Harry Robinson

Blognor Regis tells me that the latest Maynards wine gums ad features the magnificent "Hoots Mon", the 1958 classic by Lord Rockingham's XI.

Lord Rockingham's band were the creation of a son of Elgin, one Henry Robertson aka Harry Robinson, whose full life included marrying the aristocratic The Hon Myrtle ("Ziki") Olive Felix Arbuthnot, 11th Baroness Wharton (producing four children including the 12th Baron - it also makes him a distant relation of the Guardian's ultra-left Felicity Arbuthnot), music for most of the Hammer horror films and the fine string arrangements for Sandy Denny (on her 'North Star Grassman, 'Old Fashioned Waltz' and 'Rendevous' albums) and the late Nick Drake.

None of his arrangements for Sandy Denny are on Youtube, alas. Maybe I'll put a lo-fi version of 'Carnival' or 'All Our Days' up one of these days.

Fortunately Nick Drake's 'River Man' is. And it's gorgeous. Voice, lyrics, guitar, strings. As near to perfection as a song can get.

Labour Boost For British Industry

The vitally important gambling industry, that is. Those of you who actually make things can swallow the latest National Insurance increase.

Gamblers will be able to bet more and win bigger prizes on slot machines in pubs, clubs and amusement arcades after successful lobbying of the Government by the gaming industry.

Prizes will double from £35 to £70 and the maximum stake will rise from 50p to £1, the second rise in two years, under the plan authorised by Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary.

The relaxation of gambling rules is expected to provide a boost to the industry in the downturn by generating an extra 20 per cent in revenue. The Treasury will also benefit from an additional £27million a year in VAT. However, critics fear that it will increase levels of gambling addiction.

Ministers were originally going to raise the maximum stake to 60p and the prize limit to £60 but ministers were told by the gambling industry that this would not be enough to reinvigorate the market.

Funny. Not every industry can tell the Government what they want and expect to get it.

There were questions last night about the morality of encouraging people to gamble more during a recession.

It must be that old-fashioned son-of-the-manse Old Labour morality I hear so much about these days. I didn't think it possible to despise this lot any more, but they retain the capacity to surprise. I wonder how the payback money's being routed to Party funds ?

The Bad News Is ...

The police may be hacking your network without a warrant.

The good news is - well, let's hope they've outsourced the project to a large IT consultancy, in which case it will go in five years late, 300% over budget, and have lost 80% of the envisaged functionality - you know, all the features which sold it to the government in the first place (on that somewhat hazy consultancy-funded 'evaluation week' held on a private estate with hot and cold running women) .

According to a Times commenter IPCop, TrueCrypt, PGP are the things you need to ward off the baddies. Trouble is that for many of us, it's all a bit of a hassle.

More Labour Sleaze

I don't know why Labour want legislation to facilitate State (i.e. taxpayer) funding of political parties. They seem to be doing quite nicely as it is.

“Taxpayers’ money has been recycled into the coffers of the Labour party through a children’s charity,” said Nick Hurd, shadow charities minister. “It is very disappointing that the truth is having to be dragged out of the charity and the government bit by bit.”

Labour has already returned £15,000 to the charity. It said this weekend that it was “in the process” of returning the rest of the charity cash.

Catz Club , which has received £200,000 of lottery funding and a £1.3m loan from a Cabinet Office fund, first handed Labour £15,000 in the summer of 2007 for a “platinum” table at the Wembley function. A large chunk of its government loan was written off in March 2008.

Last year it again paid Labour £15,000 for the party’s sports dinner at Wembley. The charity has told the Charity Commission that it paid to attend the event to “lobby” politicians for funding for after-school childcare facilities. Out of total payments of £30,000, only £7,500 was declared by Labour as a donation.

One of the former trustees of the charity is Margaret McDonagh, a former general secretary of the Labour party, who stepped down from Catz Club in April 2006. Amanda Delew, who helped Lord Levy to raise funds for Labour, worked as a consultant for the charity until May last year.

The Charity Commission has now launched an investigation into the charity. It has already published a critical report on the second dinner in 2008. But it discovered only recently that the other dinner donation had been made in 2007. Both Catz Club and the Labour party had failed to disclose the payment.

Catz Club, which operates as Schoolfriendetc, was registered with the Charity Commission in 2004 and runs about 100 breakfast, after-school and holiday clubs catering for about 25,000 children.

