Longrider

My sojourn in the UK is about to end. Today, I start to wend my way homewards. I’ll be offline for a few days.

See ya later.

Via JuliaM this story about what appears to be an innovative approach to dealing with criminals.

CITIZENS Advice has criticised a Nottingham company in a report about businesses which pursue shoplifters for compensation – often without crimes being reported to police.

Retail Loss Prevention, a centre for retail research, features in a report out today entitled ‘Civil Recovery: Unreasonable Demands?’

The CAB says it has been dealing with increasing cases of clients accused of shoplifting or employee theft who are then pursued for “substantial sums of money” as compensation.

It says: “Criminal charges are rarely brought and often the police aren’t even called.

“In some cases the intent to shoplift is questionable. Clients are then surprised to receive a letter demanding a large sum of money, weeks after the event, when they had thought the issue was resolved.

Julia quite reasonably proffers this as evidence that the criminal justice system has failed and there is a point to be made here. If it worked as it should, then people who steal from retailers would face criminal prosecution. Unfortunately “minor” crime is all too often not followed up by the police, leading here to the victims taking matters into their own hands.

That said, I really do not like this wheeze. It is one thing to sue an offender who has been convicted – I like the idea that they have to make suitable amends to the person(s) they have harmed. However, to deal with it entirely as a civil matter worries me. It worries me because the burden of proof is so much lower. In a criminal prosecution, the CPS has to demonstrate guilt “beyond reasonable doubt” and if there is reasonable doubt, the jury must acquit. A civil proceeding merely relies on a balance of probabilities. What then, for the person falsely accused? Given that the CPS, police, counsels, judges and juries have managed to convict innocent people time after time, despite the higher burden of proof in criminal trials, it doesn’t look good for the hoodie who has been wrongly accused by a Nottingham shopkeeper. Comments on the original piece use the word “vigilante”. I am inclined to agree with them.

There is, however, a glimmer of light – if you know where to look for it.

We believe the manner in which these requests for payment are made, and the threat of escalating costs and court action may constitute ‘deceitful’, ‘unfair’ and ‘improper’ business practice, as defined by the OFT.

Given that court action is expensive, it is unlikely that retailers actually want to go to court. What their solicitors are telling them is that your average accused shoplifter is unlikely to be very savvy when it comes to the law and a stiff letter making legal threats will scare the shit out of them, forcing acquiescence. If you are suitably bloody minded, you write back telling them to go ahead and issue proceedings, whereupon you will vigorously defend yourself. They have no option then; put up or shut up. If the theft being claimed is relatively small, balanced against the costs of court action and its uncertain outcome, there’s a fair probability that they will shut up. I’ve experienced this type of bullying first hand and that advice was given to me at the time. It has worked on each occasion that I have needed it. There is a caveat though; you do have to be in the right. 

According to David Aaranovitch, believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend.

There is a constant fume about the Big Brother State, enveloping everything from safety cameras on station concourses, through parking wardens, road pricing and licence-plate recognition, to spying on school catchment cheats and fly-tippers. A little of it is true, more of it is hysterical.

Hysterical, eh? Tell that to those who have fallen victim to officious little council jobsworths using RIPA to spy on them in case they are lying in order to get their child into the school of choice – and even if they are lying, the response is disproportionate.

This anger manifested itself in the recent Watford hysteria, which began when it was reported that the council had banned parents from staying with their children at local playgrounds, and had insisted that play rangers would do the job. Some of the grandest libertarian thunderers in the land called down the wrath of their freedom-loving God on these new Labour (sorry, Nu-Labour) dupes, and invited their readers to dream up punishments for the councillors.

yeah, so?

In fact, the real story concerned just two drop-off adventure play areas, where parents had taken to hanging around and were being asked (by the Liberal Democrat council) to desist.

The council has no damned business asking them to desist. The council is there to serve the local community, not boss it about. Playgrounds are open, shared spaces and if parents want to “hang around” then having paid their council tax, they have every right to do just that. So, frankly, the libertarian thunderers are quite right and Aaranovitch is typical of the type of journalist who cozies up to the political establishment.

But this fashionable paranoia about data and surveillance goes well beyond annoyance at petty officaldom, and has become something of a mindset, as we will be reminded later today.

Ah, yes… point out that the state has, indeed, sought to encroach ever more into our daily lives, seek to hold ever more personal information on its databases and you are mentally ill.

Aaranovitch then goes on to lambast the authors of the Rowntree Trust’s report:

Four of the six authors of the report were almost better described as parti pris campaigners than experts. I focused on the DNA database argument because I was familar with it. In fact, the most scathing criticisms in the Rowntree report were of the children’s databases, ContactPoint, eCAF and Onset, which, among other things, have been designed and piloted to help to give support to vulnerable children.

