Monday 21 January 2008

Sharia Law comes to the UK

Delhi born Dr/Shaikh Suhaib Hasan has set himself up in his own little Sharia court in a converted corner shop in Leyton, North East London.

At the moment this has all the legality of a TV show ‘court’ where participants are technically only bound in as far as they agree to be bound. Though it is perhaps much more than just that to a Moslem, embedded in largely exclusively Moslem community, who has no English.

Dr Hassan is the General Secretary of the Islamic Sharia Council and bills himself as a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.

He is keen to share the benefits of Sharia Law, on an official and legal basis, with the rest of us. He is convinced it can turn the HK into a “haven of peace”.

In fact he, in a documentary, currently scheduled to be screened on Channel 4 next month, entitled ‘Divorce: Sharia Style’, Dr Hasan reveals ‘just where he is coming from’, as they say. He revealingly comments:

"Once, just only once, if an adulterer is stoned nobody is going to commit this crime at all.”

"We want to offer it [Sharia Law] to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don't accept it they'll need more and more prisons."

I think the good Dr’s Freudian slip is showing here - As far as I am aware adultery is not a crime in the UK, there is certainly no penalty, apart from the possibility of divorce, for it.

I am sure he is correct in that the realistic prospect of being stoned to death would discourage it, against the law or not, that’ll do it for you most every time.

One wonders what else that the good Dr disproves of, that is not against the law we can consider stoning people to death for?

How the man can seriously suggest such a thing without realising it brands him as a fascist is beyond me.

The Muslim Council of Britain is usually held up by the ‘great and the good’, as an exemplar of ‘moderate’ Islamic opinion. This man is their Sharia spokesman.

If this is moderate it can only be so by comparison to something incomparably worse. If this is moderate maybe we need to redefine the meaning of ‘moderate’.

Oh! - Looks like we did already…

Quote of the day

" Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force.”

Auberon Herbert


New Labour want to impose random breath tests

It seems New Labour now want to give the police powers to be able to breath test drivers on a whim and institute mass roadside checkpoints.

They appear to base this on their normal inability to understand the implications of their own skewed statistics combined with their tendency towards an authoritarian solution to anything they perceive as a ‘problem’.

It seems they are attempting to justify this with their Christmas Drink driving states. They show that the number of drink drivers stopped dropped despite a recorded increase in the number of tests (that police are measured on).

During the 1980s the number of people killed and seriously injured in drink-drive collisions in Great Britain fell from over 9000 (1,450 deaths, 7,970 serious injuries) to just less than 5,000 (760 deaths, 4,090 serious injuries).

Over the last decade or so, figures have fluctuated year on year, but overall there has been no particular trend up or down.

It is questionable if even massively increasing the number of breath tests will make a significant difference.

If the government actually wanted to reduce drink driving, as opposed to extending it's grip on the citizen, it might be better advised to reprise the hard hitting anti drink drive campaigns of the 80s and early 90s and helped make drink driving unacceptable. But this time include drugs in the message. From the figures it appears that actually worked quite effectively.

Our current system seems to have served us well over the decades, but New Labour never heard of leaving anything that works alone - and by their actions one could be forgiven for assuming they are embarked of a long term plan to undermine public trust in the police in an attempt to turn them into an occup