As I said a long time ago :

You don't think the student union guys who made these state-funded parties possible were going to stop when they went into politics or local government and got access to some real money, do you ? One of the things I really wish Civitas would devote a researcher to for a few months is the enormous taxpayer subsidy to the cultural Left. You could start with the Guardian and BBC.

Charities are a favourite way of laundering taxpayer money to the Left.

What ?

At first this looked insane :

A teenage golfer who has represented Wales has been sentenced to eight months youth custody for possessing an imitation firearm. Mold Crown Court heard police were called after Keith Torrence was seen in a car holding what looked like a gun.

The weapon turned out to be cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun.

Torrence, 19, from Wrexham, who has represented Wales both at home and abroad, admitted affray and possessing an imitation firearm in public. The court heard how members of the public and staff at shops in Wrexham town centre became concerned when they saw Torrence sitting in his car, holding the "gun" one afternoon last summer.

Another adult and children were in the back of the vehicle. A witness in a cake shop told police how he realised that he had been seen - and seemed to move the pistol around even more. Another witness heard someone in the car telling him to stop it because he was frightening the children.

What ? Waving a toy gun around inside a car gets you eight months ? Thank heavens sentencing was lighter in the long gone days when my brother and I were waving these around Redcar. What would have happened had he one of these ?

But it seems the BBC are, not for the first time, a little light on the actualite.

Judge John Rogers QC told him the possession of a firearm, whether real or not, caused fear and distress among those who saw it.

Torrence had caused such distress members of the public called the police, he said.

A custodial sentence was inevitable and he had considered whether it could be suspended.

But he had committed the offence while subject to a community sentence for affray, and the day after his arrest for the imitation firearm he had been involved in an offence of battery.

“It is quite inappropriate now for me to again impose a sentence which does not involve immediate custody,” he said.

The affray conviction was his third and he was supposedly serving a sentence' "in the community". While I doubt he'd have gone down but for the 'gun', it looks more like it was the straw that broke the judge's back.


(and another story from the Daily Post - showing journalistic invention at its best :

Shockingly, when the door of an industrial freezer was opened in the basement of Llandudno’s Sakura Japanese and Korean restaurant, officers found the sleeping quarters of the Sakura’s chef – an illegal immigrant from China.

They opened the door and found him ? Very shocking, because :

Officers were amazed to see his bed laid out inside the industrial freezer with its door removed.

)

A Few Bits of Wrapping Paper From The Curate's Bedroom Floor

A happy, secure and prosperous New Year to you, although my head tells me it's more likely to be an 'interesting' one.

Just a few stories that caught the eye but no time to blog thereon :

The policy of fighting 'child poverty' by throwing extra benefits at low-income 'families' is certainly having an effect - as the least-educated mothers opt for more children.

The researchers then looked at fertility rates both before the reforms were announced and after, for a sample of 101,330 women aged between 20 and 45.

They found a large increase in the first year after the benefits were made more generous, particularly among women who had left school as soon as possible.

The results show a 15 per cent increase in the probability of having a baby in the "low education group", equivalent to an extra 45,000 births compared with 670,000 across Britain as a whole.

Overall there has been a steady rise in the birth rate since 2001, and although some of this is down to higher fertility among immigrants, even among women born in the UK it has risen from 1.68 births per woman in 2004 to 1.79 last year.

Well, even 'women born in the UK' will increasingly be the daughters of migrants. I'd love to see a geographic or ethnic split for the figures. We know already that the largest number of births are in the areas with the largest numbers of immigrants, and that the most educated women have fewest babies. This latter trend appears to have been reinforced by Labour's reforms. The full report (pdf) is here.

Surprise surprise. The massed ranks of Guardianistas in the Probation 'Service', as well as other liberal do-gooders, don't like the Government's latest vote-grabbing scheme (a scheme I agree with, while having no illusions about what's driving it).

Plans to make criminals wear high-visibility jackets while doing community punishments face being undermined by a probation service “institutionally on the side of offenders”, the Government’s neighbourhood crime adviser said.

Louise Casey said that she was afraid it would use health and safety reasons as an excuse for offenders not to wear the jackets, which will bear the words “Community Payback”. She said that it was a “no-brainer” to make offenders wear them, because they showed the public that there were consequences for criminals who were given non-custodial sentences. She said also that she wanted leaflets put through letterboxes to tell people the outcome of crimes in their area.

Ms Casey told The Times that she was astonished at the level of opposition within the probation service to the jackets idea. “[The plan] will have to be driven very, very hard, but this is just the beginning to opening up the criminal justice system. I think the other thing that will meet huge resistance is sharing information about what happens to criminals.”

