Torment In The Community

In the bleak chronicle of those with 'learning difficulties', tortured and killed in the UK by (mostly) feral underclass youth, I forgot to blog about David Aske, who died of a heart attack in March, bullied to death over a period of ten years or more.

To residents he was a gentle man, a kind neighbour and protective son, but to generations of unruly teenagers he was “Dopey Dave”, a vulnerable man they took pleasure in provoking into a fury.

He collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack on Wednesday evening after confronting several shadowy figures in the front garden who were shouting at him. Last night police arrested a 18-year-old man on suspicion of manslaughter.

One neighbour suggested that “kids” had indulged in “bear-baiting”, effectively tormenting their chosen victim to death and that the bullying had been going on for much of his life.

Over the years his tormentors, some as young as 8, had called at the modest pebble-dashed home he shared with his brother Brian, 63, and mother Rose, 88, throwing eggs and bricks at the walls, kicking in his front door, breaking windows and demanding cigarettes and money. Residents have complained that not enough was done to tackle antisocial behaviour but Greater Manchester Police insisted that officers had gone out of their way to develop a personal relationship with the family and to prosecute offenders where possible.

The police do seem to have done something :

Police insisted they had done everything possible to support Mr Askew, his wheelchair-bound mother, Rose, and brother Brian. They had been to the property in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, 10 times in the last year after reports of anti-social behaviour. One youth – currently in prison – has an ASBO for harassing the family.

10 years of harassment - one ASBO and no-one fined or imprisoned. Is that the police, Crown Prosecution Service, the kids' social workers, magistrates, or a toxic combination? You can see how that tough approach worked out :

It is thought Askew became agitated when two youths broke down a gate and entered his garden on Wednesday evening. Police were called at 9.40pm after the youths tampered with his mother's mobility scooter and a bin.

Officers arrived within nine minutes but discovered Askew collapsed in the garden.

His poor mother. One 'youth' has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. Possibility of a conviction - zero IMHO. They're just trying to be seen to do something about that open stable door and a missing horse.

Schadenfreude Update

The Magistrate on the ITV revelation that a lot of "community service" youth do damn-all except sit around smoking dope :

I am sure that it came as no surprise to anyone in the system to hear that a number of projects are poorly managed and sloppily supervised. I have been writing on here for years about the dozens of times that governments have promised 'really tough' community punishments. On the whole it hasn't happened.

We don't always see eye to eye, but, like Lib Con's Adam Ramsey he at least seems to realise that a large number of Blair's 'tough on crime' soundbites were 'for amusement only'.

Ken Clarke, by contrast, doesn't even bother pretending to be tough.



(see also It's Schadenfreude Time ...)

Cyril Smith 1928-2010

Why did Norman Scott bite the pillow ?

Because he thought Cyril Smith was next.

They don't make Liberal MPs like that any more - working class, ran a company - not only that, but a company that made things, anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment. Even in the 70s he was a rarity in a party becoming dominated by career politicians.

"Spurred on by the chip on his very large shoulder, he saw it as his duty to fight for the rights of the common man. He was deeply proud of his modest Lancashire origins, and never let anyone forget it.

A shade puritanical, he had far more affinity with the lower middle class than with a Liberal establishment — the Bonham Carters, Thorpes and Grimonds — which he despised. He was the only Liberal to oppose the abolition of capital punishment and abortion law reform (“We are the backstreet abortionists for the rest of Europe,” he declared)."

Friday Night Jungle

Mark Steyn's brilliant musical history of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' is back up online:

Solomon Linda's song has penetrated every corner of the globe. It's the most famous tune ever to have come out of Africa.

He and his family must be multi-multi-millionaires, right? Not exactly. Linda sold it to the Gallo record company for ten shillings: that would be about 87 cents. In 1962, just as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was reaching Number One around the world, he died of kidney disease in Soweto, on the edge of Johannesburg, in a concrete hovel with a couple of bedrooms with dirt floors covered in cow dung. He left his widow the equivalent of $22 in the bank and unable even to afford a headstone for his grave.

