district. Brilliant. Of course it is all dressed up as a campaign to make it socially unacceptable to smoke in the presence of children, but the objective is abundantly clear. The aim is to stop anybody smoking anywhere.

 

Prohibition of alcohol failed catastrophically in the United States. When alcohol was prohibited in 1919 it immediately resulted in illegal brewing and distilling being taken over by organised crime and the law had to be abandoned in 1933. The crime syndicates born out of the ban on alcohol did not die with abandonment of prohibition, they just moved on to protection, prostitution and drugs.

 

The hair shirt fanatics in the UK have learned lessons from history. Instead of trying to get an absolute ban in a single law they have sought to make smoking and drinking gradually more expensive and difficult over a period of time. This has now got to the position where we are being told that we cannot smoke in the open air of the wide open spaces of the lakes and fells.

 

Never being a person to do anything by halves, on hearing the news of the proposed new smoking restriction I set out for the nearest tobacco retailer and bought a pack of cigars. Knowing nothing about them I bought the largest and most expensive ones on the basis that they would be most likely to be particularly offensive to the antis.

 

Such has been my dislike of smoking that in my student years I used to take my cannabis in cakes or by chewing resin rather than puffing on a joint. Well, I am a lot older now and I have sucked on a few spliffs in the intervening years so I thought it would be OK to join the dwindling ranks of the smokers.

 

I settled in to the front terrace of a nice wine bar with a large glass of red, assured myself that the ash trays were an indicator that smoking was permissible and guiltily lit up. It is utterly absurd for a man in his 60′s, but I felt really naughty lighting up this cigar in a public place. I think that my wife was rather pleased that I was showing some signs of being a normal human being, but I am not sure that she is the best person to judge.

 

Anyway, I rather enjoyed it. I am now going to sample some different brands and take my new habit to other parts of town. I may even go to Stony Stratford to ostentatiously smoke in their streets. I doubt whether I will ever take cigar use to the levels enjoyed by Bill Clinton, but thanks to the nanny state I am looking forward to a new area of enjoyment in my retirement.

Related articles

• Councils seek to use new powers to ban smoking in public parks (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)
• Britain to ban smoking in public parks (news.bioscholar.com)
• Stand up to the Stony Stratford smoking ban (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)

From Duggan to Destruction – Stop the Contagion

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Who was Starrish Mark Duggan?

Duggan’s Facebook page, under his alias Starrish Mark, showed him in a T-shirt with the words Star Gang. Reports suggest he probably had links to that group and allied north London gangs such as the Broadwater Farm Posse and Tottenham Mandem. These street gangs are said to be associated with the violent ‘Yardie‘ gangs of Jamaican origin. A photograph of Duggan making a gangsta gun pose with his fingers strengthens the impression that he wanted to advertise this gang allegiance.

The Voice, Britain’s leading black newspaper, has claimed that both Duggan and his cousin, 23 year old rapper Kelvin Easton, known as Smegz, “had links to the Star Gang.” Easton, described by londonstreetgangs.com as an “elder” of a group collectively called the Farm Mandem, was stabbed to death with a broken champagne bottle at the Boheme nightclub in Mile End, East London, in March.

When Duggan was shot in a mini-cab last Thursday he was under investigation by officers from Trident, the Metropolitan police unit responsible for gun crime within the black community. Duggan’s Facebook page carried photographs of him and a large number of messages left by friends. Several shots showed him in gangster poses; in others he is dressed all in black, or shown gesturing from behind the wheel of a yellow sports car with headlights blazing. Beneath that photo Duggan posted the message: “I aint even countin money no more, if it aint right it jus aint right, it does’nt even matter 2 me no more.”

According to some residents of Broadwater Farm, Duggan was a crack cocaine dealer who routinely carried a gun. Some of the messages posted by friends on his Facebook pages suggest gang involvement, referring to Duggan as a “soldier”, a “true star boy” and a “five star general”. One of the messages left among the bouquets outside Duggan’s family home referred to “Gang N17 Farm”, the name of one of the Star gang’s allies.

Shortly before he was shot Duggan sent a message on his Blackberry saying ‘The Feds (police) are following me’. Early stories of an exchange of fire in which a police officer was hit are now in doubt after indications that the bullet lodged in the police radio came from a police issue gun. It remains likely that Duggan was the subject of police attention because he was suspected of being armed and possibly on a mission to avenge the death of his cousin.

