Charlie Gilmour – Demonstrator or Criminal?

Image by victoriapeckham via Flickr

I am getting a bit sick of reading articles today saying that Gilmour has been treated too harshly with his prison sentence. Not only are some saying that he has been made an example of because of his high profile family and it is even being claimed that the sentence is an attack on rights of political dissent.

Bullshit. This guy was drunk and stoned out of his head. Far from that being a mitigating factor as his supporters want to portray it, it is an aggravating element of his crimes. You are not a political activist if before taking part in a demonstration you choose to get completely out of your head on drink and drugs.

What he went on to do was to try to set fire to the doors of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, smashed the plate glass window of a shop and threw a dustbin at a car carrying police officers protecting the royal family. In addition to this criminal damage and attempted arson, Gilmour was famously filmed swinging on the flag at the cenotaph. Not much of an issue in itself, but given the emotional value of the memorial an insult to it and the national flag in the highly charged context of an angry political demonstration was an obvious threat to public order.

Gilmour turned up in court in a sober suit and spectacles telling a sorry tale of being upset by relations with his father and denying awareness of the significance of his flag antics. All of this in contradiction of his obscenity ridden belligerence on the Internet in the days after the actions for which he had been charged. Not only was he a loutish criminal, he was happy to lie and manipulate in the hope of avoiding the consequences of his actions. No proud and thoughtful political activist. Just a devious lout who hoped he would be judged by the naïve or stupid.

He had already been indulged by being allowed long enough bail for him to finish his studies for this year, but now he was jailed for sixteen months. That’s reasonable enough for what he had done and anyway he will only serve about eight months. Not that big a deal for somebody who carries out violent acts under the influence of drink and drugs without regard for who or what by be harmed.

Having said all that, I doubt that he is much of a present danger to the public so my preference would be for him to be tagged. He should be restricted to a specific area, curfewed and required to carry out unpaid work rather than putting taxpayers to further expense by locking him up and letting him sit on his arse feeling sorry for himself.

Related articles

• Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s son jailed over student fees rampage (mirror.co.uk)
• Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist, given 16 months in jail for role in student riots (dangerousminds.net)
• You: Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist, jailed for protest violence (guardian.co.uk)
• Pink Floyd Gilmour’s LSD-crazed son Charlie is given 16 months (thesun.co.uk)
• Cenotaph Protester Gilmour Jailed For Rampage (news.sky.com)

DNA, surveillance & Freedom

 

Following a European Court ruling there is to be a change in the way that DNA records are held in England and Wales. The indications are that records of those who have not been convicted of an offence will be destroyed in most cases after six years.

 

Many libertarians will instinctively feel that they should oppose the holding of DNA records of innocent people at all and I obviously understand that. I think these proposals are wrong for completely different reasons and I believe that we need to address the question of DNA thoroughly and consistently.

 

Like everybody else born in this country, my birth was registered and a birth certificate was issued which was supposed to reliably establish my identity for all kinds of purposes throughout my life. When this system was introduced many people opposed it as an infringement of personal privacy and liberty. In more than 150 years of use I am unaware of it being misused by government agencies although criminals frequently obtain birth certificates of other people in the furtherance of crime.

 

About forty years ago I was arrested when I was on a political demonstration and my finger prints were taken. I do not know whether these records are still being held, but I presume they are and it is of no interest or concern to me at all. There was some concern about privacy, accuracy and misuse when finger prints were first used in the 1880′s, but a standard was fairly quickly established and nobody has bothered much about them since. Finger print evidence has been critical in ensuring that many violent criminals have been brought to justice and the public protected.

 

Many changes in the 21^st century world have meant that birth certification is no longer a satisfactory way of establishing identity and DNA is a much more accurate and informative biometric identifier than fingerprints.

 

This brings me to the issue of the DNA database. Of course some people will be unhappy that their DNA record is kept on a database if they have not been convicted of any crime and the database is compiled by the police and the record is associated with criminals.

 

From the viewpoint of public protection there is the serious issue that approximately half of those people who have their DNA recorded on the database will go on to be convicted of a criminal offence within six years. That is a very good argument for keeping the information even if the person concerned was not convicted of anything at the time that the sample was taken. The problem, of course, is that the half who have not been convicted within the six year period may contain some future murderers, rapists or terrorists and we are now considering destroying the means by which they could be identified and brought to justice. Several murderers have already been convicted due to DNA records taken for trivial offences or incidents in which there was no conviction at all.

 

This country is now absolutely covered in CCTV cameras monitoring the movements of the vast majority of us as we go about our law abiding lives that should be private to ourselves. Masses of our private website visits, email communications, telephone conversations and other activities are being routinely stored and searched for all kinds of purposes. This is an illegitimate intrusion into privacy and freedom.

 

Being concerned about public protection and considering that the only legitimate activity of government is to ensure the safety and property of its citizens I want criminals to be prevented from committing crime and quickly caught when they do.