The child of wealthy New York radicals, Seeger has always been avowedly anti-capitalist. Yet his publisher had a deal with Gallo Music: they snaffled up the rights to "Mbube" cheap and in return sub-licensed to Gallo the South African and Rhodesian rights to "Wimoweh". And Seeger knew all along that Solomon Linda was the composer. He says now that back in the Fifties he instructed his publishers to give his royalties from the song to Linda, and he was shocked, shocked to discover decades later that they hadn't in fact been doing so. Evidently, it never occurred to him, as an unworldly anti-capitalist, to check his royalty statements. It was, on his part, supposedly a sin of omission. Whatever one thinks of that, his associates can't plead the same accidental oversight. Having persuaded Linda to sign away his copyright, the relevant parties made sure to slide some forms in front of his illiterate widow in 1982 and his daughters some years later to make sure the appropriation paperwork was kept in order.

...it was, in the end, a legacy of colonialism that ended the injustice. There are significant differences between US and British copyright law, and one of them is that the latter attempts to restrain the damage a foolish creator can do to himself. Under British Commonwealth law, the ownership in any intellectual property reverts to the author's heirs 25 years after his death regardless of what disadvantageous deals he may have signed. In the courtroom, the quiet courtroom, the lawsuit slept for decades, until Solomon Linda's daughters were apprised of this significant feature of Commonwealth copyright law, and took action. The sleeping lion also took on the Mouse - the Walt Disney corporation, whose film The Lion King had introduced the song to a new generation of children. In America, Linda's family really had no legal leg to stand on, but, faced with potentially catastrophic complications in Britain, South Africa, Australia, India and other key markets, Disney were only too keen to settle. In 2006, Solomon Linda finally received his due.

It's Schadenfreude Time ...

Heh :

Supervisors of offenders on unpaid work schemes are increasingly being subjected to threats, and verbal and physical abuse, with many complaining of feeling intimidated and afraid, according to a new survey.

The report, by the probation officers' union, Napo, details hundreds of incidents in London, Merseyside and Hertfordshire over recent months. In Hertfordshire, one offender told a male supervisor he was going to kill him and rape his four-year-old-daughter. Another slashed the car tyres of a female supervisor and told her: "I know here you live and I'm going to get you and your family."

At least two supervisors have had to lock themselves in a vehicle to escape physical violence and one member of staff was left cut and bleeding after a stone was thrown at him by an offender.

The situation has become so serious that a protection system has been set up for supervisors in the south-west of England.

But ... I thought these were the guys who didn't need to go to prison - the nice chaps that Ken Clarke knew how to deal with !

You can see why so many probation supervisors allow their charges to sit around and do damn-all except skin up - as this ITV programme (available for next 25 days) shows us. The report (download is Word doc) is exceeding revealing of just how much contempt the 'clients' have for the organs of the state :

An offender was instructed to work on a garden site and clear weeds. Later in the day the supervisor used the gents toilet, was not able to get out and it became apparent this was because the offender was holding the door shut. Eventually the supervisor managed to get out of the toilet. The offender told him it was a joke. He was told this sort of behaviour was not acceptable. The offender became very aggressive and started to shout at the supervisor saying ‘You don’t know what we do here. Don’t look at me like that, I am going to thump you now you ******* idiot. Are you going to breach me? You can’t do a ******* thing’.

Can't do a thing, eh ?

"The offender was subsequently sent home".

That chap might be a scumbag, but there's nothing wrong with his powers of analysis, nor with those of the criminal who asked his supervisor "why don't you get a proper job you fat ****?"

There is of course a subtext to all this. NAPO wouldn't give the people who pay their wages such a revealing glimpse of what goes on, were there not a pressing need to increase the number of probation officers and to pay them more.

