Publish and be Damned

First of all, despite the fact that I am not a lawyer, I am a deeply cynical person and arguments such as this do not compel me in the slightest:

In light of these definitions individual bloggers are unlikely to be subject to the new proposed regulatory regime. So for example those individual blogs on WordPress or Blogger would remain unregulated and not subject to the adverse costs awards, or possibility of exemplary damages, that can result from not signing up as members of the proposed regulator. On the other hand websites such run by those such as the Huffington Post or Guido Fawkes could be.

Paul Staines’s ‘Guido Fawkes’ website for instance has a number of contributors, is run as a business and despite being off shore is targeted primarily at an audience in the United Kingdom.

If I enable Google Ads on my blog, I would fall under this regulator, because I've got a couple of guest posts on my blog.

The article goes on to say:

Whilst he is entitled to protest and refuse to join the regulator one has to ask, from a commercial perspective, why such a website would do so?

Well, up to a point, your honour. The events that led up to Leveson were NOT issues of regulation, they were quite clearly acts that were proscribed by law in which the media, police and the political establishment were complicit. The whole Hacked Off bollocks was not a failure in the existing media regulatory system, it was a failure of the criminal justice system to which the media were a party.

That is quite a different matter altogether and one that our glorious politico-legal Establishment has quietly glossed over with some fetching Farrow & Ball Red Herring emulsion.

The whole issue of media regulation (or not) should much more correctly be looking at the consumers of this tripe. The Sun, the Daily Star, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, etc. all feature swathes of salacious, scandalous gossip because that's what people want to read. If people didn't want to read this shit or see tits on Page 3, they shouldn't buy papers that provide that sort of thing.

The fact that this tripe gets bought and read so avidly is because there are cunts who want to read this sort of shit. It's a fucking lie to say that if papers didn't print it people would suddenly start reading Tolstoy, because there is a massive market for vacuous magazines filled to the brim with the banal details of Z-list-sleb lives.

You can regulate yourself to death and not fix the root cause of this shit.

And, of course, the slebs themselves are not at all blameless for this situation. It's insane for Hugh Grant to live the vacuous life of a sleb, trolling from movie star wife to movie star wife, enjoying all the glamour to then get the hump when the same media that fawned over him suddenly get the chance to report that he's been sucked off in a car by a prostitute.

The people who are actually the least to blame in this whole farrago of bullshit are probably the media, who are simply providing consumers with what they want.

The people who buy this shit and the slebs who whore themselves around for media attention both need to take a long, hard look at themselves.

The cunts.

The virtues of representative democracy

I frequently get into debates about democracy with people. In essence, I don't believe in government at all, so I wouldn't believe in democracy anyway.

If you have direct democracy with minimum levels of voting mandated for everything, you still wind up with a potentially significant section of the population having to live by rules by which they don't want to. There is nothing inherently more noble in 50.1% of the population beliefs over the beliefs of the remaining 49.9%. Yet no-one who argues in favour of democracy would disagree that the 50.1% have "won".

But the truth of the matter is that direct democracy is hard work. There are so many bits of law being created, we would never do anything else.

So in order to free us up to get on with our lives, we have "representative democracy", where we appoint people for five years to vote on everything for us. The problem with this is the inevitable issue that our representatives will represent us on some issues but not represent us on others. In addition, the people who voted for other parties are not, in general, being represented at all.

But in the delightful world of modern British politics, it's not even that good. The days of MP's taking their constituency's pulse on keys issues are long gone, if they ever existed.

Nowadays, MP's are referred to as "lobby fodder". By and large, policies that are deemed important by the party leadership are "whipped" and the opinion of the constituency are roundly ignored. The party leadership has decided what will happen, which means that as far as many core, central issues are concerned, the people who live in an affluent area in Oxfordshire have the most incredible levels of influence in the country.

But even that isn't true, because the cachet of having the Prime Minister as your MP means that even if you prove to be a complete fucking mentalist, mong, loser and profligate maniac, you will never get thrown out by the "democratic" process. Look at Gordon Brown.

