Aside from the fact that I wasn't going to bother getting one I really hadn't thought much of it until I saw this.

Yeah, that'd be about right.
Since leaving the UK for Australia most ex-pats I've spoken to seem to suffer from various degrees of homesickness. I've been wondering why I seem to be almost immune to it and came to this conclusion:
By the time I left the UK I hated the fucking place.
This blog will look at the reasons why I continue to watch developments in the UK in horror as well as the occasional story from Oz. Bad language is inevitable.

The UK is preparing to celebrate an evening of great British terrorism by burning effigies of Guy Fawkes, the country’s most famous terrorist, on bonfires the length and breadth of the country.
As the world cringes from the threat of global terror organisations, the UK will enjoy a night spent extolling the virtues of Guy Fawkes, the man who invented the very genre of domestic terrorism.
“Al Qaeda think they invented blowing stuff up?” said one bonfire party planner.
“Not a chance. We Brits were planning world-class explosions four hundred years ago while they were still living in caves, well, worse caves.”
“Even now they haven’t found a good way of doing it without blowing themselves up at the same time, the bloody amateurs.”
...
Historians have pointed out that one of the main benefits of this evening is the fact that everyone will once again realise just what a truly excellent idea blowing up Parliament with everyone inside, actually is.
David Wilshire, the disgraced Conservative MP, has compared the treatment of politicians over their expense claims to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany.Wilshire has just moved beyond my ability to swear. How can I? What abusive names could possibly suit someone who feels that there is any comparison whatsoever between 6 million innocent Jews being murdered and 646 politicians being put under the microscope because a significant number have been caught feathering their nests at the expense of taxpayers?
Mr Wilshire, who was forced to resign after paying more than £100,000 in expenses to his own company, said the “witch hunt” against MPs “will undermine democracy”.Oh really? Remind us, Wilshire, how many MPs have recently been murdered for no reason other than their occupation? That would be as many as..... er..... none, right? How many have been subject to medical experimentation against their will? Oh, fucking hell, that'd be none again. How many have been enslaved and sent to labour camps? Again, none whatsoever.
“Branding a whole group of people as undesirables led to Hitler’s gas chambers,” he added.
Willie Sullivan, a spokesman for the campaign, reckons that in the Houses of Parliament, “Instead of men and women with independent minds and souls, we see mindless ghouls shambling through the voting lobbies. We see elections in hundreds of safe seats throughout the land, where even a corpse could win a job for life”. He says the protesters want “a parliament where voters’ voices are heard, all votes count and MPs are truly accountable – a parliament that’s quite simply better equipped to do its job in representing us, the voters”. In other words, his campaign wants to abandon the first past the post electoral system.Where Will Heaven is less than impressed is with Vote for a Change's choice of proportional representation as a replacement, although briefly looking at their site it doesn't seem to me like they're die hard PR advocates. Instead they seem to suggest a referendum on whether the system should change by a certain date (they suggest 2014) with the replacement system to be debated and determined after the referendum if they get the Yes vote they hope for. Makes sense, and increases the chance of a Yes vote I'd have thought. If the question is just whether to replace First Past The Post with PR then those who oppose both but are more anti PR will vote No even though they'd vote Yes on a simpler question of whether there should be a change at all. Aussie friends here who are broadly republican have told me that they voted No in Australia's referendum on the issue of becoming a republic and ditching Mrs Queen as head of state because they were even more opposed to the alternatives on offer - but they'd have said Yes if it had been a simple 'Do you want to be a republic in X years?' type question (some feel that the referendum was designed that way on purpose).

LIBERAL Party frontbenchers have begun to dump their support for carbon emissions trading after receiving party research showing voters are increasingly skittish about putting a price on carbon.Somehow I doubt that will stop it from happening. Rudd, Wong, Garrett & Co have all got religion on this, and I can't see them holding back without a vast amount of voter feedback against the idea. Maybe not even then.
...
Several sources said party director Brian Loughnane told the meeting that when interviewers explained the implications of an ETS to survey respondents, they were negative about the proposed scheme.
News of the shift emerged yesterday before today's launch by Liberal ETS opponent Cory Bernardi of a highly critical assessment of the European Union's emissions trading scheme which estimates it has cost consumers up to E116billion ($190bn) since 2005, with little environmental benefit.
