you Brits are f***ed

Well done Lee, while I have little to hide, I also am not inclined to help the police, and yet also don't wish to be affected by other ppl doing illegal deeds. Want my cake and eat it. Personally there are parts of the justice system that are way off balance, for example points on your licence for speeding, which if having a licence permits you to earn your living, can result in the loss of employment. Fair I think not. Don't get me wrong I have a clean licence, but should the state have the power to remove some persons employment by default?

Which is very much the wrong way round. How can you prove a negative?

Big Brother has been here for years and is getter healthier by the day under this government.

snipped-for-privacy@macleod-group.com uttered summat worrerz funny about:

No problem :-)

Lee

On or around Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:35:46 GMT, "Dad" enlightened us thusly:

there again, it takes either very silly speeding or repeated speeding to lose yer licence, so it could be that after getting a few points you ought to be more careful - either don't exceed the limits or don't get caught. I reckon that having 9 points on me licence would suddenly make me very law-abiding...

Yebut there's them there stats and targits init...

Small village in Somewhereshire had no crime, then, late one Tuesday two houses were burgled - the culprit was never found. When the stats were released the village had a 100 percent unsolved crime rate and house prices went down.

A local law was passed making it illegal to wear a hat on Friday mornings. Hence, one Friday morning a raid was led on the small village. 98 people were arrested for wearing a hat, taken before the local Court and fined.

The next stats proved a 98 percent clean-up rate for crime and house prices rose.

If anyone knows who the burglar was, can they ask he return my false teeth, please?

Too many trolls, so little time...

10 years for trying to dodge paying car tax, I'm assuming that you'd be happy with that? Just exactly how many prisons do you think we'd need if we started banging people up for massive lengths of time for trivial offences, and would you be willing to foot the tax bills to pay for it? You'd be the first to moan about the costs I expect, then probably propose on-the-spot hanging to reduce your tax.

Ask an adult.

Another scenario, jilted lover swaps plates on ex-lovers car, reports ex-lover to police, ex-lover goes to jail for 10 years. Sieg Heil.

Ah it's all the fault of those people in the smart houses, the ones who pay the tax. Did you know that top-rate tax payers make up 12% of the population but pay 60% of taxes? That's 60% of the cash this country generates, paid by just 12% of the population. Remember that next time you slag off people who don't live on an 'estate'.

As for me, I lived in the scummiest parts of Reading for 10 years and was even homeless for 4 months, living in derelict houses with boarded-up windows, no water, heating or electric. I didn't come out goose-stepping.

I know what people at the bottom end of society are like, but most of them were decent folk trying to scrape a living. In a world where simply getting from A to B is getting more and more expensive, it's going to be hard for them to stay lawful. It must be nice for you to say that there's no excuse for being skint.

It's bad enough in the cities, but in the country (not everyone who lives outside of a city is rich, you might be surprised to know) it's even harder, bus services are useless, in my village they start at

10AM and finish at 4PM, taxis cost £20 a shot to the nearest town. Locals who have no job and no car are screwed.

On Luing, the island my brother-in-law lives on, the ferry to the mainland costs £11 per trip for a car, so many of the poorer islanders use old derelict illegal cars to drive on the island and have their legal cars on the mainland and row across the short bit of water or catch the cheaper pedestrian ferry, otherwise they'd not be able to afford to go to work. No work on the island since the slate-cutting industry took a dive, there's no work on the farms and the fishing industry died too. You think these people deserve 10 years in prison of course.

But of course you know all this, as you live on an "estate", apologies for telling you what you already know.

Stick to landies, you know something about those.

I always allow myself a little giggle at this particular type of comment. Heard it sooo many times and yet it is odd, when something happens to the person who's said it, invariably the first call they make will be, yep... No further comment... :-)

I reckon it was someone in this forum, the amount of yakking that's going on they must have worn their own out!

Get some metal ones made, then you can dispense with the tin snips.

Yes - the irony is inescapable, but have you ever actually needed to employ the services of our glorious law enforcement [sic] agency?

So far as it appears from here, the police are positioning themselves as the worlds greatest data capture agency - I'm a little surprised they're not bidding for commercial contracts - maybe they do.

What few people realise is that in pre industrial Britain there were few places to hide, the population was much smaller and people did not travel much therefore if you were wandering outside of your parish you could easily fall foul of the vagrancy laws just for being a stranger in the wrong place in a village full of paranoid people. You could end up being whipped from one end of the village to the other, put in the stocks, branded or worse.