So the Prime Minister is largely untouchable. And he drives vast swathes of policy that everyone has to live by.

But wait! It gets even better. Because MP's are lazy cunts and because there are so many new laws and regulations being introduced, not every bit of law that we are governed by is actually even debated in Parliament. They have introduced something called Statutory Instruments that aren't even submitted to the trivial scrutiny that our laws are.

Here is an example of just how fucking stupid these can be:

Weaknesses in parliament's law-making procedures have been exposed by a curious case encompassing a Tyneside egg-collector, the hatching of a non-existent offence, and the criminalisation of Britain's museums.

Museums. Made into criminals. At the stroke of an entirely unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat's pen.

Seven years after a statutory instrument updating nature regulations glided virtually unobserved through Westminster, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has this week admitted it "unlawfully" put a new crime on the statute books.

The unintended outcome of the rarely deployed Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 Amendment Regulations, Statutory Instrument (SI) 1487/2004, has been shot down by lawyers' persistent questioning.

Quincy Whitaker, a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, London, and Nigel Barnes, a solicitor at the Sunderland and Newcastle firm Ben Hoare Bell, realised that a parliamentary drafting error had accidentally removed a previous defence and laid in its place, cuckoo-like, a constitutionally impossible crime.

The regulations, meant to harmonise UK bird protection rules with EU laws, made illegal the possession of wild eggs collected from 1954-1981. Police and wildlife agencies used the new regulations to prosecute a number of people.

For seven fucking years, people have been prosecuted, fined, punished, chivvied, bothered by an unlawful law. Who has been punished for this? Who will ever be punished for this?

And the chances are that more than 50% of the people who read this blog would say "Fuck you" to EU law anyway.

The change in the law was never the subject of public consultation, neither was it debated in parliament. The retrospective criminalisation of historic collections has caused museums, scientific research organisations and private collectors to the risk of prosecution.

One of the first people to discover the law had changed was John Dodsworth, 52, who has past wildlife convictions. His home was raided by the police wearing riot gear in 2006 and about 1,000 eggs were seized from there. "Officers used a battering ram to force their way in. The children were very upset to see their parents manhandled by the police."

Riot gear? Battering ram? For EGGS?

At South Tyneside magistrates court three years later Dodsworth, an asbestos removal supervisor, pleaded guilty to one offence of possessing wild birds' eggs, but said: "I should never have been prosecuted. But when I was taken to court I was told it was a strict liability offence and I had to plead guilty. I was given a 100 hours community service order."

So not only do we have an unlawful law, but it's a law that you cannot argue with. You WILL be punished, you CANNOT be found innocent.

He later decided to appeal against both conviction and sentence. The sentence –was quashed in January 2010 and Dodsworth was granted an absolute discharge on the grounds that no one was aware such possession had been an offence at the time. "But they were still prosecuting people for this as recently as September," he said.

An overturn of the disputed section of SI 1487/2004 has proved more difficult.

Whitaker told the high court: "The retrospective criminalisation of possession of eggs that were lawfully held prior to the enactment of the regulations (those collected from 1954-1981) has widespread implications for museums and other public collections, natural history and scientific research collections and private egg collectors throughout Britain.

"[The creation of a new crime] would have been expected to have been widely announced and debated within the relevant communities if it was the intention that the regulations should have such an effect." Her judicial review case was also brought against the Crown Prosecution Service to prevent pursuit of fresh cases.

Evidence was given by Bob McGowan, senior curator of birds at the National Museum of Scotland, who said that the change in the law required him to assess 36,000 clutches of eggs in his collection. "It is difficult to imagine this particular outcome was an intention of the amendment," he said in a statement.

So, a demonstrably bad law was created, it was a strict liability offence, it was blindly and enthusiastically prosecuted right up to the last minute before being repealed. And this was all created in a democracy.

For several years after the law was changed the CPS website continued to advise that possessing historic eggs was legal, Whitaker added. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds believes the change was a legislative error rather than intentional.

