Tsk Tsk

Lib Dem chief whip Andrew Stunell said Mr Oaten had stood down "with immediate effect" as home affairs spokesman.

"He has apologised to his family. He has apologised to his constituents who he always served well," Mr Stunell said.

Obviously not the only thing he was serving well. He always was a supporter of giving rides to young deviants.

Vaguely related : this rather wonderful post by Tommy G :

"We are all entitled to go about our lives free from assault and harassment. We are not entitled to universal affection, nor to approval."


UPDATE - BBC profile of Mr Oaten.

"He has strongly opposed ID cards, while on drugs"

What did he think of them when he came down ?

Juvenile DNA

"Police hold the DNA of 24,000 children who have committed no crime"

That was the second opening headline on BBC Television news at 5.30 today.

The actual item did point out that the "children" had in fact "never having been cautioned, charged or convicted of an offence" - something slightly different.

Since 2001 the police have been able to keep DNA samples from all arrestees, no matter what the outcome of the investigations. Given the enormous discrepancy between the number of crimes committed and the number of criminals convicted, it is highly likely that some - perhaps many - who are acquitted or never charged, will go on to commit other offences. In fact, of the 139,000 samples from people neither cautioned nor convicted, 8,200 have been matched with evidence from subsequent crime scenes, including 109 murders, 55 attempted murders and 116 rapes.

An MP who is apparently a Conservative, a Mr Grant Shapps, is (according to the BBC) trying to get the 'youngsters' details erased, though his website is more ambiguous. Mr Shapps certainly sounds like one of Mr Cameron's new light-blue Tories.

"Grant Shapps lives in Welwyn Hatfield with his wife, Belinda, their son, Hadley (now nearly 5) and two year old twins, Tabytha (girl) and Noa (boy)".

I half expect to see the words 'in a Mongolian yurt set in sustainably managed ancient woodland on the intersection of two ley lines' somewhere in that sentence.

More on Richard Dorkins

The Dumb One on top form :

"Why else is Dawkins so enraged by religion ? It surely can’t be because he genuinely feels that filthy rich, Oxbridge media stars are oppressed by farmers in Welsh hill villages. Nope – Dawkins doesn’t object to religion because the religious impose their agenda on people like him, but because it hinders people like him imposing their agenda on the religious."

Howard Jacobson in the Indie :

"At a rough emotional count I'd say he recruited a million new believers for every minute he was on the box. Nothing returns one quicker to God than the sight of a scientist with no imagination, no vocabulary, no sympathy, no comprehension of metaphor, and no wit, looking soulless and forlorn amid the wonders of nature."

A Worthy Petition

Oliver Kamm reports an online petition dedicated to protecting Iraq's academics from murderous attack.

Strange, I thought. The average head-chopper's not going to take much notice of a petition.

Silly me. The petition's aimed at the real murderers - the Americans !

The good news is multiple voting seems to be allowed. I wonder how long my contributions (between 4410 and 4420) will last. See if you can spot them.


I see that a Dr Al-Ali Nadje of Exeter University is a signatory. I wonder if, like his Exeter colleague Kamil Mahdi, he thinks we're just not taking enough casualties ?

It Made Oi Smile

Remember Tom Forrest, the Scots B&B owner who claimed the right not to let double-bedded rooms to same-sex couples ?

The state-funded Visit Scotland tourism website dropped him as a punishment for not adjusting his views to suit modern Britain, where diversity of everything except opinion is encouraged.

But they're fighting back ... most amusing.

Interesting ...

Never heard of Radical and Right, but they've been photoblogging the demos (pro and anti) outside the BNP trial.

Not all the photos load - in fact only the top half on each page. Not being that much of a Web techie, I'd try doubling the number of pages while halving the number of snaps on each.

Can't quite work out where R&R are coming from politically. Obviously sympathetic to the BNP from a free speech perspective, but they think the 'media class' are responsible for all our ills.

"It is our belief that in the last 20 years the Media Class has become the dominant class in Western Society and like all emerging dominant classes in history, it is in the process of changing society to suit its class interests. The characteristics of this new Class will gradually be covered in occasional articles on this site and we use the term "Class" in the Marxist sense, as in "Feudal Class" and "Industrial Capitalist Class". "

Hmm. I think they're getting causes and symptoms mixed up, but I hope 'media class' isn't code for "rootless cosmopolitans" aka the Dreaded Zionist Conspiracy.

Is It Just Me ...

Or is anyone else sick of hearing the self-appointed Septic Saviour of Children, Michele Elliot of Kidscape, all over BBC radio and TV ?

She made me so cross I had to smack all the kids in a Tony Blair stylee.


UPDATE - there seems to be a trend for American women whose views would be laughable in the Land of the Free to seek out opportunity in the Land of the Freeloader. Bonnie Greer, Susie Orbach, Beverley Malone of the Royal College of Mini-Doctors - I'm surprised the late Andrea Dworkin never made it across the pond.