She added that there was a huge gap in providing information to neighbourhoods about what had happened to suspects taken to court and the punishments handed down. If people were told more about what had happened in the courts, they would have more faith in the criminal justice system.

I didn't know HMG had tweaked the law a few years back to make it legal for bailiffs to break into your house. Where the hell were the Tories ?

Now they want the bailiffs to be able to beat you up as well.

The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.

The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog.

From last year - a Muslim convert to Christianity gets full police support ...

A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader”, according to a new report.

Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”. A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.

A blog wholly devoted to the great Dalrymple. He is published in so many places it's hard to keep track. The Skeptical Doctor is the place which does all the work, and so I forgive the American spelling.

Britons once had the right to bear arms just as did Americans. How did it disappear ?

In a salami stylee - a slice at a time. "All the way down the slippery slope" follows the history.

It's not just the jobs that Poles flock to the UK for. While our electronics and space manufacturing sectors may not be too hot (when did anyone last buy an item of consumer electronics made in the UK ?) our thriving abortion industry is a (admittedly tax-subsidised) world leader.

Ten thousand Polish women had abortions in Britain last year, it has been reported, in procedures which are thought to have cost the NHS between £5million and £10m.

Thousands of the women are thought to have come to Britain specifically for the procedure, which is illegal in Poland.

People coming to Britain as temporary workers are given a National Insurance number, which allows them to register with a doctor and have NHS treatment.

Britain is thought to be a particularly popular destination as terminations can be carried out as late as 24 weeks into a pregnancy. In several other EU countries, abortions can not be carried out after 12 weeks.

A pill given to women under nine weeks pregnant costs the NHS about £500 while an operation necessary for those further into pregnancy costs about £1,600 including after-care.

Magistrate quits because "he recently jailed an offender for six months but saw him walking about the town just six weeks later".

Dr Soper said: 'My greatest frustration and that of my colleagues is the very early release of prisoners.'

He said virtually all offenders are released automatically halfway through their sentences, while emergency measures to tackle prison overcrowding means many have another 18 days knocked off their sentences. Yet the judges and magistrates who heard their cases have no say over their early release.

Dr Soper said magistrates considered 'very hard' how to punish criminals, and added: 'It is frustrating when that careful thought seems to be undermined. It has certainly reduced my confidence in the system.'

Community service and unpaid work have been trumpeted by ministers as punishments to help ease jail overcrowding, but Dr Soper said his own research locally showed only 60-65 per cent of offenders bothered to turn up.

Police were increasingly preferring to deal with offenders through cautions and on-the-spot fines rather than charging them and sending them to court, he said - undermining the principle of public and media scrutiny of justice.

Dr Soper said: 'It is not just minor cases they deal with - theft and violence are included and this court recently had a violent offender who had previously been cautioned by the police for causing grievous bodily harm.'

In his years as a JP, Dr Soper said, the number of courts in West Suffolk had dropped from six to three - and will soon be cut to just one.

'The idea of local justice, one of the strengths of the system, is disappearing fast,' he said.

'Now I hear that the courts budget is to be cut further, so what next?'

Blimey. When Micael Portillo, who lost his political stomach in 1997 and has since reinvented himself as touchy-feely Mr Nice Guy, says "Britain has lost the stomach for a fight" I think we should take notice.

It raises questions about the stamina of our nation and the resolve of our political class. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that Britain, with nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers and the latest generation of fighter-bombers, is incapable of securing a medium-size conurbation. Making Basra safe was an essential part of the overall strategy; having committed ourselves to our allies we let them down.

The extent of Britain’s fiasco has been masked by the media’s relief that we are at last leaving Iraq. Those who have been urging Britain to quit are not in a strong position to criticise the government’s lack of staying power. Reporting of Basra has mainly focused on British casualties and the prospect for withdrawal. The British media and public have shown scant regard for our failure to protect Iraqis, so the British nation, not just its government, has attracted distrust. We should reflect on what sort of country we have become. We may enjoy patronising Americans but they demonstrate a fibre that we now lack.

But be fair. One of the strange contradictions of NuLabs regime is the willingness to upset Muslims overseas while bending over backwards to avoid upsetting them in the UK (apart from the said overseas upsets). The retreat from Basra would at least be a mark of consistency, of bringing foreign policy into craven line with domestic, were it not for the fact that the withdrawal is almost certainly aimed at facilitating an additional troop movement into Afghanistan. Our boys will go from being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Iraq, to being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Afghanistan - all so that little Nooria can go to school.