Family and supporters of Duggan gathered outside Tottenham police station on Saturday evening. Although the whole world had been told that the IPCC was investigating the shooting and the police could not comment, this group apparently didn’t know that so they demanded ‘answers’ and ‘justice’ from the local police. At some point a teenage girl starting throwing things at the police. It is alleged that she was hit or knocked down by a police officer and this seems to have been taken as a signal to burn police cars. Full scale riot and looting began.

We won’t know the full circumstances of Duggan’s shooting until the IPCC completes its enquiry, but the information circulating so far is enough for me to consider that the dead man was a reasonable subject for attention by armed police. It is to be expected that Duggan’s family will present him in a different light. Their genuine pain is a matter for them. I hope that they will now stay completely out of public view and hold an entirely private funeral. Anything other than that will be inflammatory.

Within minutes of the first disorder on Saturday night, arson, looting and attacks on police were being coordinated by Blackberry messages. There was some degree of tactical sophistication in attacking one area and then when the police had organised their resources, calling off that activity and declaring another target area. None of this had anything to do with Duggan or the teenage missile thrower. Anything could have been the trigger. This was emphasised even more strongly on Sunday and Monday nights when the criminal attacks spread across London and into other English cities.

What common factors are there in the disorder?

• Different races are involved, but the rioters are predominantly black.
• Most rioters are young and some are children.
• The targets are high value looting without any political content.
• The rioters may be jobless or too young to work, but they have Blackberrys, Iphones, etc.

It is likely that there are a few people taking advantage of this situation to pursue anarchist or other revolutionary aims, but they are probably insignificant. There is no organised anti-government movement.

Urban gangs will undoubtedly try to consolidate their influence over neighbourhoods in this situation. Apart from asserting the territories in which they do illegal trading there may be attempts to exclude the police and impose their own control.

This is not protest about the death of Mark Duggan. It is not a politically coherent opposition to to our system of government. Although the depressed state of the economy could be an aggravating factor, there is no financial action that could be taken which would have any effect on this situation.

These riots, robberies and looting are a failure of social control. This is a society breakdown because of alienation. The criminals do not relate to the bureaucracies which hand out benefits, but are faceless and unaccountable. The youth are not dependent on work or their families for their means of life. They have a basic handout that they take to be a right and they have no interest in where it comes from. Beyond that their aspirations are to have cars, girls, status and power. The only people they can see who have these things are the gangs who control drugs, sex and protection.

There must be an immediate fix followed by a longer term solution.

The fix now requires:

• Special courts sitting continually to process those who have been charged as quickly as possible. These need to be conducted by District Judges without juries.
• Wide distribution of images of those responsible for crimes and a public appeal to identify and locate offenders.
• Emergency police powers to close businesses and clear areas until order is restored.

As soon as the riots have been suppressed the root cause has to be addressed. The heart can be knocked out of gang finances by de-criminalising recreational drug use and removing legal restrictions on the sex industry. Alongside that there needs to be targeted police action to arrest the criminal leadership without excessive hesitation due to race or supposed cultural sensitivity.

In the affected areas there must be a zero tolerance approach to criminal damage, graffiti, rubbish, gang tagging and border marking. Communities must be cleaned up by people working community sentences. It is particularly important that influential gang members are returned to their own communities and seen to be required to work, stripped of their bling and bravado. It is only in this way that the grip of these people will be broken and the culture of respect, honour and quasi-military deference discredited. Instead of lauding themselves as soldiers, community wrecking criminals have to be seen as the destructive parasites they are.

Most importantly for the longer term our welfare system must be progressively dismantled. Far from riots being the product of poverty or disadvantage they are permitted by handouts and indulgence of indolence.

It will be claimed that denying benefits to people like Duggan, who had four children, will force them into crime. This is laughable. I don’t know if he did any legitimate work, but his Blackberry, his mini-cab journeys, and his lifestyle posing with flash cars in gangsta pose was not financed by welfare. Benefits are a comfortable cushion for times when the crime is quiet or too hard work.

Time may tell whether Duggan was out to kill or that his death could possibly have been avoided. Whatever the case of that, it is not the reason why London and other cities are gripped by arson and theft. The rioting comes out of failed communities.

The only solution is greater self-reliance, simpler laws that are rigorously enforced and governments that allow people to earn money legitimately and does not take too much of it away from them when they have worked for it. The last thing we need is another army of community workers, capacity builders and all the other nonsense that has excused crime for far too long.

