Bel is thinking

Good to hear that David Cameron has no plans of implementing the proposal from one of his policy groups to levy charges on shoppers in out-of-town shopping centres.

Yes, it was only a proposal, and it hadn’t even been adopted by the party, but the media were all out with the line that ‘Cameron considers taxing shoppers for parking their cars.’ He was therefore wise to come out and disown the policy before it caused any more trouble.

The media obviously do not get the distinction between a proposal that has been put to the party for consideration, and one that has been adopted by the party. This out-of-town shoppers’ tax was clearly the former, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the headlines.

Still, in a way, I blame Cameron. What really is the point of making public all these mad ideas coming out from these policy groups? Why not consider the proposals in private until they have been adopted as party policy? Yes, I know, he is trying to counter the charge that he has no policies, but frankly, it is better to have no policies than to have daft ones.

Is there perhaps some way that any looney ideas from these policy groups can be put to David Cameron in private? On second thought, better not. David Cameron has shown himself to lack judgement on some very serious issues (remember grammar schools?). Who therefore knows what proposals the man may adopt in private, without the eye of the media (and the public) on him? The public reaction has told him to disown this ’shoppers’ tax’ policy fast, and that is a very good thing. I for one do not trust David Cameron’s judgement, so perhaps it is better for all the policy proposals to be given as wide publicity as possible. That way, if he is tempted to abandon common sense and adopt some crazy proposal, then maybe, just maybe, the media reaction will talk him out of it.

The 19 suicide-bombing hijackers are today marking their sixth anniversary in hell.

Poor souls, and they thought they were set for paradise. Six years of torment done, ages more to follow.

Still, they have forever to get used to it.

(Sorry folks, some days, Christian compassion is hard. Especially for murderous people like that.)

Earlier this week, two Conservative MPs, John Bercow and Patrick Mercer, agreed to work for Gordon Brown. Now Brown has managed to persuade the former Conservative Party deputy Treasurer, Johan Eliasch, to advise him on environmental issues.

So perhaps it is true, then, that the Labour Party has run out of ideas? Well, it must have, if its leader has disregarded all the loyal MPs and supporters at his disposal, and turned his attention to supporters of other parties. Or maybe it’s just plain old socialist envy: looking greedily over the fence at what your neighbours have, and then trying to grab it for yourself.

Perhaps this is nothing more than gimmickry on the part of Gordon Brown, petty tactics to destabilise the opposition. That may be, but it also sends out the message that the Labour party is completely starved of bright men and women with progressive ideas. Therefore, rather than being put out by Brown poaching its supporters, the Conservative Party should take it as a compliment.

Many years ago, when I studied Administrative Law at university, our lecturer would preface every single discussion of any court case involving Mr Justice Sedley (as he then was) with the words that the learned judge was a ’staunch defender of human rights’. It was therefore with mild alarm that I read this morning that the selfsame judge has suggested we should all be put on a DNA database.

His reasoning? That the database is unfair in the way it currently operates. Guilty folk are registered on it, as are innocent people who have come into some contact with the police, perhaps due to having been arrested but released without charge.

The problem, as the Lord Justice Sedley sees it, is that these innocent folk are being tarred with the same brush as the guilty folk. So in order to redress this, every other innocent soul in the land should be added to the database to dilute the stigma of the database.

(As a cheeky aside, this reminds me of a passage in the Bible, broadly stating that: ‘God has concluded the whole world to be sinners, so that he can have mercy on everyone’. When it comes to such wide-sweeping action, I suppose we can trust only God to act in this way, as His ultimate aim, according to that Bible passage, is to show us all mercy. But can we trust the Government?)

By suggesting such an expansion of the database, Lord Justice Sedley has started from the premise that the database is unavoidable: it cannot be done away with, so let’s make the best of a bad situation. But what about arguing the case that, if there is to be a database at all, only the guilty should remain on it? Leaving aside human rights considerations, is it not easier to strike a few innocent names off a database, than to expand the database by adding millions more names to it?

At the lowest level, my interpretation of what Lord Justice Sedley seems to be saying is this: if some innocent people are going to suffer, then let us all suffer along with them. This strikes me as defeatist. Would it not be easier to come up with ways to fix the database?

But we cannot really leave aside the human rights implications of this, and I think the good old judge knows that. So why did he make the suggestion in the first place? Was it to highlight the absurdity of the database? If so, he reckoned without the deviousness of our politicians, who will no doubt seize upon his comments as justification for any further expansion of the database. Already, we have Tony McNulty, the Minister of State for Security, Counter-terrorism, Crime and Policing, saying that he is ‘broadly sympathetic’ to Sedley’s idea. You can just imagine the scene in a few years’ time when this matter is being debated in Parliament. Some Labour minister will justify extending the database on the basis that it was suggested by a ‘leading judge with an excellent track record as a staunch defender of human rights’. Thanks a lot, Lord Justice Sedley. We are dealing with a Government hellbent on extracting from us our civil liberties, and you turn up to make the job easier for them.

I couldn’t help noticing the irony of Tony McNulty saying of Sedley’s suggestion: ‘I think he does underestimate the practicalities, logistics and civil liberties and ethics issues surrounding it.’ Things have come to a pretty pass when a member of this illiberal Government would presume, albeit disingenuously, to speak on civil liberties to a ’staunch defender of human rights’.

Just reading the Guardian’s report into the sentencing of the former Ukip MEP, Ashley Mote, for benefit fraud.

This sentence struck me:

The court heard he used this money to pay off credit card debts that he had run up funding an ‘extravagant lifestyle’, including restaurant dinners, private healthcare and holidays to the US, France and the Caribbean.

Hmm. Not sure exactly what form Ashley Mote’s payments took, but why is ‘private healthcare’ classed as an example of an ’extravagant lifestyle’? I speak as one who has recently had some dealings with the NHS - far from being an ‘extravagance’, taking out private healthcare, where affordable, is actually a very prudent move. In fact, given the dire state of Britain’s health system, the time is fast approaching when private healthcare, in some form or the other, will be the norm for most.

Glad to hear that Kathleen Jennings, the teenager who was prosecuted for putting her feet on the seat of a train, has been given an absolute discharge by Chester Magistrates’ Court. I don’t know about anyone else, but I do not want to live in a society where putting one’s feet on a train seat is enough to warrant a criminal record.

Yes, anti-social behaviour should not be tolerated, but in a civilised society, the punishment must be proportionate to the act. An on-the-spot penalty should have sufficed in this case, especially given that the defendant promptly took her feet off the seat and apologised when challenged.

We are right to be worried about the breakdown of law and order in Britain. Anti-social behaviour, left unchallenged, corrodes the substance of society. It is therefore right that it be challenged, but not, not at all, at great cost to our sense of fairness.

Gordon Brown stood up today, and without shame, talked about a more ‘open’ kind of politics, reaching out ‘beyond Westminster’ to real people, etc. One wonders why he has only just now grasped that, as a politician, this is what he should have been doing all along.

In addition, in a bid to involve the public more closely in policy matters, he talked about ‘citizen’s juries’ on crime, immigration, and the NHS. Such naked window-dressing. Does anyone really believe that politicians need a citizen’s jury to tell them what they should be doing on law and order and public services? This is nothing more than a time-wasting, money-guzzling project with no purpose other than to create the impression that ’something is being done’.

Oh, and if Brown really cares what the public think, why not give us a referendum on the European Treaty?