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Freak show #35
 
Fool, Britannia!
 
By DOUGLAS OLSON
 

Because it abandoned any pretense of freedom in favor of socialism in the 1940s and '50s, our mother country is at least a full generation farther along the road to ruin than the United States. Here are some frightful recent examples of the "nanny state" in action:
 

Innocence is no excuse!

A college student celebrating his 18th birthday discovered a cell phone lying on the street. Turning it in to Merseyside police, Paul Leicester was grilled for 15 minutes and then arrested for "theft by finding." The good Samaritan was held for four hours, during which he was fingerprinted, photographed for police records, and forcibly relieved of a DNA sample.

Charges were eventually dropped, but Leicester learned a valuable lesson: "I would not go to the police in the future," he told the Daily Mail.
 

Feel safer now?

• The United Kingdom's first national identification cards, complete with encoded fingerprints and biometric data, were issued last November to foreign students and the foreign spouses of Brits — but the island had not a single scanner capable of reading them! Authorities could only visually check the cards and call a telephone hotline if they suspected something was amiss.

• Police in Norfolk spent £35,000 (more than $50,000) last year to revise the department's official logo and replace the previous version. In fact, the new logo is almost exactly identical to the old one, except that it is in black and white instead of color. (Or should we say "colour"?) Both have eight points, a crown at the top, and the words "Norfolk Constabulary" in a circle around a coat of arms. The "redesign" cost £3,000, with an additional £32,000 spent on changing signs and rebranding police cars.

Shortly before the new logo was announced, the force had been savaged for failing to investigate more than 40 percent of its cases — because officials believed they were not likely to be solved. It had also been accused of trying to lower the crime rate by refusing to count auto vandalism unless there was evidence the damage was not accidental.

• London police arrested a 37-year-old man last year for not paying several homosexual prostitutes after using their services. He was charged with 17 counts, including theft and "obtaining services by deception." And yet, confusingly enough, prostitution is still illegal.
 

Which way to the death camps?

One of P.M. Gordon Brown's top environmental advisors has declared that Britain must drastically reduce its population to create a "sustainable" society. Speaking at the annual conference of the crackpot Optimum Population Trust, Jonathon Porritt tried to guilt-trip his countrymen by whining that "each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries, so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact." There were, of course, no calls for the Third World to reduce its wretched masses.

Porritt called for reducing the island's population from its current 61 million to 30 million or less. Current projections see more than 70 million inhabitants by 2031.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas agreed with this foolishness: "You can't have sustainability with an increase in population." But nobody dared even to think that reducing the nation's massive nonwhite immigration inflow might help, especially since they have many more children than native Brits.
 

The "c" word

Last year, a 15-year-old in London was notified of the Crown's intent to prosecute because he refused police orders to remove a sign reading: "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult" during a public demonstration. (Charges were later dropped.) Similar placards using the "c" word were also banned during an event in Glasgow the following month. An anti-Scientology "human rights" group called Anonymous vows to fight for its freedom of speech.

A police spokeswoman told the Sunday Herald, "The word is not a breach of the peace in itself. However, in this case it was exacerbating the situation and our stance was that we had to remove that." According to the Herald, police no longer refer to the powerful cult as a "cult" — after receiving "a complaint" about the word.

Author Tom Wolfe anticipated this situation years ago, when he observed, "A cult is a religion with no political power." Under that definition, Scientology is certainly not a cult any longer.
 

Some are more equal

The never-ending disaster that is Britain's National Health Service spent more than £12,000 for 271 private physiotherapy treatments to help some of its own workers at the West Suffolk Hospital recover from on-the-job injuries. Officials claimed it was done to protect the sheeple from being inconvenienced by having these privileged workers put ahead of them in the socialized health-care queue. "We are currently looking at whether it would be cost-effective to extend the [non-NHS] service to offer different types of rehabilitation to staff," declared a hospital spokeswoman, apparently without any intended sarcasm or irony.
 

Endless waste

Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission wants fathers to have extensive time off from work following the birth of a child. The commission's scheme would expand the mother's time off to six months, at 90 percent of pay, instead of the current six weeks. Fathers would get two weeks after the birth, and four more months in total before the child's fifth birthday, all at 90 percent of pay. Four additional months, eight weeks of it paid, could be taken by either parent before the child turned 5.

The proposal has not been accepted by the government, although it would cost "only" an estimated £5.26 billion a year — on top of the £2 billion annual cost of the current maternity madness. Private employers are now required to pay mothers for their absence, and are, at least theoretically, reimbursed by the state.
 

Department of Future Crimes

Scotland Yard's director of forensic sciences wants primary school kids as young as 5 included in the national DNA database if they "exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life," says The Observer.

"If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long term, the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large," declared Gary Pugh in 2008. "You could argue the younger, the better.... We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society."

He cited only two obstacles to inclusion of the entire population in the DNA database: cost and logistics. Britain has already overcome any "human rights" or privacy arguments: "We have children giving their fingerprints when they are borrowing books from a library," Pugh boasted.

The most rational and effective method of predicting criminal behavior is banned in Britain, as it is in America, because it is considered "racial profiling."
 

Individual attention

In March, the nanny state sent a stern letter to the parents of Megan Gillan, 15, demanding that she improve her attendance or be barred from attending the end-of-the-year prom. The only problem is that Megan had been found dead in her bedroom on January 19, from causes still undetermined. A school spokesman attributed this horrendous stupidity to a "software error."
 

Diversity is dangerous

British fire chiefs have authorized the wearing of turbans and hijabs, as well as full-length skirts and maternity clothing, as part of the official fire department uniform. That idiocy is attributed to the demand for "diversity," under the theory that it will encourage more ethnic minorities and women to join fire brigades.
 

Running scared

Only five of 44 Church of England bishops backed a proposal to ring church bells in celebration of St. George's Day — out of fear of a "backlash" from other religions. Kenneth Stevenson, the Bishop of Portsmouth, whined: "Some secularists would say the church was imposing its beliefs on the whole population." There was no comment — other, we are certain, than laughter — from the raucous Muslims who chant their shrill demands for prayers to Allah five times a day.
 

Ultimate euphemisms

As one way of compensating for a miserable job and an equally miserable wage, British officials in charge of keeping the masses pacified have come up with a marvelous array of over-the-top titles for drudgework. Just a few examples:

     Petroleum Transfer Engineers = gasoline pumpers

     Transparency Enhancement Facilitators = window washers

     Mass Production Engineers = factory workers

     Mobile Sustenance Facilitators = fast-food restaurant workers

     Vehicle Restoration Engineers = people who beat the dents out of cars

And my personal favorite:

     Gastronomical Hygiene Technicians = dish washers.

October 15, 2009

© 2009 Douglas Olson. All rights reserved.
 
Douglas Olson contents page.

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