A Wee Postie

At Biased BBC.

School's Out !

Coming to a school near you ... yes, it's Reverse Sweep History month, featuring all those famous deviants (approved ones) - like Florence Nightingale. And Shakespeare.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.


Simultaneously Ruth Kelly is on the rack for allowing deviants (disapproved ones) into schools.

Meanwhile another Christian blogger - David Holford. As far as I know no relation.

What A Headline

"Army chief fired in missile scandal"

They must be running out of missiles.

It all depends on what the definition of 'is' is.

"Euthanasia extremely rare" - BBC News

"Euthanasia : doctors aid 3,000 deaths" - Guardian

Respect The Cons

It seems like only the day before yesterday that we were tut-tutting over those nasty Nottinghamshire rozzers, dissing their clients in a most unprofessional manner.

Now the hideous virus is spreading to Yorkshire.

Prison officers at Leeds Jail have been criticised by the Chief Inspector of Prisons for describing inmates as "cons" and "bodies".

This is just awful. I feel as if society's falling apart. No respect at all for "some of the most abused and brutalised people in our society" (© J. Hari 2004). It's political incorrectness gone mad.

A little ray of light in the gloom, though. As the Englishman reports, HMP Woodhill is at least attempting to meet prisoners needs adequately.

Immigration and the BBC

I've always said that the BBC are neutral betwen Tories and labour - they're happy to attack the Tories (from the left) or Labour (from the left).

Good to hear this from the BBC's ex-business editor, Jeff Randall.

But surely the BBC's journalists give the government a hard time?

'They attack Labour ministers, but usually for not being sufficiently left-wing.'


On business :

'On the whole, they treated business as if it was a criminal activity'


On the BBC and immigration :

'Whenever we had an anti-immigration interviewee, it was a Nazi with a tattoo on his face who looked like he'd just bitten the head off a cat. I pointed out that it's the white working class who have to make immigration work. Immigrants don't move to Hampstead, mate'.


and on BBC bias :

'It's not a conspiracy. It's visceral. They think they are on the middle ground'




via Biased BBC

Reading - Torture Capital of Britain ?

We had the trial of Daniel Higgins' torturers and murderers at Reading Crown Court recently - although the deed took place in Burnham.

Home Office pathologist Dr Ashley Fegan Earl told the jury that Mr Higgins' killers used a machete to cut into his head. They also stabbed him all over his body and hit him with a blunt weapon.

We have the continuing horror story of Mary-Ann Leneghan's final hours - a case for the return of the death penalty if ever I heard one (probably one of the few things Jamal and I would agree on) .

When Mary-Ann’s friend lifted up her pillowcase she saw Johnson stabbing Mary-Ann all over her body as she curled into a ball, the court heard.

“They said they wanted her to die slowly, she became unable to move and just lay there crying. When she cried or made any sound she was stabbed again,” said Mr Latham, referring to accounts from the surviving victim.

Now, via Nosemonkey and the Philosopher, this.

Police have urgently stepped up their hunt for three vicious mini-thugs - two black, one white - believed to be as young as 13-14, who carried out an horrific robbery attack on an innocent 44-year-old man near Reading town centre in the early hours of New Year's Day. The mind-numbing ferocity of the incident is said to involve the man having his eyelids and one ear cut off.

The victim was walking alongside Kennet Side, Reading, when he was attacked as he came out from under the King’s Road bridge. He was punched to the ground by the first offender and then kicked in the head and body by all three members of the group.

The young thugs then demanded money and temporarily stopped the attack while the victim handed over his wallet and £1.50. The offenders said that this was not enough and began to attack him again.

The attack happened between 3am and 4.15am on New Year’s Day. The victim was treated at the Royal Berkshire Hospital where he remained for four days. He received more than 100 stitches to repair damage to an eye and ear and also required surgery to repair some nerve damage.

It sounds like the people who carried out this attack - on a mother and her daughters - five days previously.

Dawkins

A.A. Gill, of all people, has an entertaining (i.e. reinforces my prejudices) review of "The Root of All Evil ?"

"His splenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it?"

"Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis."

UPDATE - Cobb on Dawkins' infinite patience - though I'd call it infinite arrogance.

Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing ?

We're back in Clockwork Orange territory, where we can make people good even if they don't want to be (Anthony Burgess seems to have been a prescient writer).

Cobb writes :

"Listen to the Alphas and deploy the Betas, it's time to correct those faulty Gammas. Serious business.

This is truly dangerous. It means that we will become dependent on some institutions that correct us, that perfect us. By definition the budget for such an institution would have to be infinite, because the capacity of humans to be wrong, to be immoral, is practically insatiable."

After All, Most Child Abuse Takes Place In "The Home"

In the wake of the Ruth Kelly brouhaha, liberals are reminding us that :

As the NSPCC points out, most abuse happens at home. One child is killed each week by a parent or carer; six die each year at the hands of unknown predators.

Actually it's worse than that. About 3,500 babies are killed each week by strangers with the mother's collusion. These strangers are usually doctors. But let it pass.

