Try to contain your excitement, but tonight sees "a Newsnight Special" given over to that programme's branch of the chatterati "interviewing" The Heir To Blair. Points mean prizes for anyone who spots any of the following questions:
1. Why, as a member of the relevant Select Committee, did you support the downgrading of cannabis to a Class C drug?
2. Why do you define illegal drug use as integral to "a normal university experience"?
3. Do you regret supporting the invasion of Iraq?
4. Will you restore the supremacy of British over EU law, use this to restore Britain's historic fishing rights, legislate that that no EU law should apply in the United Kingdom without having gone through exactly the same parliamentary process as if it were a Bill which had originated in our own Parliament, adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, disapply in the United Kingdom any ruling of the European Court of Justice by resolution of the House of Commons (giving this country the same level of independence as is rightly enjoyed by Germany through her Constitutional Court), and ensure that no ruling under either the Human Rights Act or the European Convention on Human Rights applies here unless and until ratified by such a resolution?
5. Will you repeal the Civil Contingencies Act, repeal the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, and restore the situation whereby a Bill which runs out of parliamentary time is lost at the end of that session?
6. Will you not only oppose but repeal any provision for identity cards, repeal the provision for control orders, repeal existing erosions of trial by jury and of the right to silence, repeal existing reversals of the burden of proof, repeal the provision for majority verdicts (which, by definition, provide for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt), repeal the provision for Police confiscation of assets without a conviction, and repeal the Official Secrets Acts?
7. Will you restore grammar schools, but on the German Gymnasium model, thus avoiding the 11-plus while working to overcome this country's crippling cultural division between arts and sciences, and between academic and technical education, and while recognising that the defence and restoration of schooling at the highest academic level for those to whom it is appropriate (including the restoration of O-levels in place of GCSEs) as intimately related to an emphatic dedication to the defence and restoration of Special Needs Education?
8. Will you ensure that the imperial and metric systems (both of which have long histories of use in this country) are taught and used side by side except where metrication has not already taken place, as in the case of road signs?
9. Will you defend rural services, in particular systematically reversing bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s, as well as of the erosion of local schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on, the first as part of the development of a national network of public transport free at the point of use?
10. Will you defend real agriculture as the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food), as against American-style 'factory farming'?
11. Will you defend the remaining field sports, and repeal the ban on hunting with dogs?
12. Will you require the supermarkets to fund investment in agriculture and small business (investment to be determined in close consultation with the National Farmers' Union and the Federation of Small Businesses) by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax, in either case with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this are not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment?
13. Will you raise the minimum age for jurors at least to 21, restore a minimum property and/or educational qualification for jurors, restore the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy, abolish stipendiary magistrates, repeal the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, restore of the pre-1985 prosecution powers of the Police (i.e., abolish the Crown Prosecution Service), and return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with police forces at least be no larger than at present, and subject to local democratic accountability, most obviously though Police Authorities, although with the mind by no means closed to the idea of elected sheriffs?
14. Will you defend marriage as between one man and one woman (anything else being contrary to the interests of women), refuse to sanction State lying in the form of issuing transsexuals with new birth certificates, introduce a legal presumption of equal parenting, restore the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is still being paid to mothers, and pay poorer mothers of small children to stay at home with them rather than to hand them over into the care of strangers?
15. Will you develop nuclear power and the application of clean coal technology as at least the core around which other things (wind, wave, solar, et cetera) may operate, since that core offers both the re-creation of strong working-class communities based on high-wage and high-skilled employment (as previously provided by pits, steelworks, shipyards, and so on), and independence from the affairs of the Middle East, as well as from Russian gas?
and
16. Will you cultivate Russia's sense of herself as an integral part of the Biblical and Classical civilisation that is the West, and as that civilisation's bridge both to the world as defined by Islam, and to the world of the Far East, linking them to the West and to each other precisely by reference to the Biblical-Classical synthesis, and so overcoming anything in them that might ever give rise to any "clash of civilisations" such as is absurdly held to be happening at present, while acting as the West's gatekeeper against subjugation to Islam or to anything Far Eastern, and while sharing that historic role with all the Slavs?
But no points, and certainly no prizes, for spotting a question on underwear.
Yea, lets have the right to do exactly what we want - fish the North Sea to extinction, not be exposed to anything that might just conceivably help those who have to police our present sad society from discovering breaches of the law.