 

The solution is straightforward. The criminal DNA database should be continued only until it is fully replaced by a universal biometric record for everybody present in the country. Every child born should have their DNA recorded on the national database. The child’s name would be recorded within the same time limits required for existing birth registration.

 

There is an enormous difference between being able to identify a person with certainty in the event that it is required and spying into their every activity. The former is necessary and the latter is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable that people should feel unjustifiably tainted with criminality, but we must not throw away the best means of preventing crime by failing to put in place a proper system.

 

The twenty first century world requires better and more secure records than nineteenth century birth registration.

G20, tax havens and global regulation

The achievements of the G20 summit seem very limited. Little has been done to give confidence that world leaders understand, let alone agree on, what is required to avoid a repeat of the great depression of the 1930′s. An extra trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank may be of some use to tide over struggling countries, but it will not provide the increase in demand that is necessary to revive economic activity. A great deal of emphasis is being placed on agreement to deal with the problems caused by tax havens. This is really a bit of a ‘so what’ development rather than the revolution that they pretend. It is a good thing that a handful of tiny countries will find it harder to hide away the money of organised criminals and third world tyrants, but it is not going to bring an end to the world economic crisis. Anybody who believes that new controls will be adopted by everybody or that they will work very well is deluding themselves. Following the failure of the banks who had brought about the most ridiculous financial bubble in history through creating new financial instruments that were traded without their purchasers having any knowledge of the underlying value, there is now a need to revive demand in the face of consumer nervousness and insufficient credit. There is a very simple way to do this and deal with tax havens at the same time. Tax havens are only of interest because taxes are far too high in the overblown interfering states of the developed world. The legitimate role of government is to protect its citizens so that they can freely go about organising their lives and providing for their families themselves. Vast welfare systems, and the dependency that they produce, must be dismantled. This will allow radical reductions and simplification of taxation. Raising the threshold at which people start to pay tax on their incomes puts money into the pockets of poorer people. These are the very people who spend rather than hoard their cash because they need to spend to feed, clothe and house their families. This provides the demand necessary for economic recovery. Taxes above the threshold should be at a flat rate so that they are easy to collect and there is no longer any incentive for honest people to look for tax avoidance in havens. Protectionist actions will be named and shamed we are told. Well so they should be, but we need to go much further than that. There are still masses of duties, quotas and anti competitive specifications which restrict international trade and the G20 states which account for more than 80% of world trade are just as guilty of these protections as the countries outside the group. We need complete freedom of international trade. Not only is this the most efficient way for people to obtain the goods they want at the optimum price, but it also allows the poorest people in the world to break free from their tyrant governments and raise themselves by their own efforts. Best of all, freedom of trade is the sure way out of economic depression. In advocating free trade it should be understood that I am not supporting such a completely laissez faire approach as to permit criminal behaviour to flourish. Wherever there is money to be made there will be a temptation for some to try to cheat. Regulation must exist to prevent crime in trade while allowing the most possible freedom to bring goods to market.

End All Immigration Controls Into The UK

A free market should exist in people as well as goods and services. The only people who should be excluded are those who have been deported following legal process.

Everybody else should be free to come and go as they please without requirement of work permits or visas. Biometric identification should be used on entry and exit.

 

Discontinue all state benefits for anybody who has not been a continuous UK resident for 5 years

The simple solution to so called benefit tourism.

Citizenship is a different matter. Only citizens should be entitled to state benefits of any kind other than the protection of the law. Citizenship should be open to application to anybody who has lived in the country continuously for five years without any form of criminal conviction, speaks good English and has a record of employment and tax payment.

Legalise All Drugs

Attempts to control drug use can never succeed. Apart from the waste of police and court time the effect of illegality is the creation of a criminal network, extreme violence and users poisoned by contaminated product.

Gilbert Deya Miracle Babies Fraud

 

Deya leads a Christian evangelical group called Gilbert Deya Ministries. Just another crank cult preying on the spiritually needy and bleeding them of their money and devotion except for the ‘miracle babies’.

 

In a cruel twist on all the other religious frauds running their own ego pumping organisations, Deya claims to be able to make infertile women pregnant through prayer. Deya is a Kenyan and all the women who are helped into pregnancy by him have to travel to Kenya where they are presented with their baby.

 

The problem, of course, is that the babies are not theirs. They are shown by DNA analysis to have no connection with the alleged mothers and Deya’s organisation is really stealing Kenyan babies in a cynical crime to convince his followers of his miraculous powers.

 

This is one of the worse examples of how far cult leaders will go to mislead and exploit their followers. The continued claims of miracles by mainstream religions (such as those in the Catholic church who are continuing to make saints on the basis of supposed miracles) allows the continuation of an environment in which the ludicrous, cruel and criminal actions of people like Deya can continue to attract gullible supporters.