The study, prepared by Britain's Taxpayers' Alliance, says climate change policies there form 14 per cent of household electricity prices and that electricity generators have made windfall profits at the expense of low-income earners and the elderly.
...
Senior Liberals are now saying the party polling, and public polls, show increasing concern about the costs of an ETS. They believe the best political option is to run a campaign against the government based on increased costs to households and industry.
Another MP said voters were starting to doubt the seriousness of climate change.
It is also understood backbench pressure is growing from marginal seat holders who fear they will lose their seats.
The Taxpayers' Alliance says the EU's ETS "has failed to perform and is imposing serious costs on ordinary families".
According to the EU's own figures there were only minor reductions in most European countries in greenhouse gas emissions between 2005 and 2008.
Senator Bernardi, who is leading the Liberal revolt in the Senate and running a direct opposition campaign, said yesterday the British report showed an ETS was "a massive economic impost that has no real environmental benefits".
"An ETS in any form is bad for business, bad for families and bad for our economy," he said.
"With clear evidence of how ineffective and expensive it has been in the European Union, there is no way an ETS should be introduced in Australia."
Convinced? Want to spread the word? Invite your friends and family to be part of PROVE IT! Follow the three steps. Pick a point. Choose the evidence to back it up. Then send it on.Funny, I thought a scientific approach was to consider all the fucking evidence, not just choose what suits. Which incidentally is how I went from believer to sceptic - there were just too many holes in the warmist case and what seemed like a lot of misdirection going on to try to hide them.
Suddenly the both Tories and Laborg are interested in getting out the expat vote. Does that mean they've noticed they've alienated everyone else? I'm not convinced they'll have a lot of luck as the process of registering as an overseas voter can be a pain in the arse involving forms that need to be witnessed, but between the restrictions from the British end on who can witness them and Australian law (as if it's got a fucking thing to do with Australia whether I still vote in the UK anyway!) I really struggled to complete the forms at all. Might well be easier elsewhere but I still wouldn't be surprised if many expats don't bother - the same reasons for the apathy vote apply as they do for the 40% or so of UK voters who don't vote, except more so.An American woman who was charged with offering sex for World Series tickets on the Craigslist website has said she is embarrassed about her arrest, but did nothing wrong and is still hopeful of attending a game.Only in America. Maybe she really did offer to shag the cop, maybe not. Who knows or cares apart from those directly involved. Even someone who opposes prostitution ought to be able to see what a stretch this is: either the arrest was because the tickets have a commercial value or because they're something she really, really wants, and how the hell does that make her a prossie? Is it so different from a woman offering sex in return for getting a big bunch of flowers on her birthday? Ultimately, if women are not allowed to benefit in any way shape or form from sex you have to ask if they're even allowed to have an orgasm. Ridiculous? Extreme? Sort of, yes, but by the sounds of things Ms Finkelstein enjoys baseball at least as much as some women enjoy sex.
"I didn't do anything wrong, so I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," Susan Finkelstein said one day after meeting at a suburban bar with an undercover police officer responding to an advertisement on Craigslist.
Miss Finkelstein's lawyer said his client is merely "a nice lady overcome with Phillies fever."
She might have dropped double entendres in her Craigslist advertisement but never explicitly offered sex, her lawyer William J. Brennan said.If double entendres are a problem I really think they've got bigger fish to fry than a forty-something baseball nut.
The former Home Office minister was criticised by a formal inquiry for allowing his parents to live rent free at taxpayers' expense and ordered to repay more than £13,000.If you've got a very expensive monitor for Christ's sake do not play this clip:
But the Parliamentary committee, who decide MPs' punishments ruled he should be allowed to keep the majority of the money claimed on the home. The official investigation said it was "reasonable" for the taxpayer to help fund Mr McNulty's parents' house as it was in his constituency and could be designated as his second home.
Yet Mr McNulty himself admitted he only stayed there for a maximum of 66 nights a year. He spent the rest of the time at the nearby £900,000 house he shares with his wife Christine Gilbert, the head of Ofsted.
The report, published by the Standards and Privileges committee, comes just weeks after Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary, was only mildly rebuked despite being found to have broken the rules by claiming more than £100,000 after designating her family's house as her "second home". It will lead to more questions about whether MPs should decide on punishments over expense claims made by their colleagues.Fucking hell! After all the fuss, fury and fallout six months back is this going to be the pattern? Slaps on wrists, token repayments and weasel worded apologies? Is anyone actually going to be told to pay back the lot and, since returning all that he stole wouldn't get a burglar off scot free, are any of the bastards actually going to be punished for it? I wish I could believe it but it doesn't look likely. And we were told that some MPs were suicidal? I think maybe what someone thought were wails of despair were actually howls of laughter.