Community service came into being in 1976. The idea was that as an alternative to custody offenders would complete up to 240 unpaid hours of work in the community. The thinking then was that the work would contribute toward rehabilitation, that it would not replace paid employment and that it would be of benefit to the community. Last year over 55,000 individuals were sentenced to unpaid work in the community. About a third were given individual placements, such as in a charity shop, the rest were given group work placements. However Napo has observed that groups that were originally supposed to be at a ratio of one supervisor to six offenders have grown; often over a dozen offenders now attend one group with the same number of supervisors. Staff have also complained that it is now rare to have a probation officer (or even a probation service officer, who has less training) on site. Indeed, placements are increasingly staff by sessional workers who are not contracted employees but are paid on an hourly rate. Often the only contact the offenders have with the service is through hourly-paid, sessional, supervisors who are paid on average £8.50 per hour and who often have full-time paid work elsewhere and use the unpaid work to supplement their income... sessional supervisors are increasingly reporting that they are scared on site and reluctant to report bad behaviour for fear of reprisals.

The report shows not only the increasing anarchy in the non-custodial criminal justice system, but the increasing influence of non-anarchist actors - gangs - in the inner city :

The most recent serious incident occurred on 31 July in Hackney where, as a 19-year-old offender was leaving the community service site at Brook House College in London E5, he was shot five times by an assailant using a handgun...It is thought quite possible that one of the offenders on the group phoned the assailant with relevant information. All the offenders on the placement have been interviewed by officers from Trident. This follows two other recent incidents in North London... Staff are now unable to send known gang members to do placements other than in the individual’s postal district. There are similar constraints on placements in other cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

Note also that the guys getting the crap are at the £8.50 an hour end of the spectrum. If Rod Morgan or Professor Peter King got threatened or had their tyres slashed on a more regular basis I like to think we'd see some radical new crime reduction initiatives being proposed.

Men At Work

The Aluminium Wire and Cable Company, Jersey Marine, Swansea, in (I think) the 1960s.

Amazingly, we still manufacture both aluminium metal and aluminium wire in the UK. Just don't get me started on Anglesey Aluminium.

Prime Ministers Questions 27 April 2004

Youtube disabled this for copyright reasons, presumably the copyright of the Vengaboys rather than Hansard. It now seems to have been freed up. Created rather a long time ago, the patrician chap asking Blair about murder and mutilation is High Tory Peter Tapsell.

Most Stupid CiF Post Ever ?

Zoe Williams makes a stunning comeback with If sex with HIV is a crime, so is swimming with verrucas.

Or going into work with a cold, sitting in a doctors surgery with flu, etc. You have to wonder if the Guardian's doing what the old Daily Sport used to do - knowingly publishing ridiculous stuff to pull in the punters. Seems to work, too.

"Geoff was the epitome of the London man"

So sayeth Met Inspector Richard Beadle of the killing of 90 year old war veteran Geoffrey Bacon in Camberwell.

Geoffrey certainly epitomised one class of Londoner - the murdered elderly native.

The moment I saw the headline, I was reminded of a piece I blogged about six years back, which appeared in the now-defunct online magazine Right Now. It was about the killing of elderly white people by young black men in South London, and while I disagreed with the author's thesis that the Stephen Lawrence killing and the Brixton nail bomb were some kind of unconscious, inchoate 'resistance movement', he wrote it as he saw it - and it wasn't outside my old primary school that people were being killed.

The link and site has long gone - but the magic of the Wayback Machine has brought J F Cronin's 'The Forgotten Victims' back to life - the victims being Constance Brown, 72, of Streatham, Elizabeth Pinhom, 96, of Herne Hill, Thomas Kidd, 61, of Tulse Hill, Ted Howell, 75, of Lewisham, Leslie Watkinson, 66, of Peckham, and Frank Dempsey, 56, of Clapham.

"I wouldn’t like to be an old person living in Bethnal Green" said musician Jah Wobble when he moved to leafy Cheshire. For Bethnal Green, read 'most of London outside the leafy south west postcodes'.



(UPDATE - at the opposite end of the age spectrum, while she's not a native, the treatment Michele Kirsch's kids received on a Stoke Newington estate is also relevant. The truism that racism isn't only restricted to white people is one that Guardianistas are happy to accept in theory. It's just giving chapter and verse they're uncomfortable with.)