Nigel Barnes, who represented Dodsworth in his appeals against sentence and conviction, submitted a series of freedom of information requests. "I questioned whether the statutory instrument was lawful," he said. "What are the CPS going to do now about the people who have been convicted? It may be a handful, it may be more. There are many more who may have committed an offence without realising it."

Whitaker searched through the parliamentary papers and Defra files. "When I got the papers I realised it must have been a drafting error," Whitaker explained. "The department has now conceded it was wrong.

Whitaker said: "It's an example of how much modern-day legislation is passed by civil servants without anybody understanding it.

"Had anyone realised what had happened, it should have been referred to parliament because it creates a criminal offence. As it was, it was unconstitutional.

"The House of Lords had specifically rejected the creation of the offence which the amendment regulations in fact created when the original act (the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981) was debated in parliament.

"To create an offence that was contrary to the express will of parliament by delegated legislation without informing anyone that it has that effect is highly unconstitutional to say the least."

A Defra spokesman confirmed that the department now accepted the change to the law was illegal.

A statement said: "The 2004 consultation documents on the draft statutory instrument did not outline an intention to remove the pre-1981 defence in relation to the possession of wild bird eggs. Defra has accepted that, as the consultation did not mention those particular changes, they were unlawfully made."

The Crown Prosecution Service's website said that something was legal while they were actively prosecuting people for that very act!

How many lives have been affected by this law, how many people needlessly criminalised, just because our duly elected representatives are too fucking lazy to actually debate and discuss every law that we are supposed to live by?

Still think democracy is such a good idea? Did you vote? Because if you did, this kind of shit is your fault.

And suddenly, I saw the truth of the matter

I don't make a point of reading the Daily Mail, but you can't tell where a bit.ly link like http://bit.ly/agEXHy is taking you.

The article was the usual indignant waffle about the soft criminal justice system and the comments were mainly about how community sentences are a joke and what scum these repeat offenders are. But one comment from "Craig" in Glasgow stopped me dead in my tracks:

These sentences create lots of work for lawyers through the legal aid system and that's the real reason we have these silly sentences. Lawyers know their cash cows will continue to re-offend if they're getting such soft sentences. If criminals got sentences that fitted their crimes, then lawyers would get a lot less work. You see stories in the local paper here of people with 40 odd previous convictions and they've only been in jail for a few months, it's utterly ridiculous.

When you apply Guido's test of cui bono to stuff like why our legal system is such a complete fuckup, it becomes obvious. It creates work for lawyers, and curiously enough, it's lawyers who create the legal system.

The complexity of the legal system also creates massive barriers to entry and allows for endless rent-seeking opportunities.

And it's not like I haven't moaned about lawyers before. I can't see how I missed this one.

On yer bike!

Haven't got a bike? The police will give you someone else's.

There is a catch, obviously.

Jesus fucking FUCKING Christ.

The state is not your friend

Fuck's sake!

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.

What the cunting fuck is wrong with the fucking police? Have the motherfuckers gone completely fucking insane?

This advice sounds scarily apt:

The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive.

If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as possible no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect).

And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives.

Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards.

Unintended consequences of those wise government policies. And yet people still insist that we need more goverment. Smarter government. The right kind of government.

Wake up folks, it's all crap. Just like the only good socialist is a dead socialist, the only good government is a dead government. They are all fucking cunts.

Instant? Sure!

Justice? Not so much:

The top prosecutor has demanded an end to the use of police cautions to deal with thousands of serious assaults every year amid concern that the justice system is failing to rein in violent offenders.

Keir Starmer, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, is seeking a review of so-called “instant justice”, with up to 40,000 assults each year now dealt with by on-the-spot cautions.

These include a 15-year-old boy who was cautioned for rape and a man who was cautioned for smashing a beer glass into a landlady’s face at a pub

You might feel that a caution for rape is a ludicrously trivial penalty. I couldn't possibly comment.

Costs up, detections down ...

... so why are the police so keen to keep our DNA?

