Nothing to add, really. This is just horrifying.

From today’s Guardian:

Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, the home secretary will say today.

The crime initiative is part of a government strategy to win back voters by proposing more radical approaches to tackling deep seated problems.

In a speech in London the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, will acknowledge that the number of antisocial behaviour orders being issued is falling, but will argue that there has been a shift to the use of parental orders instead.

As part of the crackdown on bad behaviour, she will urge police forces across the country to follow the example of Essex police, who have mounted four-day “frame and shame” operations by filming and repeatedly stopping identified persistent offenders on problem estates.

The programme in Essex has been successful, even though it may raise human rights issues about such tough tactics, especially if those harassed by the police have not been found guilty of any criminal offence.

Smith will say: “There is no let-up in tackling antisocial behaviour. We know that getting in early to stop troublemakers works, but I want stronger action to deal with persistent offenders. I want police and local agencies to focus on them by giving them a taste of their own medicine: daily visits, repeated warnings and relentless filming of offenders to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide.

“There can be no excuse for inaction while people still fear for the safety of the streets and estates where they live. We will do more to protect them. We all need to sharpen our resolve to tackle both the symptoms and the causes of antisocial behaviour.”

The government has been accused by the Conservatives of going soft on its previous “respect” agenda, closing down its respect unit and placing a new emphasis on youth clubs and play.

Read the whole sorry thing here.

 

Elementary Logic #110

An interesting postscript to the debate we’ve been having on my last exposition of Elementary Logic. I’ve no particularly bitter axe to grind here because I didn’t vote for Boris, but I am nonetheless enraged by the almost instantaneous discovery that he’s a rubbish liberal.

It appears Bojo and David Cameron are of one mind* on the link between petty crime and serious crime. Bojo has made his first policy announcement, and yes, it’s “Ban More Fun”. We’re no longer allowed to drink on the tube, or we’ll get it confiscated from our little mits by the fun police.

I firmly believe that if we drive out so-called minor crime then we will be able to get a firm grip on more serious crime. That’s why from 1 June the drinking of alcohol will be banned from the tube, tram, bus, and Docklands Light Railway.

You may well be thinking, haaaang on. Drinking in public isn’t actually itself a crime, is it? Well, you’d be wrong. Traditionally, public order legislation has only given police the power to make arrests for actual drunkenness, and/or disturbance of public order. That was before NuLab. As of 2001 it became possible, under the Criminal Justice and Police Act of that year, for local authorities to designate public places as alcohol free zones, and after that the police can issue on-the-spot fines to those who infringe the zone.

Thus, drinking becomes a crime. Cripes! Just as well NuLab passed that particular intrusive mumsyish measure, eh, Boris? Will these cretins ever realise that they’re helter-skeltering together down a tight little blue-and-red spiral of ever-decreasing policy difference? Remember the wisdom of The Thick Of It:

She doesn’t just think inside the box, she’s built another box inside it and she’s doing all her thinking in there…

* Dave Monday to Wednesday, Boris Thursday and Friday, and the brain gets the weekend off.

 

The Fall and Rise of Mr PikeBishop

Having stormed City Hall and taken over the BBC, we in the People’s Republic are looking forward to a swift descent back to anonymity, hopefully with some new loyal citizens (a puppy for every new reader!). Already the stats graph has stopped shaking like a maxed-out Geiger counter, which is actually quite a relief. We are not quite sure we can take ourselves seriously as a blogging commentator. Somehow it was all a great deal simpler in the good old days when we were wittering on about Anglo-Norman linguistics, the distressing fall-out from the Incident With The Broken Chair or tax, tax and a little more tax, with occasionally the odd mention of the Liberal Democrats.

But credit to the Beeb for contributing to the flossy excitement of political blogging. I suppose. Like most online innovation, the huge amount of white noise surrounding political blogging will probably resolve itself into a couple of clear signals a few years down the line. The majority of ideas, innovations, participation exercises, collaborations, interactive experiments, publicity paraphernalia and other self-regarding bollocks produced by the political parties and those who lobby for them will become dead wood - as, of course, will the majority of blogs and hub-sites operating now, including quite probably this one. One or two interesting and useful contributions to the field of political behaviour will remain.

Meanwhile, a little story about New Media And Old that may reassure us in the crazy boom years. Mr PikeBishop is a name bloggers will know (self-absorbed? nous?). For anyone who doesn’t keep their intellect wrapped around their own sphinctre, his real name is Frank Fisher. Frank was an opinionated crotchety libertarian with a acid-sharp knack of cutting people’s heads clean off in conversation, and a tendency to object to all categorisations including this one. One day, he discovered Comment is Free and a whole new world opened up. Suddenly there were hundreds of terminally stupid people ripe for a neck-tickle with a blunt axe! He didn’t even have to leave the house and go out looking for arguments at bus stops! Frank became Mr PikeBishop, and administered merciless opinionated crotchety libertarian medicine across the political spectrum.

Now, the Guardian ancien regime in those days still believed that its readers were sitting cross-legged at the foot of its Tree of Ineffable Wisdom and gazing up into the boughs with an expression of starlit wonder. They were somewhat disconcerted to discover that a real, live, breathing audience with opinions and pet topics of its own existed on the other end of the newspaper distribution chain saying things like “This is shit, this is”, and the person of Mr PikeBishop represented this alarming new fact so well that he won the popular vote Big Blogger competition of 2006, presumably to the organ’s total dismay.