The report from the Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges into Tony McNulty exemplifies everything that was rotten with the now-discredited system of parliamentary allowances. It also casts serious doubt on whether MPs have even begun to understand what it was about the system that caused such anger.On a couple of occasions where work has taken me away from home I've stayed at my mum's rather than a hotel. Did I miss a trick there? Should I have sent my then employers a bill for mum's mortgage, utilities and council tax? Would the fact that they'd have taken little time to think about it before telling me to fuck off make me less of a cunt for trying it on?
McNulty ... claimed the additional costs allowance (ACA) for a second home occupied by his parents in Harrow. Over a period of several years, he was paid around £72,000 to cover the costs of mortgage interest, council tax and other bills.
The question of whether Mr McNulty claimed taxpayers' money to subsidise his parents would be a matter for the police, if there were some grounds for suspicion of fraud. Yet the morality of his actions does not appear to have troubled the standards committee at all. Even though his parents were living in the house, the committee accepted that Mr McNulty stayed there occasionally, thereby legitimising his claim.
However, the ACA was supposed to reimburse MPs for expenses "wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred when staying overnight away from their main UK residence... for the purpose of performing parliamentary duties". Since Mr McNulty chose to live just outside his constituency, it is hard to comprehend how John Lyon, the standards commissioner, managed to conclude it was "necessary" and "reasonable" for him to have a second home just a few miles away. Why did Mr McNulty not live in his constituency, and save the taxpayer £72,000?Why did he not just flush himself down his own toilet and save us a lot more?
The committee also said that since he did not claim his full second-home "entitlement", there was no loss to the taxpayer. Oh, but there was. The expense of running a second home was incurred only because Mr McNulty did not live in his constituency, which is just a 30-minute train journey from Westminster. That was his decision; why should the rest of us pay for it and put a roof over his parents' heads as well? This point was lost on the committee, made up of MPs who presumably thought it unexceptionable.I think there's has been a misunderstanding about the concept of a jury of one's peers: thieves should not have their fates decided by fellow thieves, and likewise MPs accused of exaggerated or fraudulent expenses claims sure as fuck shouldn't be able to rely on their honourable or otherwise friends in Parliament to smooth things over.
After several years of using compact fluorescent bulbs, I've concluded that they don't last half as long as the manufacturers promised. Worse, I'm starting to worry about the mercury in them, particularly now that old-fashoned incandescent bulbs have been banned.And this is written by a reasonably dedicated greenie. Not so green, however, that he's buying LED bulbs yet. Like Al Jahom recently mentioned, LED bulbs can be as much as 30 quid. As with the lack of solar panels covering every roof, there comes a point where even the most die hard eco-friend won't install things that cost so much the potential savings are many years away. for most people loving the planet comes second to looking after your wallet.
I recently heard from a man who knows a lot more about this than I do, having worked for years in heavy industry and specialised in the analysis of oil and gas samples. He points out that evaporated mercury got into the air conditioning at one of the buildings owned by the multinational company for which he worked (for reasons that I hope will be obvious, I'm not using his name).
"Spills were not noticed or cleaned up," he says. Over a year, roughly 80 people were permanently injured by mercury vapour. "Their teeth fell out first, then they got the shakes and malaria-type symptoms." It was months before the employer realised what the problem was and put things right.
This man was astounded to see mercury bulbs up for sale without a health warning. He points out that it's illegal to transport them by plane because of the high mercury content, and that it would have been illegal a few years ago even to sell the bulbs till the EU legalised them - at the same time as banning mercury-based thermometers.
"All I can say is that if you or your family have mercury bulbs at home," says my informant, "get rid of them. If you want to promote low energy bulbs, then go for LED bulbs."
MEAT-eaters are, at long last, to be treated like smokers, it has been confirmed.Me too.
Lord Stern, author of the UK government climate change report How Come You're Not Dead Yet?, said meat-eating must join alcohol and tobacco on the anti-social behaviour register and called for a massive increase in funding to make you feel like an utter shit, even in your dreams.