Over the last two years, the number of individual profiles held on the NDNAD has risen from around 4.4 million to 5.6 million in March 2009.

Is it working?

However, during the period in question, the total number of crime scene matches dropped from 41,717 to 36,727. Given the increased number of profiles held, this is not inconsistent with some criminals changing their behaviour to avoid leaving samples.

I'll take that as a "no", then.

And how come there's been a 25% increase in samples held when the government keeps telling us that crime is down. But I guess the there's an even bigger issue here:

The raw figure for offences where crime detection resulted directly from a DNA match show a fall from 19,949 to 17,463 in the same period.

Riiiight ... so we have more samples, fewer crime scene matches, fewer detections ... something is still missing, though. Hmmm.

Oh yes, that's what's missing!

Over the last year, costs have doubled

Don't you just love everything the government does to keep us all safe?

Gotta love it

And I think I agree with his analysis as well.

What? The fuck?

OK, so it's the Daily Fail:

Three sons of the firebrand Islamic preacher Abu Hamza could face jail after yesterday admitting taking part in a £1million stolen car fraud.

OK, so ignoring the irony of a militant Islamist's kids stealing to fund "a 'party lifestyle'" and that one of them "also admitted possession of cocaine with intent to supply", which I'm pretty sure is not acceptable to Muslims, what is this "could face jail" crap?

Judge Peter Testar at Southwark Crown Court warned the gang yesterday they could face jail.

'I am ordering these pre-sentence reports with no prejudice - that means no promises,' he said.

Hang on a minute. They stole dozens of cars, blatantly defrauded a number of businesses, dealt drugs and they could face jail? Could?

What the fuckety fuck do you have to do to go to jail nowadays?

Tip of the clown wig to Pengy.

SOCA -- a new horror

Do go read the whole thing, but:

At their wits’ end as to how to raise the money, the two McBrides negotiated a second mortgage on their homes. Charlie McBride presented Soca with £120,000, asking that it should be taken as a down-payment on the fine until he had somehow found the rest. The agency asked how he had come by the money and, when told that it came from remortgaging his house, told him that he would be charged with contempt of court because the house was a "frozen asset".

Two weeks ago the two men were accordingly jailed for contempt, and having been allowed one telephone call to tell his wife Karen what had happened, Charlie is now serving out his sentence as a prison refuse collector.

Very scary indeed.

So ... who died?

I think he was a bit of a cunt, to be fair:

"Setting aside the position of having your son on the back, there is a steady stream of traffic coming the other way, the road is wet, had you lost control, it would have become a missile.

"The potential consequences of which would have been a certain serious accident and at least highly possibly the death of at least one other road user."

He continued: "If you add to that the fact you had your son on the back, the level of lack of responsibility is almost unbelievable.

"The matter is so serious, the custodial sentence can't be avoided."

How is it serious? Who died? Who was hurt? Who was frightened? What went wrong?

As far as I can see, this bloke has been sent down for SIX MONTHS for riding a motorcycle irresponsibly.

Compare that to Lord Ahmed, who got THREE MONTHS after killing someone. Doesn't smell, does it?

Are judges all fucking mad or what?

Huh?

Mr Justice Wilkie said: "It's clear the dangerous driving had no causal link to the accident."

Cunt.

They don't like it up 'em, Part 1

An occasional column featuring the hypocrisy of the Righteous when their own tactics are used on them.

So ...

Two High Court judges, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, had intended to order that the documents on Mr Mohammed’s alleged torture be published.

However, they decided reluctantly to block the release of the information after being told that the withdrawal of American co-operation would lead to Britons facing a “very considerable increase” in the risk from terrorists.

In their judgment on Wednesday, the judges attacked the conduct of the US government, accusing it of attempting to subordinate the rule of law.

I wonder how these high court judges feel about the egregious use of British courts by libel tourists to stifle free speech in the US?

"Good," you might think ...

... upon reading these words:

Restaurant bomber jailed for life

But actually:

A Muslim convert who injured himself in a failed suicide attack in an Exeter restaurant has been jailed for life with a minimum of 18 years.