The Land That Stein Forgot

St Columb Major - the most un-touristy town in North Cornwall. Susan and I spent a pleasant morning pottering round the rainy and slightly run-down streets. Lovely church, nice locals, interesting buildings and a couple of excellent butchers.

By contrast, Padstow was a disappointment - a nice but not terribly picturesque harbour, one Spar, a lot of expensive places to eat and a lot of expensive clothes shops. Rick Stein obviously loves the place - but he's killing the thing he loves. His empire is now expanding towards St Merryn and Constantine Bay - I confess to having given him my beer money at the Cornish Arms.

























Memorial to the Cornish wrestler James Polkinghorne. The town was also the birthplace of John Nichols Thom, self-proclaimed Messiah who led a small detachment of Kentish farm labourers to defeat in the 1838 Battle of Bossenden Wood, having promised them invulnerability to bullets in the style of the late Pierre Mulele.



















Above - not much rocket or sun-dried tomato to be seen on Broad Street, St Columb Major.

Maybe Padstow's just a bit more upmarket than last year's Perranporth, but Cornwall seems more hideously white than ever. The beaches at Constantine and Porthcothan rang with RP accents (Constantine has a beach stall which does six kinds of coffee but no tea) as little Barnaby and Saffron splashed about in their wetsuits. The English upper middles still seem to be sprogging, I'm pleased to say. And everywhere we went builders were busy catering for those seeking to escape the "frantic lifestyle". If 'Wales is the new Cornwall' then Cornwall is still the old Cornwall.

Gone ..

Cornwall - see you next week

Yazza - Keeping On Digging ...

Interesting. Yasmin Alibhai Brown is someone who blames half the ills of the world on white men, but the political's not personal. Like YAB herself, Yazza's sister also married out - a Taff social worker, no less.

I'm a big Yazza fan - even with her anti-white nonsense, she talks from the heart - and it's basically a good heart despite the stupid, even vile things she occasionally comes out with. But you shouldn't talk from the heart, in print, about your family.

"My only sister was widowed last month. She is 11 years older than me. My father, who loved her best, had sent her over to England in the Fifties."

Yazza ! No ! That is too much information !

"Her grown-up daughter ... stopped speaking to me two months ago, for reasons not explained."

I'm not totally surprised. But is this revelation going to improve things ?

"My grieving niece puts down the phone and was enraged when I wrote a sober and frank letter to her partner."

Aiiee !

"I lost my only brother too this February. He too was uncommunicative, always furious with me for writing openly about the family."

Not nice. I can see why Yazza's upset. But brother still sounds like a sensible chap.

Yazza is Yazza and she ain't gonna change - nor would we wish her to. But she doesn't half make a rod for her own back. A couple more pieces like this and none of her relatives will be talking to her - yea, even unto the tenth generation.

My father cut me off from when I was 15 to the day he died. Only my mother was different, open and emotionally honest... (I) wonder what my sister would write if only she could. She can't. I can. It may have been the saving of me but it has left me alone, condemned to separation, like many others who will not stay silent nor consent to the deliberate use of silence, even in this age of emotional austerity.

This age of emotional austerity ? She must be talking about some far-away country of which we know little. We haven't been emotionally continent since about, well, about the time Yazza arrived in the UK.

I don't know why the Big Brother producers/exploiters never thought about Yazza as an inmate. She'd have been a natural, and it would have made great television for those who like that sort of thing. Imagine all those confrontations, confessions, confidences and repentances as her fellows confronted their race, their gender, their sexuality.

I wouldn't have watched. But, as Jimi Hendrix said about Radio One, I love her just the same.

Media 101

He moves to the left.

"On Economy, Voters Move to the Left in Hong Kong"

But they lurch to the right.

"EU Voters Lurch to the Right"

Cameron - New Diplomatic Offensive

South Asia

28 July 2010 Last updated at 18:57

Cameron - 'Oi, **** - whose ******** side are you on ?'