Related articles

• Mark Duggan died of single gunshot wound to the chest, inquest told (mirror.co.uk)
• London riots: Dead man Mark Duggan was a known gangster who lived by the gun (telegraph.co.uk)

Warren Jeffs – Mormon Child Rapist

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Warren Jeffs is the hereditary leader of around 10,000 people who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This is one of the offshoots of the Mormon church. They declare that a man cannot enter heaven unless he has at least 3 wives. Jeffs obviously wants to guarantee his place in paradise because he is reputed to have 79 wives. I really don’t care how many wives or husbands a person thinks they need. It is none of my business, but the problem with Jeffs is that somebody can only become a wife if they are an adult who freely makes the choice to take on that role. 24 of those who Jeffs claims as wives were under 17 when he claimed them.

 

Jeffs has now been convicted of sexually assaulting a 15 year old, who had a child by him, and a 12 year old. Jeffs made audio recordings of his sexual activity with the 12 year old and also recorded himself instructing children and young women on how they should please him sexually.

 

Jeffs is not only a predatory paedophile of a very nasty kind, but he is also something of a sweetie when it comes to passing on the messages from his god. Jeffs conducted his own defence, if you could call it that. He made failed attempts to have State District Judge Barbara Walther removed and filed a brief based on what he said was a revelation from the Lord saying she will suffer a crippling sickness that will soon take her life. Nice stuff. You don’t need much imagination to work out what sort of revelations he passes on to the women and girls who might be reluctant to become the ‘spiritual’ wives of this 55 year old lecher.

 

Of course the behaviour of Jeffs fits in very well with that of other leaders of crank religious sects. Whether it is Wayne Bent, otherwise known as Michael Travesser, David Koresh or Jim Jones to name a few recent ones, the pattern is common. They have continual instructions from god that they must have sex with whatever women or children take their fancy and it is a religious obligation for everybody in their cult to assist them in doing this.

 

Jeffs is a menace and after sentencing in a day or two he will hopefully be put permanently in a safe place, but the 10,000 people who followed the ramblings of this criminal crank will not be safe. This organisation will not disappear and there are others still out of gaol who will be pleased to pick up where Jeffs left off.

 

Ten thousand is a lot of people to be taken in by the delusional nonsense of Jeffs and his ilk, but what about the much larger and more powerful religions? Mainstream Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith. He was a pathetic conman who spent his time trying to fleece the gullible by telling them he could find hidden treasure with ‘seer’ or peep stones. At some point he hit on the idea of getting a divine revelation and dragging in some more suckers. God, through the angel moroni, gave Smith some golden plates which he translated with the help of his stones into the book of mormon. Of course god took back his gold writings so nobody would ever be able to check Smith’s ridiculous story.

 

That book is now the basis of the massive, multi-million dollar Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints (Mormons). I refer to the dollars deliberately. They are a very money focussed outfit. Those clean cut, be-suited young men you find on your doorstep calling themselves elders are the frontline sales team of a mega corporation whose only product is lies. Some of the lies are just silly, but there are others which are more sinister. For example the Mormon church is racist. According to Smith,god cursed Ham for looking at his naked father. The curse darkened the skin of Ham’s offspring (the Hamites). This is code for saying that black people are inferior. Modern mainstream mormons try to deny the racism without rejecting Smiths words. They removed the ban on black people being full members of the church in 1978. They realised that there was some lucrative recruiting to be done in Africa, but they are still racist and defend the revelation of god by which they justify their racist behaviour.

 

Jeffs is a criminal and most mormons are not. Even the members of Jeffs crazy cult fragment of mormonism are not all deranged, but you have got to question how and why people are taken in. Whether it is the criminal abuse of Jeffs or the straightforward con of Smith, their behaviour appears obviously deviant and yet large numbers of people have been willing to follow them unquestioningly.

 

Mitt Romney and John Hunstman are mormons and Republican politicians who are possible nominees to run for President of the most powerful country on earth. If their judgement with respect to their religious belief is so strange, how would they deal with the great issues facing America and the world?