What I hadn’t noticed is that one of the report’s authors, Terri Dowty, self-described as a “musician and author” and editor of a book promoting home education, is a long-term campaigner against ASBOs, and any action that she sees as stigmatising certain young people. To that end she was the leading light in a children’s rights group called Arch, which concentrates on the threat to children from the State.

Yes? And? So? This does not undermine what Terri has to say, now does it? Or is Aaranovitch merely indulging in an ad hominem? Yup, that’s about the sum of it.

Three years before the Rowntree report she and another co-author had addressed an LSE conference on “Children: Over Surveilled. Under Protected”. Before the conference she was quoted as asking: “Who is bringing children up? Are parents effectively nannies for the State’s children?” All in all, one feels, it was just another brick in the wall.

Ms Dowty also co-authored a report on children’s databases, Safety and Privacy, for the Information Commissioner, in 2007. Ms Dowty, like her co-authors, will be, I am sure, committed and intelligent. But by no stretch of the imagination could she be called a dispassionate expert.

Well Aaranovitch certainly isn’t…

None of this alters the fact that what Terri Dowty and her co authors are saying is measurably true – children are being over surveilled, the government is building a database state, big brother is not our friend and Aaranovitch is a chump (Terri didn’t say that; I did).

Talking of prize chumps…

Ian Blair resurfaces with some totalitarian wittering.

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both,” said Benjamin Franklin. Nearly a century later, Abraham Lincoln would disagree: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” That essential conflict remains alive today.

Well, I suppose if you are going to write totalitarian tripe, you might as well start as you mean to go on. I’m not convinced that Lincoln was referring to Franklin – and if he was, he would have been wrong as Franklin’s comment remains true to this day.

Blair is arguing that the police voice should be heard on matters of security. Well, yes, why not? But that doesn’t mean that we should take notice of it – not least when it is the tired old “the bogeymen are out to get us” nonsense as an excuse to ramp down on civil liberties.

Blair then blathers on about Al-Qaida. Remember them? oh, yes, a group that doesn’t actually exist as an organisation. Rather the ideology exists as disparate cells – some of which managed to score a hit. And, remind me, how many atrocities has this so-called group actually pulled off? And this justifies treating all British citizens as suspects to be harassed by Blair’s (ex)rent a mob – according to Blair.

So the question is whether, echoing Lincoln, “our case is new”. If it is, then it may be better to risk being at the mercy of the state than at the mercy of the murderously inclined.

Bollocks. I’ll take the latter – every time. The risk to each of us is small. The risk to each of us by a totalitarian state is greater by far as we see our liberties eroded by grasping demagogues – all for our own good of course. Thanks but no thanks; give me the jungle in preference to the gilded cage every time. Sooner the risks posed by a handful of incompetent extremists than the overbearing machinery of the state.

We proposed an equivalent of the system of “investigative detention” used in Europe…

Is it just me or does that send a chill down the spine? The generation that fought Nazi Germany has been betrayed by men like Ian Blair.

So, on balance; sure, the police should be allowed to have their say – and likewise we should be able to tell them to piss off and return to the Peelian principles of policing.

Via Timmy I see that Demos has jumped on the enforced servitude idea so beloved of control freaks everywhere.

Demos today launches a report arguing that the principle of national service, abolished in Britain in 1960, still has something to offer. A national civilian service — a sort of “civic corps” — would look very different from its military forebear: it would be flexible and tailored to people’s lives, not a one-size-fits-all compulsory scheme.

It would, however, be based on the same principles that underpinned wartime service: the idea that we owe something to each other and that citizenship is more than a soulless contract between individuals and the state. It would be paid for by introducing interest on student loans, raising about £1.2 billion a year.

The scheme would see people serving throughout their lives, taking up opportunities, from school projects at the age of seven to paid leave for employees. For a week a year, people would down their tools or keyboards and pick up litter, dredge canals, become reading mentors or help the elderly. The community benefits would be huge.

Sigh… As Tim points out, this idea has been tried before and it wasn’t particularly pleasant. The state does not own our bodies and the state is not society. We do not owe something to each other. Voluntary service should be just that; voluntary. Anything else is slavery.

Frankly, the only rational response to a call to reintroduce slavery is; “fuck off!” Sorry, can’t put it any better than that.