British Prime Minister David Cameron has warned Pakistan not to have any relationship with groups of "r**heads" that "want to blow up our bloody Tube trains".

"We should be very, very clear with those ***** in Islamabad that we want to see them pull their fingers out", Mr Cameron told reporters after a speech in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. His remarks were greeted with warm applause by his Indian audience.

"Whose side are these P**** on, anyway ?"

Earlier, in Turkey, he had addressed the Palestinian issue, calling for 'those sodding front-wheelers to give Hamas a break'. His remarks were greeted with warm applause by his Turkish audience.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, who is travelling with the prime minister, sought to further clarify Mr Cameron's remarks.

"He wasn't accusing anybody of double dealing, or criticising Israel" Mr Hague said."He was just giving his audience what they wanted to hear. In this he is following the tradition of other great British statesmen, such as Mr Blair."

Tomorrow David Cameron returns to Britain and domestic politics. In a speech to Carlisle Chamber of Commerce on devolution, he is expected to call for reduced central government funding to"those sponging, drunken Jocks". Later in the evening he will address the Welsh Assembly on "the Saxon Serpent", and point out to a delegation from Sinn Fein that "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity".

• Candid Cameron ruffles diplomatic feathers 28 JULY 2010, POLITICS
• Cameron pitch to Indian business 27 JULY 2010, POLITICS
• Cameron denies immigration rift 28 JULY 2010, POLITICS
• Can Cameron win friends in India? 27 JULY 2010, POLITICS
• Should Britain forge closer ties with India? 28 JULY 2010, UK

"Payback Time"

David Cameron has arrived in India for a visit he hopes will inject new energy into Anglo-Indian relations and help build trade links between the nations. The prime minister, on his first visit to Asia since taking office, is being accompanied by several senior Cabinet colleagues and UK business leaders.

The government regards India as a vital regional and economic partner in the drive to boost exports and investment.

If India's a 'partner', why are we giving her foreign aid, especially when she has a space program and nuclear weapons ?

Mr Cameron travelled from Turkey where he pledged to help its EU entry bid.

Ah, yes. Doubtless driven by that grass-roots Tory pressure for a few million Turks to come to the UK.

Cameron can talk of partnership as much as he likes. Indian businessmen aren't stupid.

"Recently there was speculation that Anil Ambani, one of the richest men in India, might buy Liverpool football club. There was much debate on Indian television of the merits of owing a Premier League club. One participant suggested it was payback time to the British for the East India Company. The presenter cut in sharply, saying: "We paid them back a long time ago. I thought the Indians owned most of the British businesses worth having. We don't need to buy a football club to demonstrate that."

The rest of the panel roared with laughter.."

As Churchill put it in a slightly different context : "It makes one flush to read the comments which were made behind the scenes about our country and its representatives."

Shouldn't The Label Be Covered With Blood?

(On the other hand, the nightmare of the last 50 years has pretty much been off the radar of the UK consumer. Maybe the name summons up dappled sunlight through a leafy tropical canopy to the average Brit - just not to this one).

Strike One For The Revolutionary Communist Group

Once upon a time an asylum seeker arrived in the UK from Nigeria with her son, and had her application turned down. Her story was that her husband, chairman of 'a local youth organisation', and daughter had disappeared, and her house had been burned down twice, because of his political views. "The Home Office disbelieved them, advised them to try ‘other parts of Nigeria’ and locked them up at Oakington Detention Centre."

There must be a gap in the story - and she seems to have been a good networker, because she was soon making useful contacts with the asylum industry in Manchester. At a (tax-funded - by the AHRC) performance of a play about asylum (by members of the tax-funded University of Manchester department of Applied Theatre) she met a 25-year old American student :

"I sent a letter to the Home Office on her behalf, urging them to let her and her son stay in the UK in safety."

The main backers of her campaign, however, seem to have been a bunch calling themselves the Revolutionary Communist Group, a smallish spin-off from the old International Socialists most noted for their picketing of Jewish-owned shops.

