"summary police powers" to fine drunks on the spot, no witnesses needed, no magistrates.

i don't like the phrase "nanny state", beloved of the tabloids - but this is the purse lipped finger-wagging that we've all experienced over the summer, with an added coercive edge. state power will be summarily used to punish individual  for drinking. the charge of drunk and disorderly has long been used capriciously by the police against individuals the police didn't like the look of, now they don't even have to bother with the magistrates. i've never really understood the "crime" aspect of being drunk anyway. the assault laws can, and should deal with violent drunks, just as with people sober and violent.

blair's conference speech gives an insight into this mindset. emphasis mine, ASB = antisocial behaviour

"It is true: crime, overall, is down, burglary and car crime by big numbers. But it's not the point.

Respect is about more than crime. It's about the loss of a value which is a necessary part of any strong community: proper behaviour, good conduct, the unselfish notion that the other person matters.

For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a difference. And I now understand why: the system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st-century crime - ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime - with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens."

right, bear with this, ignore for a moment the cretinous statement that drunkenness and difficult neighbours are unique to the 21st century. he goes on-

"The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me: that must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights; it means deciding whose come first."

for a start, the whole point of the term "antisocial behaviour" is that it's meant to describe low level nuisance (which is pretty subjective) rather than actual criminal acts. here he shamelessly conflates this  with organised crime, drug dealing (which i personally don't consider a crime at all) and binge drinking. binge drinking, that is, being drunk, is on the same continuum with organised crime. and people have to be protected from it. that is the "law abiding" have to be protected from it - who are, by definition, those who are sober and have neat gardens.

his problem with the system is that not enough people are being prosecuted, this is because it presently has to presume the accused's innocence until proved otherwise. this is a good system, as it (theoretically, anyway)  protects the individual from the power of the state, which will assume that it represents the censure of the law abiding sober majority. when deciding "whose rights come first", he means that the squeals of outrage of the law abiding/decent/hard working (a people made in tony's image) have primacy. they must be protected - effectively this means removing the presumption of innocence.

this is horrible. purse lipped, finger wagging and bordering on fascism. a cosy fascism of ikea and other hoody-free shopping centres, jamie oliver food, edicts on health enforced by the police, "choice" in the sense of 24hour pub opening, but not the choice to be drunk, or smoke. hecklers will be ejected.  critics will be banned. this is a death grip on the "centre ground", that will be consolidated by criminalising "extremism" in any form.

roll on tone's diverse and vibrant britain, innit!

well, fucking hell just call me hiatus boy. it's been a while, really since i made any proper post (though i doubt quite seriously that there has been any bated breath out there). the gibberish in the post below was a fragment of text that i've had kicking about for a while, and whilst drunk i thought it was suitable for a post all of it's own cos i couldn't think of anything else. perhaps i was wrong.

so life goes on, really. 

i sit in my rocking chair (yes i have a rocking chair) in front of the computer, looking at various things - news, music, porn.

i have become fascinated by the backgrounds in amateur porn-  it has to be amateur, the commercial stuff just has the usual slick accoutrements that you might find in your average duran duran video, or coke dealer's place. the other stuff has kitchen surfaces, back gardens, rooftops, tangle and snarl of video or computer wires in the background, waste baskets, discarded fluffy slippers, bad posters/prints on the walls, horrible wallpaper etc. i'm not saying that the makers of such things have automatically bad, or any specific, taste; but the sight of person or persons doing stuff in front of some sort of floral monstrosity, whilst their tv remote, family photos or some such, is also there on the table behind them, just adds to the frisson- such as it is.

 the personalisation of the setting is  the antithesis of much of the commercial product, which de-personalises as much as possible. it might be in order to reach a mass audience, and express, or play to (i don't know, is this what it does?) their fantasies the airbrushed generic showhome is appropriate. maybe that's (here comes a word i hate, but realise it seems to have currency) aspirational.  the fingernails always get to me though - you could do yourself a serious injury with those. i hate the loss of a sense of skin too, that which sags bags wrinkles sweats, and  the retoucher magics away.

the innapropriate furnishings and domestic clutter are just  reminders, like the less than perfect bodies of the amateur productions, of mortality - because more or less all our cherished stuff will look shit when we are dead, just junk for relatives to clear, and our bodies too,  if they don't look that way already. the settings tend, with the lighting, or lack of, and the expressions, or lack of; to highlight the intimate absurdity of fucking. but also, sometimes, it's touching awkwardness.

And this is the way we all begin. At the edges. And have to work our way into the middle.

The story of our lives starts without us. We have to rush to catch up.

Our genesis happens out of the way, something between strangers. It’s their story first of all. They didn’t  know us, they didn’t have us in mind.

 We have to catch up, from the edges. We have to work our way in, make the contacts, find our way to the middle.

Not everybody does. Not everybody does all the time. This is something that we’re lent, not something we can  own. It can be lost, or maybe never found.

We come here as strangers.

Fucking hell. At least the description “evacuee” is now being used regularly – though not as much as “refugee”. But this is pretty disgusting.
 the poor, black, and now homeless population of new orleans have been criminalised, by definition.

The word refugee implies someone who has come from outside, who is stateless. The description seems to betray the way that the destitute are regarded. First left to die, and then placed in camps under armed guard. There is enormous fear of the poor. Here also, words like “chav” carry a weight of  disgust. There are people who need to be reformed, obviously, by the judicious application of make-over television shows, telling them what to wear, not eat, how to parent, how to decorate. If this doesn’t work, then there’s more stringent rules for benefits, the privatisation of public housing, “zero tolerance” (for drugs, looting, whatever).

Even polly toynbee had some fairly intelligent things to say

“But before we get too piously smug about America, just imagine a flood crashing through the Thames barrier and drowning London and Essex. What would we see? Essentially the same thing, even if mayor Ken Livingstone did evacuation well. The middle classes would escape to friends and relatives. The poor who have no networks beyond other poor people would collect in camps”.

And afterwards, the homeowners, the gentrifiers, would suggest that a rebuilt london would be so much nicer, property values would be higher, and council taxes lower, if all those nasty estates, with nasty people in them, were just pulled down. As some people are still needed to serve coffee and clean floors, maybe we could just stick them all in the thames gateway?

    (link) i'm sort of surprised the fuckers should care- but impressed that some at least do. we come close to the US in this country, in terms of proportion of incarcerated, it's not doing us any good either.

a bootleg of the rather brilliant Auters can be downloaded from here. i reccomend it. the Auters, in fact luke haine's output generally, is well worth investigating. he has a menacing, creepy voice, and scabrous, frequently funny lyrics. it doesn't surprise me that his site lists stuart home as an associate - another provocateur with a sense of humour.