ReplyDeleteIf you've done nothing wrong, what's the problem with an ID card? (Bet you're happy to give all sort of personal information if you want some credit.)
And as for "majority verdicts" - yes please - I don't want "wildcat" jurors undermining our legal system because they like/don't like the colour of the defendant, the approach of the prosecuting/defending council or anything else, and then hiding behind "reasonable doubt".
David, you don't understand the reason 191 out of 193 countries on this planet have gone completely metric, do you?
ReplyDeleteAh, "wildcat" jurors! In other words, independent-minded ones who won't convict absolutely anyone on the say so of a policeman with a target to meet and/or a vendetta to pursue, entirely regardless of the evidence, if any, presented.
ReplyDeleteThe spiteful, envious persecution of the professional classes by those who thought that all they needed was cash rather than culture, but who then found out that no such thing was the case, is now a particularly serious problem. Those classes tend to produce "wildcat jurors". Oddly enough.
If there is no unanimity for conviction, then there is reasonable doubt. It is as simple as that. And since you are obviously a policeman, I don't know how you have the temerity to mention "colour".
I certainly would be perfectly happy to present all sorts of eveidence in order to obtain credit, i.e., for that specific purpose. I have no objection to passports, or driving licences, or anyhthing else with a specific purpose. But I cannot see the point of ID cards. Well, other than to persecute black people, or trade unionists, or peace activists, or...
Nobody does "police our present sad society". That's a key part (though by no means all) of why it is sad. Perhaps some members of our enormous Police Force might consider stepping outside for a moment and policing the streets?
Or perhaps not, since even when they do they only ever pick on people of whom they are not physically afraid, who will come quietly, and do not have an encyclopediac knowledge of human rights law (despite having few or no qualifications to their nmae - funny, that...).
The Police are now being replaced on the streets with children. Says it all, really.
Please note that not one of the issues that I listed was mentioned much, if at all, during Newnight's fawning "interview" with the BBC's preferred candidate for Prime Minister. Indeed, almost nothing was. It was like being back in the early days of Tony Blair.
Nor was there any mention of Cameron's membership of a criminal conspiracy, complete with membership lists, officers, a uniform, the lot, specifically for the purpose of smashing up pubs, not to mention assaulting publicans and their staff.
And nor was the Tories' plan to hand over control over great swathes of life in designated ghettoes to wholly self-appointed local Muslim, Hindu and Sikh leaders in return for getting out the vote for the Bullingdon Boys.
Among many, many, many other things...
I understand it very well, Toneg: the only reason to use any other system is the force of local or national custom, with everything that that entails.
ReplyDeleteThat was why everywhere on the Continent had its own traditional, picturesque, history-laden system of weights measures until compelled to adopt the metric system by the same Napoleon who compelled them to adopt identity cards.
By all means let the metric system be used as a sort of Esperanto, but there is no getting away from the fact that, apart from in a few specialist trades or for a few arbitrarily chosen purposes (such as when describing extreme cold, though not when describing extreme heat), nobody uses it in day-to-day life in Britain. At most, weights and such like are given in absurdly complicated metric measurements corresponding exactly to very precise imperial ones.
All despite two generations of teaching nothing but the metric system in schools (to the ruin of standards in Maths), despite the victimisation of traders merely providing what their customers want and understand, and so forth.
Both the imperial and the metric systems should be taught in schools, and metric equivalents might as well be written underneath or alongside imperial ones where metrication has already taken place in theory (seldom in practice). But that's all.
Well David, FYI, you've really "got it wrong" - I am not (and never have been) a policeman.
ReplyDeleteI am just an "ordinary "guy on the street" who wants to lead a quiet, safe life.
Perhaps you would like to explain exactly how the jury selection system would identify my "wildcat juror"?
BTW, do you actually bother to read/can understand our English language? Yes, I did indeed mention "colour", but in the context of "like/don't like" - a totally neutral observation from my point of view on what might/might not influence the views of a randomly selected juror.
If you (Heaven forbid) had a child murdered by some pervert, how would you feel if the perpetrator got away with it for no other reason than that he/she had the "good fortune" to have a single fellow traveller amongst the jury?
Let's hear your answer to that one!
You could say that about any crime you liked. It would be an abuse of the system. What if there were 11 racists on a jury trying a black defendant, and they all voted to convict? That would be an abuse of the system, too.
ReplyDeleteConviction by majority verdict cannot be conviction beyond reasonable doubt. It's as simple as that.