Now the Revolutionary Communist Group are perfectly entitled to call for the abolition of all immigration controls, and to that end support any and every asylum seeker. After all, their political forebears, Revolutionary Communists of various stripes, slaughtered tens of millions of people in their pursuit of a fairer society. Compared to that, building the New Jerusalem by moving half the population of Africa and the Middle East to the UK seems positively benign.

But what sticks in the craw is when the (then-Guardian owned) Manchester Evening News and the BBC describe such people as 'campaigners' without even mentioning the extreme-left agenda driving the 'campaign'.

Eucharia said: "A lot of my family members have been killed. I do no want to die or lose my son. I want to live here with my son where I will be free from fear."

Campaigners supporting Eucharia and Timeyi held a day of action on Market Street in Manchester city centre and earlier this month staged a campaign meeting at St George's Church, Abbey Hey, to rally local support.

You can see from this link the power of support from St George's, Abbey Hey. It's closed and up for sale.

The good news was that, 900 letters, from how many people is not known, and 2,250 signatures (ditto) later, the Government relented :

Under all this pressure, driven by Eucharia’s determination to fight for her and her son’s life and their right to stay in Britain, the Home Office have given in and granted them indefinite leave to remain. Without this campaign, Eucharia and Timeyi would have been deported long ago, facing the same fate as the 18,280 asylum seekers deported last year.

Throughout, Eucharia and Manchester RCG insisted that the campaign should be political, emphasising the link between racism in Britain and British imperialist exploitation abroad such as in Nigeria.

Can't say the RCG are exactly hiding their agenda, can you ?

And there it may have ended. Ms Jakpa, whose husband and daughter apparently disappeared in Nigeria, gave birth to another child in the UK, and was pregnant with yet another, when she decided to go for a drive.

A woman saved from deportation by a high-profile campaign has been jailed for ten months after killing a child while driving without a licence. Four-year-old Caitlan Fitzhugh, of Coronation Street, Openshaw, was walking hand-in-hand on the pavement with her mum Stacey Strutt when she was hit by a Ford Transit van which mounted the kerb. The van careered into the youngster after being hit by a Ford Focus driven by heavily pregnant Eucharia Jakpa, who had no licence.

Not that a little dead child can remove the aura of saintliness, mind :

Andrew Nuttall, defending, said Mrs Jakpa felt ‘real and heartfelt remorse’, but had originally struggled ‘getting to grips’ with the fact she had taken a life. He admitted she had ‘behaved badly’ by seeking to blame the other driver. But he maintained that the ‘committed Christian’ had understanding of the ‘enormous pain’ felt by Caitlan’s family, since her husband and daughter had been killed in Nigeria.

I don't understand. If she's a 'committed Christian', where have the other child and the pregnancy come from, given that her husband is no longer to be found ? And why did she lie and try to blame the other driver ? Maybe she's not quite as committed as all that - or maybe Andrew Nuttall is just doing for her what Holbein attempted to do for Anne of Cleves.

And most of all, why has she kept schtum about the other people in the car, who ran off at the scene ?

Jakpa was only a provisional licence holder at the time of the crash and police say she has never provided details for her supervising driver. Two passengers who were in the car at the time ran off after the collision and have never been traced.

Sgt Jeff Hollick, from Greater Manchester Police, said: "Stacey may eventually recover from the physical injuries she suffered but there is no doubt the emotional scars left by the loss of her daughter will remain. Jakpa has never revealed to us whether she had a full licence holder guiding her and nor have the two passengers come forward of their own accord to explain their role, so Jakpa carries the full consequences of that collision on her shoulders."

Just an idea. The two who ran off couldn't have been the long-lost husband and daughter, could they ?

Cognitive Dissonance Alert

Manchester Evening News :

Officers have received 23 calls from concerned parents since the first incident was reported less than a fortnight ago. The abduction bids have all taken place in Stockport. Most of the remaining calls were to report men acting suspiciously – such as driving slowly down streets where children were playing.

