High Speed Music

Don't come any faster than this - watch Paul Warren on fiddle - or shorter either. But no one-chord wonders here :

What An Unfortunate Name ...

It sounds more like the sort of practice that Harriet Harman would deplore being advertised on the Web.


(Best of order in the comments, please)

Guardian Morality

This blog, eighteen months back :

Oh Lordy - "Disability Hate Crime". I suppose the idea is that although the current criminal justice system is totally unable to enforce existing laws on anti-social behaviour - witness the tragic fates of Christine Lakinski and the Pilkington family - they hope to add the disabled to the list of "protected species" aka designated victim groups.

The Guardian :

Although much of the abuse centred on the taunts about the children's disabilities, police failed to recognise it as a hate crime rather than simple antisocial behaviour, which would have made it a far higher priority.

The inquest heard that at the time of Pilkington's death, Leicestershire police had not implemented the Home Office guidance on hate crimes issued two years earlier.

Hinckley and Bosworth council's community officers visited Pilkington but never learned until after she was dead that anyone in the family was disabled.

And if poor Francecca Pilkington hadn't had a disability ? If she'd been harassed 'because she was there' ? Then she could go hang as far as the Guardian, the local authority and the police were concerned.

(via Dalrymple : "the seriousness of an offense committed in Britain now depends upon who the victim is. If a person is not of an identifiably protected group, he or she is not entitled to police intervention against abusive stone- and bottle-throwing youths. He is not entitled to protection at all. The Guardian’s article appears to accept that such behavior, so long as it targets a member of an unprotected group, is merely undesirable—“anti-social” rather than obviously criminal")


UPDATE - Aaarghh !

"Pilkington case may be a Lawrence moment for disability hate crime"

You Have Been Warned

Some people on 'the Left' gave up on democracy a long time ago - both Cherie Blair and Helena Kennedy are on record as saying that they saw the law as a more effective method of bringing about radical social change than dull old vote-grubbing - and when you look at the helplessness of the law-abiding and the empowerment of the criminal today, who's to say they were wrong ?

(incidentally, if anyone out there has mp3s of Ms Kennedy's recent 4 part R4 'Jeopardising Justice' series, please get in touch - I didn't record them and should have done)

Still, that dull old campaigning stuff played its part, and Labour have been in power for 12 years, arriving with massive goodwill and expectation, soon to leave with the hatred of many and the bitterness of their own supporters.

Laurie Penny has been to the Labour conference :

On Tuesday I walked along the seafront with Hilary Wainwright (another public school leftie) and John McDonnell whilst those two seasoned old campaigners- veterans of 1968, feminists and formerly die-hard Labour activists - mused that the future of the left lay in direct action.

John McDonnell is a fan of the IRA ("it's about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle") and has called for the lifting of the UK ban on the LTTE, more usually known as the Tamil Tigers.

It remains to be seen what manner of 'direct action' Mr McDonnell has in mind. Can't say we've not been told, though.