I’m staying with one of my sisters for a few days during this trip. Yesterday evening, they put on the latest DVD – Four Christmasses. Not being someone who likes Christmas overmuch (Mrs L and I have tended to hide away in rural France until the whole thing is over) I can’t say that I was looking forward to it – and, frankly, it’s the type of film Mrs L and I wouldn’t touch with the proverbial barge pole. That said, it started well – a young professional couple who don’t “do” Christmas. Oh, good, they get points for that. They don’t “do” children, either. Getting better by the moment. What these two do is what they pretty much want to do and if that is out of step with the rest of the world, then so be it. I really liked them at this point. Their plan is to nip off to Fiji and avoid all the Christmas stuff by lying to their various disfunctional families. Okay, the lying is a bit naughty – Mrs L and I didn’t bother with trying to explain or deceive. We simply announced that we didn’t like it, didn’t want to do it, and that was that. Much easier if less dramatically interesting. The plot twist relied on this couple being caught out in the lie, of course – because this is Hollywood and naughty people get caught out doing naughty things. And not doing Christmas is very naughty indeed.

This being Hollywood with its saccharine outlook on the world, we can’t be having people who are different and don’t want to do all the shitty nappies and projectile vomit and the vomit inducing homilies about “family” at “this time of the year”. So, their flight is cancelled due to fog and they have to do the Christmas thing with their various families – and, magically a la Christmas Carol – they are converted to wanting to be normal just like everyone else.

In the real world, mere exposure to dirty nappies and projectile vomit does not suddenly induce a maternal instinct where it did not previously exist. One of my sisters did change her mind as the biological clock reached a certain point and I don’t doubt others have made similar decisions – but for others of us, the desire not to be the same as everyone else is deep rooted and a few hours exposed to babies and baubles doesn’t change that. If anything, it strenghthens the resolve. I knew even as a child that I didn’t want children of my own. Mrs L is the same. Now that we are in our early fifties, that decision is irreversible, and there are no regrets.

What is a shame is that this film had promise; an opportunity to show a diffent outlook in a positive light. Instead it turned out to be the usual Hollywood morality tale – and if you don’t do the family thing and the tacky American Christmas, you just ain’t normal. You’re a hedonistic, unfulfilled freak. Okay, so be it; better a hedonistic freak than a pious moralistic bore.

Apparently, those who disapprove of minarets do so because they have lost their own faith.

Minarets are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith

Poppycock! What is it about the religious that they cannot understand those that have no faith, need no faith and can manage perfectly well without it? I’m uncomfortable with the minarets vote, but the groan really does scrape the barrel. There are no wounds in which to rub salt.

But if the Swiss and other Europeans were self-assured about their own identities, their Muslim fellow-citizens probably would not strike such fear in their hearts.

The reason it strikes fear is because Islam is a proselytising faith that will use any means open to it to convert or subdue. It is a primitive, mysoginistic belief system that cannot separate the religion from the culture and legal system. Islam is where Europe was in the middle ages. Europeans, quite reasonably, don’t want to return to that. Indeed, it is because we are comfortable with our identities without believing in supernatural deities that we worry about the rise of this archaic alien superstition.

Like most CiF contributors, Ian Burma is an idiot. Not least for his closing comment:

That said, it would surely help if we had fewer referendums. For, contrary to what some believe, they do not strengthen democracy. They weaken it by undermining our elected representatives, whose job is to exercise their good judgment rather than voice the gut feelings of an anxious, angry people.

What good judgement?

Simon Davies rails against automated marketing calls.

Like millions of people across Britain, I now refuse to answer my home landline number, and with good justification. I am plagued night and day by relentless and unwelcome marketing calls.

It seems almost every call to my landline now comes from an automated dialler machine, offering me one or other deal in a “government-backed scheme” to reduce my debt, or increase my credit. They come thick and fast; uninvited recorded voices reciting a generic script. Sometimes there are a dozen or more a day.

I used to enjoy the intimacy of my home phone line. Unlike my mobile number, which is known to thousands of people, my home number was the exclusive domain of only the trusted and loved few – people who really matter to me and to whom my life is open. Not now. I don’t even bother giving it to my family and closest friends. It is an outgoing call line only.

While I tend to agree with his sentiments – these calls are an intrusive nuisance, I can also attest that during my last few years in the UK, I stopped these calls pretty much dead. The telephone preference service works well. Once I registered our UK landline number, marketing calls fell off dramatically. By the time I left just over a year ago, it was rare to receive a call from anyone we had not specifically given our number to. Those odd few were dealt with by filtering calls using the answering machine. If it was a genuine caller, they understood what we were doing and started to leave a message and one of us would pick up. Anyone else was left to leave a message or not as they wished.

Since moving to France, we do get the odd sales call. We have registered with the list orange. Again, we filter calls. 

I’m not sure that I agree with Simon Davies when he says that this is a privacy issue. A nuisance, yes, but not an invasion of privacy.

