British Labor party b*tch shows true Leftist form

MP in four-letter blast at blind man: 'Out of my way' Labour whip shouts at reporter

A Labour whip unleashed a four-letter tirade at a blind man for getting in her way during a fraught exchange in the Houses of Parliament.

Lyn Brown, the burly MP for West Ham, barged into the back of Talksport political editor Sean Dilley, and his golden retriever guide dog, as he was walking in a corridor towards Portcullis House.

Witnesses were shocked to see a clearly stressed Miss Brown bulldoze into the back of Mr Dilley before overtaking him, shouting: 'For ****'s sake, move out of my ******* way.'
Tirade: Lyn Brown MP launched a verbal attack on a blind radio reporter who got in her way at Parliament

The journalist asked her to be more careful as he did not want to crash into his guide dog, Chip. Miss Brown then sniped back: 'You are such a rude ******* man, you just walked right in front of me.'

One source said a frustrated Mr Dilley then replied: 'I'm blind, you stupid woman.' He then demanded to know Miss Brown's name, as he could not see who had bumped into him, but Miss Brown replied: 'I am not giving it to you, **** off.'

Mr Dilley threatened to ask security guards to identify her, to which Miss Brown replied: 'You just do that and see what happens.'

She was pursued by Commons security and did not stop, saying: 'You are harassing me, leave me alone.' The security guard had to call for police assistance and a report was compiled by the Commons authorities.

A witness said Miss Brown, 51, was 'clearly in a rush' but her brusque manner shocked Mr Dilley, who was born blind. The Commons source said: 'She was shockingly rude. There was no need for her to use language like that. 'Frankly I was surprised because Labour is supposed to be a party which is sympathetic to people with disabilities.'

The witness added: 'The blind man she crashed into seemed very distressed by her manner and stream of swearing. 'I heard him saying that he was blind and calling her a stupid woman but frankly had I been barged into like that I would have been using much stronger language. 'The security people were muttering that if she had spoken to them like that, they would have carted her off to the prison cell in Westminster.'

Miss Brown was hauled before her boss, chief whip Rosie Winterton, for a dressing down. The Mail understands she was made to issue an apology to Mr Dilley. A Labour source said: 'There has been a misunderstanding. Lyn has apologised. They now both consider the matter to be over.'

SOURCE




Privileged brat jailed for his rampage of hate

Charlie Gilmour, the son of the Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, has been jailed for 16 months for going on a drink and drug-fuelled rampage during a student fees protest in London.

Charlie Gilmour admitted violent disorder after joining thousands demonstrating in London's Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square last year. During a day of riots he was seen hanging from a Union flag on the Cenotaph and leaping on to the bonnet of a Jaguar car that formed part of a royal convoy. He was found on Friday to have also hurled a rubbish bin at the vehicle.

The court heard the Cambridge University student had turned to drink and drugs after being rejected by his biological father, the writer Heathcote Williams, and had taken LSD and valium in the hours leading up to the violence.

Gilmour's rock star father and mother Polly Samson watched from the public gallery as their 21-year-old son was told he must serve half the jail term behind bars.

Passing sentence at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court in Surrey, Judge Nicholas Price QC accepted that his antics at the Cenotaph on Whitehall did not form part of the violent disorder, but accused him of disrespect to the war dead. "Such outrageous and deeply offensive behaviour gives a clear indication of how out of control you were that day," he said. "It caused public outrage and understandably so."

His conduct at the war memorial had prompted a deluge of "vituperative and in many cases obscene" emails and other forms of communication, he told Gilmour. These were, he added, "not just to you but, it is with deep regret, to your whole family, who were of course totally blameless."

Gilmour, who apologised afterwards for his behaviour, had claimed he had not realised the significance of the Cenotaph - an excuse the judge scoffed at. "For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief," he said. "You have shown disrespect to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, to those who fell defending this country."

Gilmour was part of a 100-strong mob that attacked a convoy escorting the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall during last year’s student riots, the court heard on Thursday.

The Cambridge University undergraduate, who was also photographed swinging from a Union flag on the Cenotaph, leapt on the bonnet of a Jaguar carrying royal protection officers before allegedly throwing a bin at the vehicle.

Shouting slogans such as “you broke the moral law, we are going to break all the laws”, the 21-year-old son of the multi-millionaire pop star went on the rampage during a day of extreme violence in central London.