In advance of the Copenhagen summit on climate change he claimed that too many people had failed to grasp the implications of global warming and insisted that anyone who had cottage pie last night should be fired from their job, locked in a trunk and chemically sterilised to prevent them from corrupting as yet unborn vegetarians.
....
In one film a parent is seen lifting a ham sandwich to his mouth. As it nears his lips his child starts crying hysterically. When the parent moves the sandwich away from his mouth the child stops crying immediately.
The parent then moves the sandwich back and forth as the child cries and then stops crying in perfect synchronisation. The parent then looks into the camera, smiles knowingly and throws the sandwich in the bin.
And in another advert a child is shown being slowly roasted on a spit alongside the caption 'Oi! meat-eaters! Why don't you just eat your fucking kid?'.
Tom Logan, a pork enjoyer from Hatfield, said: "I am amazed it has taken this long."
The global financial crisis, crippling drought and the Black Saturday fires that killed 173 people were all part of Allah's will to punish the "filthy people" of Australia, one of the men accused of plotting to attack Sydney's Holsworthy army base has claimed.Perhaps he'd like to ask his god why Australia has weathered the financial crisis comparatively well (a recent return to Britain showed us that, as it says on the number plates, Victoria - or Australia - is the place to be), why recent rains are refilling some of the dams, and why the devastating bush fires only killed 173* - considerably fewer than was first feared and less than you'd expect from one largish airliner going down. He might also want to ask what Allah had against all the wildlife that got barbecued alive or smoked to death, whether the failure to actually build any new dams for some years has been a factor in the water shortage and, above all else, why Allah saw fit to allow those alleged to be planning to attack the Holsworthy base to be caught.
In February 2007, Mr Di Milta says he drove home from work to take his sick 11-year-old daughter Marisa to hospital. The girl was in excruciating pain after two lots of spinal surgery and Mr Di Milta admits to rushing home, driving at about 65 km/h in a 60 km/h zone.So other than minor speeding to a degree that could also be achieved by a damn good tailwind Mr Di Milta's offence was a technical one. No doubt the law was designed in this way so that those who might consider evading the random tests by driving away from the booze bus are presumed guilty and punished to the same extent, the idea being to make it a waste of time driving off. Clearly that's not the case here since Di Milta not only returned to the booze bus but did so within such a short space of time that it's simply not credible that he'd have been over the limit at the first stop and had a BAC of zero when he came back. So what was he punished for? Failing to offer instant obedience to a police officer? I doubt that one's on the statute books and I also doubt that the cop was taking a vindictive attitude toward a clearly compassionate father put his daughter above obeying her instructions. I imagine there's probably a reporting procedure for drive-aways that she was expected to follow and she may well have expected that someone higher up would sort it out fairly. Like the court, maybe? If that was what the police woman was thinking I can't blame her because it's not an unreasonable expectation that courts are there to see justice done, but either because of the law or because nobody stopped to consider if charging Mr Di Milta was really in the public interest an injustice was done instead.
Not far from his house, he was stopped at a booze bus, where he told a policewoman about his situation. She told him to get out of the car, but he drove off.
Half an hour later, while his daughter lay in hospital, Mr Di Milta returned to the booze bus, apologised to the same policewoman and took a breath test, which returned a blood-alcohol level of zero.
Mr Di Milta was charged with failing to stop at a booze bus and his lawyer later entered a guilty plea - allegedly without consulting him. A finding of guilt or conviction carries a mandatory licence suspension of two years.
''No one asked me anything. The magistrate talked with the lawyer and my licence was suspended for two years,'' Mr Di Milta said.Poor bastard. And insult has been added to injury.
When he returned to court to get his licence back this month, he could not answer a magistrate's question about how long it would take for a standard drink to leave his body to reach a zero blood alcohol reading.Why the hell put him through this? Why bother making him go through the indignity of having to have his car modified as if he was a recidivist drink driver? Why send him on a patently unnecessary course? Why even ask him the fucking question when the test he gave in relation to the offence for which he was banned came back with a zero alcohol reading?
The magistrate then ordered him to undertake a drink-driving course and that an alcohol interlock device be fitted on his car.
''I thought I'd paid my price,'' Mr Di Milta, a chef, said. ''Why do I get punished for something I did not do? I'm not a drink-driver.''Why indeed. Apparently the way the law is written may be part of it...
