Support on the Left for Compulsory DNA Registration

In the Guardian's 'Comment is free', Conor Gearty, makes it clear that he thinks Judge Dread’s Sedley’s plans to force compulsory DNA collection and registration on every man woman and child who lives, or sets foot, however briefly, in the UK "deserve to be debated and not dismissed out of hand as heretical.".

He suggests, setting up a straw man, that supporters of civil liberties and the right not to be interfered with by the state are the sort that ” regularly break CCTV cameras and are affronted by being asked to stop smoking in public places.”

He goes onto say that this kind of libertarianism is “often quite reactionary and in its absolute form it is always being overridden - and rightly overridden - by government in the name of the public good.

So he sets up his ‘Straw’ Libertarians as ‘bad’.

Bad because ‘reactionary’ is ‘bad’, in his and many of his readers lexicon. Bad, because those libertarian civil liberties freaks - all, every one of them, smoke.
Bad because they are rude and anti social (because they smoke & won’t put their cigarettes out) and antisocial criminals (because they regularly destroy CCTV cameras put there by a beneficent Nu-Lab state for your protection).

So because they are so very very nasty, they and their antisocial so-called rights need to be stamped on by the (by comparison) ‘good’ state. It is virtually the state's duty to protect the populous from them.

Conor, seems to feel “that the exact extent of the damage we do to personal freedom has to be warranted by the goal we are seeking to achieve. Advances in technology are always throwing up fresh opportunities for public good via new invasions of this kind of liberty. Sedley's proposals fit within this tradition”

Public Good?

So, to roughly translate: The end justifies the means then. This guy is possibly even more scary than Sedley.

UK Police Chief demands Government Targets be scrapped

Chief Supt Ian Johnston of the Superintendents Association is to attack the whole concept of Government crime fighting targets and demand they be scrapped.

He has a point. Government and Nu-Lab in particular seems to have a sort of 'Midas touch' in reverse, where every thing it touches turns to crap – but without the redeeming possibility of it being composted and therefore of some use.

Government crime fighting targets are yet another example of where in the galloping pursuit of yet another sound-bite, or unexamined quick-fix policy, the full ramifications are not properly thought through and the law of unintended consequences bites NU-Lab on the backside yet again.

What actually happens is that the limited targets are concentrated on, often to the exclusion of actually doing the job properly.

In the case of the police that can mean, instead of responding to the needs of their local population, in a given area, they can end up arresting victims, as well as perpetrators to get extra ‘detections’.

End up arresting, or reporting people, that would be more effectively dealt with differently, or do not actually need dealing with in the first place.

Thus producing the ‘right’ figures becomes a ghastly parody of what the public actually wants and the police begin to loose the general support of the public.

Government needs to consider much of it’s policies and legislation very much more carefully than it does.

It is in far too much of a hurry to legislate and ‘reform’ to bother to make sure what it does is not seriously flawed. It has weakened scrutiny further by weakening/pulling the teeth of the House of Lords. Consequently much of what Nu-Lab have done since they came to power is flawed.

Some of the chickens are taking longer than others to come home to roost, but come home they inevitably will, sooner or later. As they do Nu-Lab tries to cover it with spin where they can.

There is of course little they, or any of us, can do about the increasingly large proportion of legislation and directives imposed on us by Europe and it’s court.