Video captured by police officers outside the Houses of Parliament showed Gilmour, from Billingshurst, West Sussex, waving a red flag and shouting political slogans. The judge watched one clip in which he was shouted: “Let them eat cake, let them eat cake, they say. We won’t eat cake, we will eat fire, ice and destruction, because we are angry, very f------ angry.”

As the clip was shown in court on Thursday, Gilmour sat in the dock giggling and covering his face with his hands in embarrassment.

On another occasion he could be seen urging the crowd to “storm Parliament” and shouting “arson”.

In addition to attacking the Royal cars, he was also part of a mob that smashed the windows at Oxford Street’s Top Shop as staff and customers cowered inside.

Gilmour, who was escorted into court by his father and his mother, Polly Samson, has already pleaded guilty to violent disorder and appeared at Kingston Crown Court for sentencing on Thursday.

The case was adjourned until today while Judge Nicholas Price QC decided whether Gilmour threw a bin at a car in the Royal convoy, which he had denied.

The judge was told that palace staff feared for the Royal couple’s safety when the convoy of three cars came under attack as the Prince and his wife made their way to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium. Royal protection officers and staff from the Royal household provided witness statements describing their fear as the cars were set upon by a baying crowd.

Sophie Densham, the private secretary to the Duchess of Cornwall, said she heard people shouting, “off with their heads”, “Tory scum” and “give us some money”. Will Mackinlay, equerry to the Prince of Wales, described seeing a person with long hair, who was later identified as Gilmour, sitting on the bonnet of a Jaguar carrying royal protection officers, before watching someone hurl a bin at the car. “I was very concerned for the safety of the convoy and the people travelling in the convoy. I was also concerned how the royal protection officers would react,” he said.

During the five-minute assault, the rear passenger window of the Royal vehicle was smashed, lime green paint was thrown over it and the Duchess was prodded in the side with a stick.

There is no evidence that Gilmour attacked the Rolls-Royce in which the Royal couple were travelling.

The student, who has just completed his second year studying history at Girton College, Cambridge, was among thousands of people who protested against plans to raise tuition fees.

The court heard that Gilmour had been identified at a number of flashpoints during the day, and was photographed attempting to set fire to a pile of newspapers outside the Supreme Court. A police officer stamped on the burning paper to put it out.

After being photographed swinging from the Cenotaph, he issued an apology describing it as his “moment of idiocy”. In a statement, he said: “I feel nothing but shame. My intention was not to attack or defile the Cenotaph. Running along with a crowd of people who had just been violently repelled by the police, I got caught up in the spirit of the moment.”

Gilmour’s biological father is the poet and playwright Heathcote Williams but he was adopted by the pop star when his mother, a writer and journalist, remarried.

SOURCE





Let convicts choose: Prison or the lash?

by Jeff Jacoby

ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, I wrote a column -- "Bring back flogging" -- that called for reviving corporal punishment for convicted criminals. Rather than continuing to lock up millions of offenders, many of them nonviolent, in crowded and brutal prisons, I suggested, it would be more humane to punish at least some of them with a straightforward whipping and let them get on with their lives. Americans have been taught to think of flogging as hopelessly barbaric and primitive. But is corporal punishment really less civilized than a criminal-justice system that relies almost exclusively on caging human beings?

It was a pretty good column, and I always had a hunch it would make an even better book. Now it has, and I only wish I had written it.

Peter Moskos, a criminologist at the City University of New York and a former Baltimore police officer, has just published In Defense of Flogging, a serious if startling proposal to drastically shrink America's "massive and horrible system of incarceration" by letting most convicted criminals choose between going to prison and a semipublic flogging with a rattan cane. An absurd thesis? Don't reject it out of hand, Moskos says, before considering what you would want for yourself. "Given the choice between five years in prison and 10 brutal lashes, which would you choose?" A flogging would be intensely painful and bloody, but it would be over in a few minutes. Prison would mean losing years of your life, being locked away from everything and everyone you care about.

Offered those alternatives -- hard time or the lash -- most people would choose the lash. Better the short, sharp humiliation of a flogging than the prolonged emotional torture of being shut in a cage. Better to be punished and be done with it.

Its title notwithstanding, In Defense of Flogging is less a brief for the resumption of corporal punishment than an indictment of America's appalling system of mass imprisonment.

The United States locks up people at a rate unmatched anywhere on Earth. There are 2.3 million people behind bars in this country -- more than the populations of Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco combined. Both in raw numbers and as a percentage of the whole, the United States has more prisoners than any other country. With an incarceration rate of 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, America outjails not only every advanced democracy -- in Canada and Western Europe, the rate of imprisonment is about one-seventh what it is here -- but even the world's dictatorships and autocracies. In Russia, the incarceration rate is 629 per 100,000. In Cuba, it's 530. In Iran, it's 220.