"Most abuse at home" was repeated in today's Guardian, and on the Today programme by professor (of Sexualised Violence - I'm not making this up) Liz Kelly, who runs the taxpayer-funded Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University (formerly Camden Women's Institute), a male-free zone which boasts femiluni Julie Bindel among its alumni.

Strangely, what you'll never hear in the Guardian, on the BBC, or from Liz Kelly, is the kind of home where abuse takes place.

I quote :

According to data from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), young people are five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment if they grew up in a lone-parent family, compared with children in two-birth-parent families.

All studies of child-abuse victims which look at family type identify the step-family as representing the highest risk to children – with the risk of fatal abuse being 100 times higher than in twobiological- parent families according to international (figures) from 1976.

However, the use of the term step-father has become problematic, as, whilst it used to refer to men who were married to women with children by other men, it is now used to describe any man in the household, whether married to the mother or not. An NSPCC study of 1988 which separated married step-fathers from unmarried cohabiting men found that married step-fathers were less likely to abuse: ‘for nonnatal fathers marriage appears to be associated with a greater commitment to the father role’.

Analysis of 35 cases of fatal abuse which were the subject of public inquiries between 1968 and 1987 showed a risk for children living with their mother and an unrelated man which was over 70 times higher than it would have been for a child with two married biological parents.


Of course, the family isn't disintegrating - just changing.

This is a public information post.

Your Honour, I was trolling in a westerly direction, when I vada'd ...

Britains "most-gay-friendly employer", where 10% of the staff bowl round the wicket, is Staffordshire Police.

A spokesman for the Staffordshire force said gay and lesbian officers were entitled to attend up to three gay pride rallies a year in paid time, to have paid parenting leave if they adopted a child, and to run parties with gay groups from neighbouring West Midlands constabularies.

I've got no problem with paid leave for adoption, and what parties they attend is their affair, but I'm raising a bijou eyebrow at paying taxes for people to go on marches.

Nature vs nurture is always an interesting debate in relation to any aspect of human behaviour, though in the case of homosexuality my money's on nurture, as a 'gay gene' wouldn't seem to be one that would confer reproductive advantage. But the current politically correct "fact" is that they were born that way, immutable part of self, discrimination as bad as racism, etc etc. Any evidence to the contrary is ignored and its exponents vilified.

So lets assume that they're right, and batting for the other side is an immutable part of your being, like skin or eye colour. In that case, why should taxpayers pay for people to "demonstrate the pride of the marchers in being gay" as Met Commander Cressida Dick puts it ? Would Staffordshire Police expect taxpayers to subsidise a White Pride march ?

(It's a pity Commander Dick has such trouble with the job she's paid to do).

Elsewhere, in Nottinghamshire ...

A detective is facing disciplinary action by his force for referring to a career criminal as “pondlife” in a private conversation with another officer.
The detective constable, who faces possible dismissal from his job, has been told that the criminal “might have been offended” had he heard the remark, although he was not present at the time.

Mustn't demonise the villains, must we ?



Sir Robert Peel is rotating at 7,200 rpm.

Scary

"As the British authority passes ... the old hatreds between Moslem and Hindu revive and acquire new life and malignancy. We cannot easily conceive what these hatreds are." Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1931.

I blogged about the 1947 India partition massacres here. But there's nothing like an eye-witness account.

Radio Four are repeating their series 'Sleeping With The Enemy'. The first part (RealAudio) deals with what happened to thousands of women who survived the massacres - abducted as booty (no pun intended).

It's medieval - if not Biblical - stuff - men, many doomed to be killed themselves, slaughtering their wives and daughters to prevent them being dishonoured by the enemy. The difference being that this happened within living memory. Participants - victims and perpetrators - may still be alive. The last time stuff like that happened in the UK was probably the Danish invasions of the 8th and 9th centuries, and before that the Saxon cleansing of the Celts from what is now England.

During this period, so many women disappeared that the newly formed governments of India and Pakistan were compelled to act. They formed official 'recovery' departments to bring their women back...sometimes with even more tragic consequences. Sleeping With The Enemy tells the story of Ranjit Kaur, a Muslim woman who survived a massacre and was then claimed by a Sikh man who married her. She was 10 years old.

To prevent such perceived 'dishonour', Bir Bahadur Singh, a Sikh man, relates how he watched his father publicly behead his teenage sister - along with 25 other female members of their family - in front of a Muslim mob.

I wouldn't listen just before bedtime if I were you though.


UPDATE - I said nothing like that had happened in England since the 8th century - there was one more such (smallish) episode in England, where Jews led by Rabbi Yom Tob killed themselves at York in 1290 rather than fall into the hands of a bloodthirsty Christian mob (animated and led by a number of people who owed money to Jews).

"The mob then returned to the cathedral where the records of debts due to Jews were in safe-keeping. They compelled the guardians to turn these over to them to be burned then and there in the sanctuary."