Vox Polis

I always have a chuckle when I’m reminded of all those obscure laws that never get repealed. A law firm in Swansea has come up with a list of 10:

1. In Hereford you can shoot a Welsh person on a Sunday, with a longbow, in the Cathedral Close.
2. It is legal for a male to urinate in public, as long it is on the rear wheel of his motor vehicle and his right hand is on the vehicle.
3. A bed may not be hung out of a window.
4. It is illegal for a lady to eat chocolates on a public conveyance.
5. It is illegal to be drunk on licensed premises.
6. Taxi drivers are required to ask all passengers if they have smallpox or the plague.
7. Any person found breaking a boiled egg at the sharp end will be sentenced to 24 hours in the village stocks (enacted by Edward VI).
8. Any boy under the age of 10 may not see a naked mannequin.
9. Throughout the whole of England it is illegal to eat mince pies on December 25.
10. You can shoot a Welsh person with a bow and arrow in Chester, inside the city walls and after midnight.

A few years ago Richard Smith and Bateman decided to travel America to break as many obscure laws as they could. For example, it is illegal to go whaling in the landlocked state of Utah or fall asleep in a cheese factory in South Dakota.

I wish someone would do the same in the UK. But trouble is you might get arrested. Look how seriously Scotland Yard are taking the obscure law that forbids the sale of honours.

El Mundo has reported that 94% of Euro notes in Spain contain traces of cocaine. Well what a surprise!
Because these notes could have been “contaminated” at any point, such as when put in counting machines, it doesn’t tell us anything about the number of people using it, the frequency or anything else that might be interesting. But it does grab tabloid headlines.

Similar surveys in London have found traces on 99% of all £5 notes. Even tests in the European Parliament’s toilets found traces of cocaine. Does this tell us that MEPs are using? Hardly, they have their own private bathrooms, and the EP toilets can be used by the public.

The only thing that I can think that these types of surveys tell us is that people are using notes to snort cocaine. In this case Euro notes - perhaps we should get rid of notes! Or ban the Euro!

I’m a big supporter of renewable energy and believe that it is the only way the UK will meet its targets and reduce its carbon emissions. These views have been presented a number of times on this blog. But recently I have become a little more sceptical about wind turbines. There have been a series of stories in the MSM that draws on some interesting findings.

First of all, there was a report by Renewable Energy Foundation on the efficiency of wind turbines, which only generate about 28% of their capacity. This especially highlighted the problem of inland wind turbines, including one on the M25 which generated 8% of its capacity.

So build more at sea seems to be what this suggests, and this is certainly what the Government intends to do, with the world’s biggest wind farm to be built off the Kent coast. Of course this has annoyed some of the locals who complain about the eyesore (I think they look impressive personally) and the damage to the local birds (just like buildings!). But even those at sea rarely achieve their optimum output.

Currently there are 30 wind turbines on the Kentish Flats. Interestingly there have been some issues. After just one year of operations, 9 are out of action waiting repair, with the tops of the turbines having to be sheared off and the gear boxes replaced. I hope this isn’t a recurring problem.

One of the problems is of course that not enough has been invested in the past to make current wind turbines as efficient as they could be, but this will hopefully change over time.

John Reid quietly admitted last Monday that of the 3.46 million people on the National DNA Database, 1.14 million have committed no offence. The latest figure is one million higher than Home Office figures released in March. The number of innocent people on the database is the result of a policy which allows the police to take and store DNA samples from anyone they arrest regardless of whether the arrest leads to a caution or conviction.

Given that the database contains a disproportionate number of samples from people from ethnic minorities as well as the records of (as of January) 24,000 innocent children, it’s pretty clear that what we have is not a database of criminals but one of people the police don’t like the look of. For the time being we have have a pledge from the Home Office Minister Andy Burnham that the database would not be extended to the whole population but in light of recent calls from Tony Blair to acquire the “maximum number” of samples an incomplete database could turn out to mean everyone apart from politicians and those with enough money to claim that they would be at risk if their information was stored in a leaky government database. I can only hope that the investigation by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics will provide enough evidence against the database for someone to put the breaks on the pernicious harvesting of our most personal information.