I think with this sort of thing there is safety in numbers as the average driver is too insignificant to be noticed even when blatantly committing repeat offences.

We have had this sort of big brother thing for a long time, look at the way that TV licence legislation works, the assumption is that any house that does not have a licence must contain someone who is watching TV illegally. I recall I used to get regular reminders trying to get me to buy a second licence when I was running a business from home, and yet still there are people who have never been caught out using a TV illegally.

At one time you needed a licence for a radio, but that was abandoned when people stopped buying them with the advent of cheap go anywhere transistor radios, simply too many offenders so the law was considered unenforcable.

For me, I am pretty sure that no-one is going to clone my vehicle succesfully, and I am quite sure I can prove whether any photo is genuinly of my car or not, notwithstanding the need is still there to prove who was driving if an offence is observed to have been committed.

There are plenty of ways for smart lawyers round practically everything,

Besides not all number plates will be machine readable, for instance in heavily congested areas where traffic is bumper to bumper you won't see most of them for the car infront or behind.

Anyway if my landie is ever stolen, at least I can have some idea of where it has been.

Anything that drives uninsured drivers off the road has to be a good thing, there are too many victims of hit and run accidents.

One of the nice things about Landies is their border breaking abilities. Shame their owners forget about the Marque then go an build new borders around religin an polytiks an stuph really, but it passes next time the fecka develops a leak - thankfully :-)

Not employ, but I listen and evaluate their evidence as much as the defendant or (in a growing number of cases) plaintiff.

They are nowhere near, and neither will they be, _EVER_ not even the slightest bit close - in your wildest of dreams!

Besides this (not overly paranoid as it happens) assertion, you need to realise that it is NOT the police who are demanding extra powers, and indeed, are somewhat concerned as to how they will devote resources to increased expectations and responsibilities.

The majority of forces in the UK make a fair amount of revenue from contracted services - if they didn't, UK residents would be paying for rock concerts and the like. your choice, Rock Steady Security also have the same contracts - where would you prefer your money to go?

Truth is, prolly, that there are reasons to be paranoid. If you're not, you're not paying enough attention. The police aren't your worry, though, they only do as the rest of us are free to do;

Exactly as we're told.

Within ten years the Galileo satellite system will render optical technology redundant. Everyone will be mapped and charged in real time all the time.

I may be wrong but I don't think many hit and run drivers get away undetected these days. Also uninsured drivers have now been dealt with along with untaxed vehicles. The erosion of civil liberty from the loss of motoring privacy and freedom from being spied on is just part of a bigger picture which is no problem as long as the Government is benign and benevolent. The easier it is for the powers that be to regulate the population then the higher the temptation for any Government to try to use those powers for their own end. The American constitution allows its citizens to bear arms partly for that particular reason, so they can defend themselves from a malevolent central power. We should never take our liberty for granted as once it is lost it is extremely costly to regain. Just look at the state of a lot of countries coming out of oppressive government around the globe today.

Huw

Why "yes but"?

Huw

Yes but in Switzerland even bicycles are registered yet they have the highest gun count per head of population anywhere that I am aware of.

I'm sure there will be an option to avoid having it in the car, but you pay more money. Those who can't afford it have to have it installed to save them money, but it can still be claimed that it's not compulsory. Get the poor, and work yer way up! Given that most petty crime and vandalism is caused by those on the lower incomes (much of which is because there's so many) that'll be something to sell the idea to any better-off resisters and Daily Mail readers. They need some hook to make it seem like people want it.

I was puzzled and rather disconcerted by the way that the normally admirable BBC website mentioned civil liberties arguments in the first article about it, but quickly moved across to articles that only emphasise the positive aspects with civil liberties arguments only present on the "have your say" pages where they were the majority view. Not sure what the beeb's playing at there.

I wonder what'll happen if you block the signal using metal grounding plates or whatever, I'm sure some will call for 10 years in jail as you must be hiding something!

Also, the casual linking of uninsured drivers and hit 'n' run accidents by the previous poster seems somewhat random and unsupportable, uninsured drivers make our premiums more expensive and that's all, but hit 'n' run drivers can be insured or uninsured. I don't see a link between them.

The often quoted possibility here is when the BNP get into a local council and start feeding information to thugs.

I'd add power-happy local councillers (and there's plenty of them) to that list.

If I were you I would be more paranoid about the government spying on the internet trawling for people who are talking about guns and revolution.