12 years with good behaviour?

Life: it's not just for Christmas, you useless cunts!

Whats in a name? - beware the Lawmakers

Via IanPJ:

The name of a law has little if anything to do with how it will be applied:

The Government used anti-terrorism powers to freeze an estimated £4 billion of British financial assets in Landsbanki, Icesave’s parent bank. A spokesman for the Treasury said that the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act was invoked as a “precautionary measure”. (the Times)

If the law itself, in this case (s4) Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, does not say something along the lines of, “this may only be used against people or organisations reasonably suspected of terrorism, crime or acting against national security” (s4 doesn’t), it will be used against other people or organisations.

Likewise,

“We have had plenty of examples recently of local councils using existing anti-terrorist legislation for completely different purposes than the legislation was ever set up to do,” Tory peer Baroness Hanham said. (the BBC)

Promises that a law will only be used against terrorists are worthless. What matters is what the legislation itself says.

We have problems if legislators don’t understand how legislation works.

We have warned many times on this blog that the majority of the draconian anti terror and rights stripping laws enacted by this government (80% at the behest of the unelected European Commission) over the past 11 years has not really been aimed at terrorists, but have ultimately been designed to be aimed at and used on you, the public.

The examples above merely reinforce that view.

Hattip UKLiberty

Punishment fits the crime, eh?

Gosh, I don't know, wasn't this one of those Magna Carta-y thingummies? That the punishment fits the crime?

A man found guilty of illegally keeping wild birds in his garden shed has been banned from driving for four months by a district judge.

I swear, I am not making this up. This bugger, who frankly sounds as daft as a brush, was caught illegally keeping birds, couldn't prove anything, bang to rights, all fine.

District judge Jill Watkins said as he was on benefits and a "man of limited means" [remember this] she would punish him with a driving ban as a deterrent to others.

A driving ban? What the cunting fuck was this dozy cow smoking? How is a driving ban in any way, shape or form, a relevant punishment for keeping birds illegally? What's next, a Chinese burn for littering? A donkey punch for failing to stop at a traffic light?

Remember the "limited means"?

She also ordered him to pay £1,000 towards the prosecution costs.

Not that fucking limited, then.

Am I being unduly cynical or paranoid when I wonder if driving bans are going to be the de rigeur future punishment of choice for left-leaning, eco-wibbling, but above all fucking stupid judges?

Hat tip is due to fuckweasel for this one.

Praised for his Co-operation

I wasn't going to do "piss-boilers", but I've changed my mind, thanks to this lovely fellow:

Lee Bonney, who was caught after leaving his mobile phone at the scene of a crime, appeared at Plymouth Crown Court yesterday.

The 29-year-old pleaded guilty to 155 offences, after confessing to a series of car break-ins that saw vehicle crime figures in the city soar.

But Bonney was praised in court for his co-operation with police and avoided a jail term.

Instead he was given a series of strict community, drug and supervision orders.

You what? You co-operated with the police after being caught bang to rights and this gets you out of jail? Are they fucking mad? And of course, he's going to slavishly adhere to his "orders", isn't he?

He also admitted breaching a conditional discharge imposed by the court last September.

Jesus. One bloke hits 150 cars, not posh cars, not the cars of the wealthy, but the cars of the "common man". But because this drug-addled amoral fuckwit co-operated after being caught red-handed, he gets a slap on the wrist and 150 car-owners get the implicit message that crimes against them aren't worth punishing.

I also have to wonder what form the co-operation took? Maybe something like: "Take the rap for all these unsolved car crimes, Bonney, and we'll have a word with the judge." Well, a cynic might think that, but I never would.

Judge Francis Gilbert QC praised the 29-year-old for being “extremely co-operative” with police and said that owning up to the crimes was taken into consideration in his verdict.

Hey, Francis, I promise that if I strangle you with my bare hands, I'll be extremely co-operative with the police. Can you arrange with your fellow judges that I also get community and supervision orders? I don't do drugs, but cunts like you are making them look increasingly attractive.