In terms of sheer numbers of people affected, this issue is emerging as the most significant privacy problem of the year.

This is a Denial of Service attack on the entire national phone network, and nothing is being done about it. We pay for a phone line that can be used as a personal means of communication, not a marketing device to be exploited by companies. And yet regulators have taken the view that commercial entities have a right to intrude in whatever way they wish.

Frankly, I think that he is overstating it – this is not a matter for regulation. Filter the calls, go ex-directory and register with a preference service and the calls dry up.

It seems adding your number to the “Do Not Call” list on the Telephone Preference Service makes little difference.

Actually, yes, it does.

While I used to be annoyed by these calls, I was also aware that my landline number (unlike my mobile number) was published in the telephone directory and was, therefore, in the public domain. Here, I am inclined to agree with Davies:

Part of the problem can be traced to the historic position of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that phone numbers are not personal information. That position may have been tenable 20 years ago, but not now.

Which is why there was such a negative reaction recently when a mobile directory was proposed (interestingly, this is still unavailable).

The way to deal with this is much the same way as we deal with SPAM – keep our details out of the public eye and give them only to those who need to know.

So while I agree that telemarketing is an obnoxious practice and those who do it deserve to die horrible, painful deaths, it is one that is relatively easily dealt with, using TPS, answering machines and even auto filtering systems, why use a thermonuclear devise to swat a fly? So, yes, don’t answer, if that is the way you want to deal with it. But getting government involved is pretty much always going to be a very, very bad idea. I would have thought Davies would be aware of that one already.

Wonders never cease…

Hickman comments on  the latest from the optimum population trust and I agree with him (although probably not for the same reasons).

“Rich nations to offset emissions with birth control.” At first sight, I thought it was a satirical headline from the Onion. Good one, I thought: they’re imagining carbon offsetting at its most ludicrous extreme.

But then I read further: “The scheme, called PopOffsets, understands the connection [between population increase and climate change],” says the Optimum Population Trust‘s director Roger Martin. “It offers a practical and sensible response. For the first time ever individuals, companies and organisations will have the opportunity to offset their carbon voluntarily by supporting projects to provide family planning services where there is currently unmet demand.”

I believe “WTF” is the acronym now favoured when faced with such statements.

Well quite. The plan apparently is that we assuage our guilt by buying condoms for the third world – titter ye not.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT), which is supported by environmental grandees such as Sir David Attenborough and James Lovelock, is arguing that, instead of planting tress and the like, it makes much better sense for people in developed nations to offset their emissions by paying for condoms to be handed out in developing nations where birth rates are much higher. To facilitate this, a website has now been set up where you can calculate your emissions for, say, your “summer holiday 2009″ and then make a donation which helps pay for contraceptives to be distributed in countries such as India and Kenya.

Words fail me. “Not on your nelly” springs to mind but doesn’t do justice, somehow. But to have me agreeing with über warmist Hickman is quite an achievement.

More “let’s all go veggie” bollockery.

Reducing consumption of a protein found in fish and meat could slow the ageing process and increase life expectancy, according to the research.

Scientists have long believed that an ultra low calorie diet – aproximately 60 per cent of normal levels – can lead to greater longevity.

Riiiight… So it’s all about quantity rather than quality is it? Well, yes, actually.

Studies in animals including monkeys have shown that reducing food intake can benefit health and increase lifespan.

Researchers have found that reducing calories by as much as 30 per cent could reduce risks of developing heart disease or cancer by half and increase lifetimes by nearly a third.

The extreme diets – just above malnutrition levels – add an extra 25 years to the average life in Britain with the vast majority of people living to their 100th birthday

So if we starve ourselves, we get to live to 100. Great. Terrific. Can’t wait. Frankly, I’d rather live fast and die young(ish). Life is for enjoying, not enduring. If I have a straight choice between a well lived life, one where the years of my existence hit a brick wall and fall about my feet in an undignified heap or one where I live long on a subsistence diet and bore myself to death, then the former looks pretty attractive to me.

But in a series of new experiments on fruit flies, scientists discovered that simply varying the mix of amino acids in the diet affected lifespan.

Uh huh? Fruit flies, eh?

Although flies and people are very different…

You don’t say? Okay, okay, I’m slightly misrepresenting him here and openly taking the piss, but really, quality is more important than quantity. Contrary to the belief of scientists and politicians, we are not all looking to spend eternity in our bath-chairs holding back the inevitable. Some of us, many if not most, I suspect, would rather make the most of the time allotted us and take the chance that one day it will kill us. We have to die of something after all. Might as well go out enjoying it.