Via The Register.

People had to take more active steps to get back into the labour market. And for those who won’t do so, then there should be consequences, including less benefit or no benefit at all.

No it’s not an old quote from Norman Tebbit but part of what John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will say in a speech to the IPPR this week.

This is a new direction for New Labour. In the past the Government has adopted an enabling policy (the New Deal) towards the unemployed, giving them benefits, training and skills to help them into the job market. But there has always been a “hardcore” of people who have gone through this system and still not got a job. The Government’s even tried more expensive and elaborate schemes, but to no avail (see the StepUp scheme pilot which cost £40m).

So the Government’s gone for what many taxpayers would argue they should have done in the first place - cut their benefits. That’ll stop them sponging off the state.

In his speech, John Hutton’s also going to compare the attitude of the lazy British to that of the dynamic and hardworking Central and Eastern Europeans who have come to the UK. I suppose that this fits nicely with the Government’s policy on Romania and Bulgaria, which has placed limits when they join in January. The Government message is that there’s lots of jobs, we’re not allowed to fill those with Romanian and Bulgarians, (because the Daily Mail said it’s bad) so you lazy British will have to scrub the floors and serve burgers instead.

At work we would often have a bet on what newspapers would have on their front covers. Nine times out of ten you could tell what was going to be on the Daily Express’ front cover - a story on Princess Diana. For nearly 10 years the Daily Express has relentlessly pushed the Diana story. It is now time this stopped.

If the Daily Express was a person, we’d probably say they have more than an unhealthy obsession with Diana. More likely we’d get them professional help for their obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Now that there has been an official inquiry, I would like to believe that they would finally accept the outcome. But like all obsessive-compulsives, it will never be enough. It is time to move on.

Forget biometric passports. Forget spy satellites or secret CIA operatives. The weapon the US State Department has been using to find Iranians linked to nuclear weapon production is Google. According to the Washington Post, they’ve just been typing in “iran + nuclear”, finding out which names come up and then seeking a ban on their travel and business dealings. Not bad for a $10 billion dollar budget.
I’d better be careful. If you Google me - I’m linked to a possible nuclear testing site.

You’re sick of reading about it and I’m sick of writing about it but copyright extension just won’t go away. After the Gower’s review recommended no extension to the copyright term for sound recordings I really thought we’d seen the back of this. Apparently not. This morning I read that 4500 musicians including Sir Cliff Richard and Katie Melua (now there’s a soporific duet) have signed an advert in the Financial Times calling again for an extension of copyright on sound recordings to 95 years. Is it just me or is this all getting a bit demeaning? My advice to the signatories of this advert: stop this pathetic grubbing around to wring out every last penny from your faded glories. If you want to make more money record some new songs, go on a tour, work as a musician. If that doesn’t work then do what the rest of us do and get a normal job.

In related news, independent music labels have apparently claimed that fair use copying rights (also called for in the Gowers review) could “open the floodgates” to a tidal wave of private copying and (shock, horror!) sharing. For the nth time: it’s unfair to make people pay for the same thing twice if they want to use it another way. It wouldn’t fly in any other industry and entertainment shouldn’t be treated any differently.

According to the Indie, ExxonMobil has been funding EU orientated think tanks who agree (or will agree for lots of money) with their environmentally sceptical “I don’t care about destruction of the world” view. This raises an important point about think tanks that many people do not realise. They all have a specific political agenda and are usually funded by rich and powerful business individuals and companies who want some “bang for their bucks”. Take for example the IPPR - employees have commented that they feel like they spend more time helping to keep Labour in power than rehashing other people’s work doing research. Over the summer there were also several “cash for access” stories.

Worryingly the MSM and public policy makers often rely on think tanks for information and stories; quoting them as if they are representative of civil society. The only thing they represent are specific politically partisan views and big business. Think tanks are just another form of political lobbying that dilutes proper political debate and allows unelected elites to wield political power.