Mr PikeBishop single-handedly gives the lie to the general assumption (that of, you know, The Wizards) that political blogging and online comment is a Macbook-glossy world of young hipsters with soft-yet-cool brains ready to receive the imprint of this or that party allegiance. Mostly it’s just the same crusty, hairy, peculiar blighters who were already arguing about politics in pubs or at bus-stops, ’cept with a computer in front of them.

You may gather from all this that I have a sneaking admiration for Mr PikeBishop, as most CiFers do, even the ones still carrying their heads around in a tupperware box. So imagine my delight on election day when I see this post from Mr PB on a particularly foaming anti-Boris piece from Zoe Williams:

Well I wasn’t going to vote today - not being in the Smoke and not having anyone to vote for - and as usual was going to draw a cock on my ballot paper, this time with “Gordon Brown” written along the shaft, but Zoe, you have inspired me. It would only take a 3% swing to the crappy Libdems to unseat the Labour councillors who hold my ward; obviously I’m no libdem, but I saw one of their candidates the other day, posting materials on a sunday morning, he at least looked keen and the thing is… I now realise I have a reason to vote. So Zoe, I shall be voting libdem at around 6 this evening, on my way home from work, just to annoy you.

Chin chin

Mr PB, Mr PB! I said. Thank you!

Don’t thank me, he said, because I hate you and everything you stand for.

Well, yes. Sadly, I fear this is the last time we’re going to attract Mr PikeBishop’s cock drawing vote. Particularly if he sees I’ve screwed a blog post out of it. But the point is, old-fashioned Rennardism scored a tiny babystep victory here.

Part of the reason Labour tanked on Thursday is because, anecdotally, they’ve lost their activist base. The leaflet-pushers and door-knockers are either pissed off after ten years of being ignored by the central party, horrified by policies like the axing of the 10p band which appear to undercut everything they believe in, or they’ve gone on to better things (and lost them). The kind of attrition that has worked itself out in the cabinet since 1997 leaving us under the yoke of the present sorry bunch of losers is just as applicable at the bottom of the hierarchy - and a hierarchy is exactly what it is. I’m not an uncritical fan of leafletting, despite actually rather enjoying the process itself. But a keen sprig with a bunch of leaflets in the right place at the right time clearly worked its magic on Mr PB.

However, lest the leaflet fanciers among us get too complacent we should remember it can also go horribly wrong, as this exclusive photograph taken in Picton ward in Liverpool at 7am on Thursday morning demonstrates:

 

It appears that the Labour activist who got there before our lot ignored the warning on the upper notice, with the resultant crucifxion as shown on the lower notice.

We, er, won Picton.

 

Boris to be part-time village idiot?

It seems that the Tories have been sitting on this one until election morning, and little damn wonder. Boris Johnson has changed his mind, and announced that if he wins in London tomorrow, he is going to keep his seat as MP for Henley for up to a year. A cunning stunt, indeed.

This settles it. He definitely thinks he has been running for the position of Lord Mayor (the one wot wears all the chains and that palava and goes to big dinners) all along.

Leaving aside how monstrously unfair this is on everyone who voted for him on the way to work this morning before the story was allowed to break (Well, fancy that! Jolly lucky timing, eh?), this has the makings of an extremely disturbing situation for London.

We all knew that Boris was never really going to run London all by his little self. My main fear attaching to him throughout this campaign has not been that’s he’s a racist (I doubt he really is) or that he’s not liberal (I think he probably is) but that he wasn’t actually going to be the Mayor. The “Mayor of London”, should he win, was going to be the label for a collective of faceless advisers who might very well be the kind of barking paternalistic illiberal Tories I cross the road to avoid. There was always the risk, and Simon Heffer picked up on it again in his anti-Boris blast yesterday, that voting Boris didn’t actually mean you’d get Boris.

And this seems to, well, unashamedly confirm it. No sane person can want to run London and be a home counties MP at the same time. It’s ludicrous. It’s a fairly outrageous thing to ask of Londoners and an absolutely atrocious thing to ask of the people of Henley. So which of us is going to draw the short straw and get fake cardboard cut-out Boris?

And what on earth prompted the Tories to make this terrible, craven, cheating decision anyway? If Nick Clegg had pulled a weaselly trick like this they’d have been in full cry. Let’s suppose (oh do go on!) that they’re not all cackling vessels of ultimate evil for a moment - what can their motivation possibly be? What in the name of arse is going on at Shouty Plonker HQ?

Well, the only thought I have is that they’re worried about losing the Henley by-election. But they can’t be! It’s the Tory heartland of Tory heartlands. Is Dave so concerned about compromising his somewhat static 40% poll share that he’d compromise the future of London and Henley instead to avoid it? I thought the Tories were meant to be romping away from the Lib Dems in the south (that’s what I keep reading in the newspapers anyway)?

Whatever the cause, those faceless silhouettes of the big man on the Back Boris campaign literature suddenly look extremely sinister. [FX: Thunder rumbles ominously in the distance...No really, it just did!] Who did we really back? Who exactly is going to be running London after tomorrow?

 

Coo…

…innit dark in here…