TRUST US, HONEST!

The government wants us all to trust them:-

Trust them to tackle crime.
Trust them to run the economy.
Trust them to maintain our sovereignty within Europe.
Trust them to be honest and ethical.
Trust them to keep our personal data (that they demand from us with menace) safe secure and confidential.

Crime - The crime rate from 1997 to 2006 has soared with the number of rapes doubling, serious woundings rising by more than 50% and convictions at an all time low.

Economy - Need I say anything here? We have just crashed into what some believe may be the deepest recession in living memory.

Sovereignty - 75% of our laws are now made in Europe, even our MPs are complaining that they are powerless.

Honest and Ethical - Shall I just say two words - MP's Expenses!

Personal Data - The NHS have reported 140 serious data breaches in the first 3 months of this year, affecting the personal and confidential details of tens of thousands of people.

It is time for a step change! We should have a general election NOW and vote for MPs who will promise to be open and honest, and not just declare it but lay their dealings open to scrutiny by the public. We need politicians who will seize power back from the beaurocrats in Brussels and hand it back to the people of this country.

Enough empty rhetoric.
Enough lining of pockets.
Enough of the 'old boy' network.

We need a political establishment that remembers what it is for - to represent the PEOPLE of this country and to work for the benefit of the people instead of dipping their grubby little fingers in our pockets!

84 year old man and his daughter stopped by anti terror police thanks to ANPR

Quite amazing timing coming on the heals of my blog about the ANPR network currently being implemented:-

An 84 year old man and his daughter appeared tonight on the BBC TV programme "Who's watching you?" to tell their story of how they were pulled over in Central London and searched by a police anti-terrorism unit - and threatened with arrest under the Terrorism Act if they did not explain where they were going.

What they hadn't realised was Sussex Police had put a marker against their car on the Police National Computer after they attending three anti-arms demonstrations against EDO MBM Technology in Moulsecoomb.

They hadn't commited any crime, they hadn't been arrested, they had just attended a demonstration. That was enough to get them marked down as potential terrorists and harrassed by the police whilst going about their lawful lives.

This is the kind of thing we must STOP right now! Our government (and the police acting on their behalf) should not be harrassing innocent people, this routine monitoring and surveillance of innocent people should not happen in what I always believed to be a free country.

Write to your MP demanding that they vote to dismantle this police state that we have become.

Read the newspaper story at http://www.theargus.co.uk/search/4393086.Brighton_pensioner_slams__police_state__after_terror_police_tag_car/

Watch the programme at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ktdzj/Whos_Watching_You_Episode_1/

More Big Brother

Some time ago I read about plans to link every available camera up to automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) equipment in order to record our every movement.

Naiively, I thought this would take a long time to achieve as the sheer cost and complexity of the system required to build this network of ANPR surveillance would be prohibitive.

Now I read on the BBC site :-

A national network of cameras and computers automatically logging car number plates will be in place within months, the BBC has learned.

Thousands of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras are already operating on Britain's roads.

Police forces across England, Wales and Scotland will soon be able to share the information on one central computer.

Officers say it is a useful tool in fighting crime, but critics say the network is secretive and unregulated.

Now I'm starting to get seriously worried, we already have levels of surveillance and monitoring that we have never experienced before and now we face the threat of the majority of our car journeys being recorded and checked in case we break some law or other.

I am not opposed to surveillance as part of an investigation into a crime or suspected crime, I DO object most strongly to routine monitoring and checking to see whether there is any crime they can pin on us - there are now so many laws I cannot honestly hold my hand up and say that I have not broken any laws today, I just don't know!!!

Measles outbreak - are we doomed?

Measles outbreak in Wales the worst in more than a decade

It seems that we have reason to be afraid, measles is sweeping across Wales and threatening death and brain damage to thousands of children ........ or so the authorities would have us believe.

We have had letters, leaflets through the door, exhortations that we must urgently submit our children to be 'protected' by a jab of the MMR vaccine.

Now let's look at the figures - Llanelli is supposed to be one of the major centres of this outbreak, with a population in the region of 60 to 70 thousand people I reckoned that there must be hundreds of cases in the town .... the figures I have found say 6 !! Yes, that is 6 confirmed cases with another 19 probable and 18 suspected.

Let us be generous say that all 43 cases are actually cases of measles, that is less than 0.066% of the local population infected! I don't know about you but that doesn't sound like much of an epidemic to me.

What is puzzling me is the response of the authorities, four children attending a nursery in Burry Port have been treated in hospital but the nursery is following guidelines and staying open, this doesn't square with advice offered in other cases of infectious diseases where the recommendations have been to isolate and avoid known hotspots, this suggests that either measles is not as contagious as they say or they actually want it to spread! Why else would you want parents to continue to send their children to a location known to have been involved in cases of a contagious disease?

The National Public Health Service (NPHS) claim that ".. the only way this will stop is for people to come forward for the MMR vaccine".

I don't want to get embroiled in the debate over whether the MMR is safe or not but why aren't they prepared to offer the single vaccine as a means to spread the immunity? there is no mention of mumps or rubella outbreaks so why not recognise the unease people feel over the MMR and offer a more acceptable vaccine?

What is it that makes them so keen to get the MMR into their target of 95% of the population? Is it just money making for the MMR manufacturers or is there something more sinister? Why can't we choose the single vaccine? Surely, if there is an option which will increase the rate of vaccine take up during an 'outbreak' shouldn't it be offered?

I don't have all the answers, but something doesn't add up here!

I'm Back (and a rant about rules)

Sorry folks to have been away so long, went down with a nasty dose of flu that just wouldn't go away and haven't had the energy to pick myself up off the floor. Nothing to do with swine flu or anything sufficiently exotic for us all to get excited about pandemics........ I'll leave that kind of rubbish to the gov't, maybe they should have called it torreodor flu 'cos then I could make all the jokes about bullshit etc.

Anyhow, I wanted to say how much I appreciate reading Ken Frost's Blog "Nanny Knows Best", I do truly think he 'gets it'.

In work I have been quietly arguing with people about all the health and safety rules, I really do think that introducing rules to cover everything we do actually makes our workplace more dangerous, I have noticed that people are just following 'the rules' and not thinking for themselves - it comes as a complete surprise then when they have an accident because 'they followed all the rules'. Unfortunately the usual response is to introduce more rules - doh!!!

Recently I got thinking (aha, now I know where the headache came from), and realised that this over prescription of rules is actually at the heart of many of the problems troubling our society - people have stopped thinking for themselves, they no longer consider whether what they are doing is right or wrong, they only want to know whether there is a rule that says they can't - if there is no rule then it must be OK!!!!!!

This thinking is highlighted by the recent claims of so many MPs - they didn't do anything wrong when they made their expenses claims - they didn't break any rules.

Maybe I'm being simplistic here, but I always believed that MPs had an obligation to be honest and ethical, Surely they shouldn't need 'rules' to tell them that it is not right to claim for mortages you don't even have, for expensive 'duck islands', for moat cleaning, for multiple second homes, for porno films etc etc etc.

Just WHAT do they think they are doing? I always understood that expenses were there to reimburse you for money you spent in carrying out your duties, not perks to be exploited to the maximum!

My dad always said "rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools", I think he had a damn good point and it's about time that this collection of fools did the honourable thing and resigned en mass in order to give us the opportunity to either believe their claims to behave ethically in the future or to replace them with somebody we think we can trust.

Please read Ken's blog on the matter at http://nannyknowsbest.blogspot.com/2009/05/system.html