Related articles

• Polygamist leader guilty in child-rape case (msnbc.msn.com)
• Polygamist leader guilty in child-rape case (msnbc.msn.com)
• Warren Jeffs Convicted of Child Sex Abuse (time.com)

Prat of the Week – David Morris MP

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My award for prat of the week goes to Tory MP David Morris for his attempt to have all hairdressers regulated:

 

The Early Day Motion reads:

“It is dangerous to allow unqualified individuals to apply hazardous chemicals to customers’ hair without proper training and, whilst customers can seek recourse through the civil courts for any mistakes, this does not prevent those responsible continuing to practice; and urges the Government to amend the Hairdressers (Registration) Act 1964 to include compulsory registration of all hairdressers and the ability of the National Hairdressing Council to strike off those who do not practise in a professional manner”

 

Before entering Parliament, Morris was a hairdresser and now that he has become a legislator he wants to make his mark on the world by allowing his ‘professional’ body to strike off errant hair trimmers. Thus reducing all the Tanyas with their “’ow wus yer ‘ollidee?” chairside manner to the same position as doctors at the hands of the BMA ethics committee.

 

There is a pub not far from me that advertising a ‘pint and a trim’ service. Would this enterprising landlord be required to register under Morris’s interfering Act of Parliament or would he only have to cough up and face bar side inspection if he gave highlights with the short back and sides? Who knows. I am sure that Morris doesn’t. It will be for the new and expensive bunch of jobsworths created by this nonsense to exercise their undoubted skill and judgement before deciding whether to fine or ban or both the poor sod trying to make a decent living by providing a needed service.

 

As Morris admits in his Early Day Motion, the customers of incompetent hairdressers already have redress through the civil courts if they have suffered loss as a consequence of their poor choice of coiffing, but personal injury lawyers are beside themselves with excitement at the prospect of a new law. If they can show that the boozer barber was unlicenced, they will be able to extract higher compensation and whip up lots more claimants in the accompanying publicity. Everybody’s happy then. More compensation, richer lawyers and a smugly satisfied MP

 

Except that there will be fewer hairdressers, higher prices and more people coming to grief doing their own bleaching and colouring in the kitchen sink.

 

Forget your Early Day Motion David. Stay in bed till late and do us all a favour.

Tottenham in Flames

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Twenty six years after PC Keith Blakelock was murdered on the Broadwater Farm estate, riots have erupted in the same area after a man was shot dead by police.

Tonight there are buildings and vehicles burning and looting has taken place in the centre of Tottenham with reports of around three hundred people involved in disorder.

We do not yet know if the man who was apparently killed by a police bullet on Thursday was himself armed, but there are reliable reports that a police officer was struck by a bullet in that incident and he only escaped injury because it was his radio that was hit.

We are already being told that this is an area of ‘deprivation’ and a friend of the dead man’s family is reported as saying:

“They’re making their presence known because people are not happy,….this guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.”

When she says ‘he was involved in things’ she means he was a criminal. There will be an enquiry to establish whether the police acted properly when they shot Mr Duggan. It may be no surprise that his friends and relatives do not have confidence in that, but it is very telling that some of them think it is OK that a person was involved in crime and that they are justified in taking to the streets before they know whether he shot at a policeman.

The people who are attacking police, destroying property and looting shops are not doing that because they are starving, oppressed or suffering from discrimination. They are doing it because they habitually hold their communities in fear and they think they can get away with intimidating anybody who tries to establish order and safety on the streets.

The sad truth is that a quarter of a century after Keith Blakelock’s murder, the police have made no progress in breaking the grip of violent crime infesting the estates of north London. It is impossible to stop the drug dealing, prostitution, unlicensed drinking and intimidation that is controlled by criminals. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that people will always pay for sex when they want to and people will always get high. Trying to stop these things by making them illegal has no more effect than telling the tide not to come in and outlawing activity that cannot be stopped just passes that trade over to very nasty crooks instead of it being conducted with reasonable safety. The second problem in this specific area is the failure of the police and the local authorities to deal with black criminals. This is partly due to fear of the political consequences of doing it and largely because there are too few black people in policing and running the community.

We will be bombarded with requests for enquiries into poverty and deprivation in the area. Rather than producing masses of hot air and wasting time and money on post mortems of the riot, the real need is to immediately establish zero tolerance of the real crime which destroys residents tranquility and peace of mind.

Get in hard and fast on every mugging, burglary, assault and theft. Stop graffiti and littering. Ensure that habitual offenders are prevented from damaging this community any more. Do that well enough and people will stop being afraid to speak out about crime. They will become more interested in keeping their area nice and they will want to have careers in the police, fire service and other jobs that some are seeing as enemies at the moment.

Criminal gangs are not born out of poverty or deprivation, they come from fear and alienation. Fear must be driven from the streets so that decent citizens can safely build communities.