Traffic law experts consulted by The Age said that while Mr Di Milta could have possibly beaten the charge with a defence of necessity, a guilty plea meant that, under the law, the magistrate had no choice but to suspend his licence.... but you'd have thought that someone at some stage, either prosecutors or beaks at the original trial or at Mr Di Milta's more recent appearance, would have noticed that they're beating on the poor guy for a trivial technical infringement and that the punishment he's received goes way beyond what we might loosely call his crime.
The necessity defence has been successfully run in several traffic cases. They include the case of a man who drove to the chemist to get his ill wife an asthma puffer and ignored a booze bus, only to return to it later and record an blood alcohol reading well above the legal limit.
Legally, magistrates can order people convicted of not stopping at a booze bus to take a drink-driving course, while a minimum six-month fitting of an alcohol interlock device is mandatory for those convicted.'Can' order, you see, not 'must'. Their hands may be legally tied as far as the (pointless in this case) alcohol interlock device is concerned, in which case you'd hope that intellectual honesty would cut in and they'd be making waves up the chain to get the law amended, but the fact that they're forcing him to go on this drink driving course without any apparent justification for doing so makes it look like the real crime, the unspoken and unofficial offence, was failing to be deferential and obedient to authority. Since Mr Di Milta's insurance company will probably take a dim view of his conviction without taking any interest in the facts he can look forward to his punishment continuing for some time in the form of unnecessarily high premiums. In the quest for safer roads the wheels of justice just keep running this guy over. It'd be ironic if it wasn't so bloody outrageous.
Employers will come under pressure to register staff with the Government's anti-paedophile database even if they have little contact with children, the head of the scheme has said.Surprise surfuckingprise. The bastard's barely been in the job long enough for his arse to warm up his office chair, and already he's looking to massively extend his agency's remit and the database for which it's responsible. Eleven million people, almost 100% of which are entirely innocent of any child abuse - indeed,any crime - are on this egregious übercunt's computer and that isn't enough for him.
But Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.What? What? You think that they think they might lose business? You don't think that some of the farcical problems that have been reported in the past might balance that, even if it was true in the first place? What an utter crock of shit! I'd call this just a thinly veiled attempt to prep the entire country for the day when everyone will have to be on the database no matter what.
Sir Roger also disclosed that the sensitive information gathered about those on the database would be kept indefinitely, even if they left the relevant professions, because it could be useful for any subsequent applications.Oh really? What a fucking revelation that is! You astonish me.
His warning raises concerns that hundreds of thousands of workers could end up having their backgrounds checked even though there was no obvious need to do so as companies insisted that staff be vetted to reassure customers.Then companies need to harden the fuck up and tell Sir Roger, the ISA, the Home Orifice, the government and both the Nu Laborg cock sockets and the Tory fuckwits that will no doubt be replacing them shortly, to go fuck themselves with the business end of a belt sander. We all know that the paranoia levels are such that it won't be those with just obvious paedo related offences on their records that will be affected, and it is neither right nor just that someone might be unable to get or keep a job because of some petty offence years before. But it will happen, you can bet on it. And this bastard wants nearly the whole workforce on his books?
Those with a criminal history could face losing their job if it prevented their employer gaining accreditation.
Widespread spiking of drinks with date-rape drugs such as Rohypnol and GHB is an "urban legend" fuelled by young women unwilling to accept they have simply consumed too much alcohol, academics believe.Oooo, fuck. That's not going to go down well with the fems and the righteous All-Men-Are-Rapists mob.
A study of more than 200 students revealed many wrongly blamed the effects of a "bad night out" on date-rape drugs, when they had just drunk excessively.Hang on. I once spent part of an evening wrapped around the bottom of the pedestal of the downstairs toilet, and despite hearing two of Pink Floyd's longer albums played in full on the stereo I was convinced I'd only been in there for twenty or thirty minutes. Shit! Someone must have spiked all that Guinness that I drank... or posshibly the half litre of Polisshh vlodka that I washeled the Guinninninnness drown with. Because obviously it couldn't possibly be as simple as the fact that I was completely off my dial.
Many are in "active denial" that drinking large amounts of alcohol can leave them "incoherent and incapacitated", the Kent University researchers concluded.
Young women's fears about date-rape drugs are so ingrained that students mistakenly think it is a more important factor in sexual assault than being drunk, taking drugs or walking alone at night.
The study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, found three-quarters of students identified drink spiking as an important risk – more than alcohol or drugs.