I could have sworn that driving slowly in streets where children are playing is what you're supposed to do.

Friday Night Music

With this audio quality (from a 20 year old cassette), no wonder they call him Scratch.




Somewhat more melodic but very very sad - I've only just found out that 80's lovers rock queen Jean Adebambo killed herself last year. What a great pity. Gorgeous music, gorgeous voice.

A Diversity Tax ?

This blog, way back.

One of my hobby-horses is the question of culture. For some reason UK liberals believe (or claim to) that, no matter whence you hail, the moment you set foot on UK soil the mystic properties of Old Albion (or Cymru or Alba or Erin) flow up through your shoes and make you just like the natives - in terms of your propensity to evil. But in the case of your propensity to good, all the good bits of your culture magically stay, enriching the poor natives by the power of diversity.

My car insurance, which includes a 20 year old and an 18 year old, has gone up by about 25% this year.

The cost of car insurance has grown at its fastest rate, in large part due to a rise in fraudulent claims, according to data released today.

Cases of insurance fraud have been on the rise since the recession began. Figures to be published by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) later this week are expected to show that these are still on the rise. As it is, the ABI puts the total cost to the industry of undetected general insurance claims fraud at £2bn per year. This adds around £40 a year to the insurance premiums paid by all policyholders.

The most common and costly form of general insurance claims fraud is "opportunistic retail fraud". This is where individuals exaggerate or inflate genuine claims to increase the value of a payout.

But there has also been a big rise in organised fraud, where criminal gangs work to systematically defraud insurers. The most common way of doing this is via a "cash for crash" scam, where criminals stage accidents, typically at roundabouts, by slamming their brakes on suddenly causing the car behind to crash into them. The fraudsters then claim for the cost of repair or replacement of their vehicle on the innocent driver's insurance. At a high court case in February, an organised ring of "cash for crash" insurance fraudsters was ordered to pay its victims almost £400,000 after seven insurers joined together and successfully sued the fraud ring.

The Insurance Fraud Bureau estimated in 2008 (pdf) that "Such payouts are potentially costing the average policy holder an extra 5 percent on their premium every year."

I wonder if it's gone up since then ?

I've been looking at "cash for crash" since 2006.

The "cash for crash" number one hotspot was Blackburn, where there have been 1,710 incidents over the last seven years, according to figures from the recently-formed Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB).

The next worst locations were Bradford (1,669 incidents), Birmingham (1,510), Oldham (1,034), Bolton (986) and Manchester (979). The scam was first spotted in North West of England but had now spread to London and the South East, said the IFB.

In May 2010 Direct Line released the Top Ten cfc hotspots by physical location :

1. Centenary Way, Trafford Park, Manchester
2. Haslingden roundabout, Junction 5, M65
3. Scotland Road roundabout, Junction 13, M65
4. Gannow Top roundabout, Cavalry Way, Burnley
5. Eden Point roundabout, A34, Stockport
6. Denham roundabout, M40
7. Jarman Park, A414, Hemel Hempstead
8. Parkway Uxbridge Road A312 / A4020
9. Port Way / Strand Road junction , Preston
10. Junction 24 roundabout, M25

Still heavily biased towards Preston/Blackburn/Burnley. I see Southall, Slough (Denham - or is that an unwarranted assumption and it's people from Gerrards Cross ?) and Luton in the mix, too.

I trust when our rulers calculate "the enormous economic benefits of immigration" (pdf) that such factors are being taken into account.

Being able to count on a basic standard of honesty is a great economic good - because it means there's no requirement for a huge compliance overhead (to be fair, honesty among the Native Brits has also declined rapidly over the last 50 years, if the crime figures are anything to go by). The same applies even more in voting, and in spades when it comes to the administration of justice :

A Crown Prosecutor and barrister has admitted dropping cases for cash.
I am not one who is easily shocked, but this is something that I would have found incredible at first sight. This man has betrayed so much that our society values that I can only expect the judge to hand down the most severe sentence when the time comes.

None so blind as those that will not see, eh ?