Related articles

• Tottenham in flames as protesters riot (guardian.co.uk)

Rising in the charts

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I have had a few days off due to some family commitments so things have been quiet in the world of Malpoetry, but there is cause for small celebration today.

Our ranking among Wikio political blogs has risen from a position in the 400′s to number 271. That doesn’t put us among the political mega stars, but respectable enough for a personal blog.

Thank you very much to everybody who has dropped by to read or make comment. A special thanks too for Daz at http://outspokenrabbit.blogspot.com/who has been a devoted follower, commenter and promoter of this blog. Make sure to pay Daz a visit. You will be rewarded with fascinating and insightful analysis of far higher quality than you can find in most other places.

Demolish Daft Laws

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A lot of fuss was made when France banned the wearing of the burqa in public places. So how many people have been fined for breaking this law? None it seems. Women have continued to wear the burqa and apparently they get more hostility from the public since the law was passed, but they do not get fined.

There have been a number of demonstrations by burqa wearing women hoping to be penalised so that they could go to the European Court of Human Rights or to challenge whether the law was in conflict with the French constitution. The usual kinds of antics that will consume large amounts of public money, but make no difference at all to how people lead their lives.

A man wearing a burqa in the colours of the French flag has been charged. Not with burqa wearing, but with the more serious charge of outraging the flag. It can only be concluded from this that the burqa ban cannot apply to men. That must be a relief for John Simpson who famously liberated Afghanistan while wearing one. It may also be an encouragement to admirers of the failed 21/7 bomber who fled the country in a burqa. Despite being a tall man it seems that nobody thought to peep inside before allowing him to escape our shores in the middle of a major terror alert.

Before the French burqa ban, the Swiss voted to ban minarets. The immediate reaction was for a shopkeeper to knock up a plywood minaret, shin up a ladder and stick it on top of his chimney. What is a minaret? Unfortunately none of the foolish people who wanted to prevent mosques from being built, but didn’t have the balls to say so, had thought that one through. I have got news for them. Even if their stupid law worked, mosques don’t have to have minarets.

Why am I rambling on about this rubbish? In the aftermath of the mass murder in Norway and revelations that the killer had British connections we are likely to be faced with calls for new laws to make sure that it doesn’t happen here. Among the demands to make it illegal to be mad, or whatever other ridiculous proposition they think up perhaps we should pause to consider what we are doing.

The burqa and minaret bans, however they may be dressed up, are expressions of unease at the growing presence of Islam in countries where it is seen as an alien presence. Some will be afraid of jihadi fundamentalism, others will be unhappy about the loss of their cultural identity and some will probably have religious concerns about the threat to primacy of their beliefs.

All of these are reasonable worries. The problem with the laws is that to the deranged mind of a person like Anders Breivik, legal resistance to an Islamic takeover has failed and he needs to start a war to do what the burqa and minaret bans failed to do. Let’s be clear, I am not suggesting that silly laws are the cause of the Norwegian tragedy, spree killers have all kinds of reasons for doing terrible things.

The point I am making is that laws cannot solve social problems. Proscribing organisations results only in them changing their names or going underground. It does not get rid of the reasons why those organisations managed to find followers in the first place. The same applies to bans on the symbols of Islam or any other thing that is bothering people.

Resolving social tensions cannot be done by governments. We have to work out decent and secure arrangements for society among ourselves. If a woman has her face covered in the street it is not a problem for me and it is none of my business whether she made that decision for herself or if she might have been pressured by her family of community to do it. Those things are for her to decide and it is only right for others to be involved if she asks them.

If the same woman wants to teach, be a student in a class, enter a bank, pass through border control, collect a child from school, or engage in any other activity where her identity or eye contact are necessary for that process to be properly and safely undertaken, then she must show her face. That should be dealt with by the woman concerned and whoever she is interacting with. No law could ever cover all situations and the state should not intervene in disputes about whether or not it is necessary for the face to be revealed for a specific purpose.

Similarly with minarets or any other building styles. It is offensive for the state to try to impose centralised building control that stifles cultural, religious or taste preferences at a local level. Land owners should be able to erect safe structures on their property without constraint other than to the extent that it might damage the enjoyment of the property of neighbours. If a place of worship, entertainment or whatever is going to disturb the neighbourhood in which it is proposed, then it is for the residents of that neighbourhood to resolve the matter. If they cannot reach agreement, a town or community council should be able to require conditions on the building, but there is no place for a remote government to dictate how things should be.

Alienation is at the root of social conflict and genuine localism is the only solution.