More than half said they knew someone whose drink had been spiked.
But despite popular beliefs, police have found no evidence that rape victims are commonly drugged with such substances, the researchers said.
Among young people, drink spiking stories have attractive features that could "help explain" their disproportionate loss of control after drinking alcohol, the study found.Quite. But it comes with a downside. Aside from the fact that getting sphinctered, shagging some stranger whose probably also half in the bottle, and waking up and crying rape the next morning belittles genuine rape victims, sooner or later some girl is going to be drugged for real and raped, and her case is going to be weakened too. And for what? A rumour that makes a convenient excuse that's caught everybody's imagination and spread like wildfire. How does that do anyone any favours?
Dr Burgess said: "Our findings suggest guarding against drink spiking has also become a way for women to negotiate how to watch out for each other in an environment where they might well lose control from alcohol consumption."
Co-researcher Dr Sarah Moore said: "We would be very interested in finding out whether the urban myth of spiking is also the result of parents feeling unable to discuss with their adult daughters how to manage drinking and sex and representing their anxieties about this through discussion of drink spiking risks."
Nick Ross, chair of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, commented: "There is no evidence of widespread use of hypnotics in sexual assault, let alone Rohypnol, despite many attempts to prove the contrary.
"During thousands of blood and alcohol tests lots of judgement-impairing compounds were discovered, but they were mostly street drugs or prescription pharmaceuticals taken by the victims themselves, and above all alcohol was the common theme.
"As Dr Burgess observes, it is not scientific evidence which keeps the drug rape myth alive but the fact that it serves so many useful functions."
She may be fictional but Tinkerbell has been named as the first 'honorary ambassador of green' by the UN.Don't take drugs, kids. They're overrated, because as trips go this is shit - nothing weird and wonderful, just stupid and banal.
Millions of litres of oil are pouring into the Timor Sea from a well that ruptured more than two months ago, according to environmental campaigners.Check the date on that Times article - 24th October. I remember when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, and I remember the media went batshit crazy about it right away. But of course twenty years ago CO2 wasn't the bugbear it's become in more recent times, and the people most likely to give a shit about it were, well, green* kids like me. But still, it was a big enough event that I stopped worrying about carbon dioxide and warming for a while to worry instead about the Alaskan shoreline and local wildlife.
Offences involving firearms have increased in all but four police areas in England and Wales since 1998, figures obtained by the Tories reveal.Fuck me, who could possibly have seen that coming? I mean, taking guns away from the law abiding was bound to make the criminals stop using them too, wasn't it? In all fairness how was the government supposed to know that the criminals would carry on using guns even though it was clearly illegal? Well, allow me to quote extensively from one of my favourite books.
One part of the country has seen the problem increase almost seven fold as the availability of guns, and criminals' williness to use them rises.
The number of people injured or killed by a gun has also doubled under Labour.
[Vimes] remembered Findthee Swing. A lot of it was history. The revolt would have happened with Swing or without him but he was, as it were, the tip of the boil.Not much to add to that except to wonder if art is imitating life or the other way around.
.....
Swing... started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought: 'This is how the people ought to be, how do we change them?' And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper, because Swing's patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head.
There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that, Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.
Vimes wondered if he'd sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he'd dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked too, if only there had been enough coppers - say, three per citizen.
Amazingly quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw, though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing, and it was this: criminals don't obey the law. It's more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone but themselves. And they couldn't believe it was happening. It was like Hogswatch everyday.
Some citizens took the not unreasonable view that something had gone a bit askew if only naughty people were carrying arms. And they got arrested in large numbers. The average copper, when he's been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don't much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won't instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and wear more expensive clothes than he personally can afford. The rate of arrests shot right up, and Swing had been very pleased about that.
Admittedly some of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens. That was Assault on a City Official, a very heinous and despicable crime and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere.
It wasn't that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn't offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn't seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough and ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. instead, he'd taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
A Home Office spokeswoman said: "It is misleading to compare figures for 2007 / 08 with those from 2002 and before, due to changes in recording practices.Oh, do fuck off and come back with a new excuse.
"There has been an 11 per cent fall in gun crime since 2005 and provisional figures for firearm offences recorded by the police show they account for 0.2 per cent of all recorded crime."
In no longer pretty citiesThere are fingers in the kittiesThere are warrants, forms and chittiesAnd a jackboot on the stair