Are Americans safer because so many of their fellow citizens are behind bars? That's far from clear. "From 1970 to 1991 crime rose while we locked up a million more people," Moskos writes. "Since then we've locked up another million and crime has gone down." Was it only the second million who were the "real" criminals?

Prisons are good at keeping violent predators off the streets, but relatively few people are imprisoned because we fear what they might do if we release them. Most inmates are locked up because locking people up is the way we punish virtually every offense -- from committing murder to laundering money to selling marijuana. Prisons were originally conceived as a means of curing criminals and bringing them to penance. What they have turned into is a vast American gulag of pervasive brutality and brain-numbing boredom, replete with psychological damage, pervasive drug use, gang intimidation, and an estimated 200,000 rapes a year.

For dangerous felons there may be no alternative to incarceration. But for millions of nonviolent common criminals, low-level drug offenders, and white-collar swindlers, Moskos writes, "the punishment of prison is far, far worse than the crime they have committed." Why not offer them instead the option of corporal punishment, under a doctor's supervision, and followed by immediate release? Considering all the costs and cruelties imposed by America's gigantic penal system -- imposed not only on the individuals we lock up, but on their families, on the taxpayers, on minority communities -- wouldn't flogging be a more humane and reasonable alternative?

Granted, flogging criminals would be ugly. But it would also make their punishment immediate and transparent. And it wouldn't be nearly as destructive and dysfunctional as keeping 2.3 million people in cages. America's penal system is a national disgrace. In Defense of Flogging suggests one way to make it better.

SOURCE





Thousands on secret British council blacklists: Personal details kept of residents who dare to complain

Thousands of people involved in disagreements with council staff have had their personal details stored on secret blacklists.

Bureaucrats have listed the details of members of the public who have been involved in rows with teachers or dustmen over seemingly trivial matters. Scores of councils hold databases of ‘undesirables’ – individuals who could potentially pose a threat to their staff. They hold the details of almost 9,000 people, but most have never been charged with or convicted of a crime.

Personal information such as car registration numbers, telephone numbers, household pets, nicknames and distinguishing features are listed on the databases.

Earlier this year the Coalition pledged to crack down on the legacy of Labour’s surveillance society. Ministers have investigated the number of state powers of entry contained in primary and secondary legislation and were astonished to discover 1,200 in existence – more than 400 of which were created by Labour.

Thirty-four of the 78 councils in England contacted by the Daily Mail admitted having the watch lists and five more are planning to introduce them this year. The total will be higher because there are more than 350 councils in England.

Councils have wildly different criteria for placing people on the blacklist. Many are put there simply after a form is filled out by a member of staff and then rubber-stamped by a manager.

Telford and Wrekin Council said it lists residents ‘if a person behaves in a way which is felt could pose a significant threat of physical or mental harm to employees’.

Doncaster Council said a ‘person needs to pose a potential danger to an employee of the council, or someone acting on behalf of council’ to be put on the list.

But in many councils hundreds of staff can access personal information about people logged as a potential threat, even though they have no contact with the public and so could never be in danger.

Last night Daniel Hamilton, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘It beggars belief to think that so many councils are wasting precious financial resources compiling databases of “undesirable” local residents.

'While councils have a duty to protect their staff, they also have a duty to respect the privacy of local residents. ‘People who have never committed a crime should not have their details logged like common criminals. Their details should be deleted immediately.’

Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, has warned councils that they have a legal duty to keep the information secure. A spokesman for his office said councils had a duty of care to protect their staff, which could involve putting them on a list. But he added: ‘These markers should be used very carefully and should contain the reasons for identifying individuals as being potentially violent.’

He said councils should inform residents who are on the database, setting out how they ended up on it. Only in extreme cases where a council believed that telling a resident they were on the list would lead to a violent reaction should they not approach the individual.

Good citizen treated like a criminal

When she spotted a drunk trampling flowers in a park, Jane Clift saw it as her public duty to report him. But her efforts led to a nightmare in which she was branded potentially violent and put on a council blacklist with thugs and sex attackers.

Her details were circulated to public and private bodies, including doctors’, dentists’, opticians’, libraries, contraceptive clinics, schools and nurseries.

Their staff were advised not to see her alone. The 44-year-old former care worker was forced to withdraw an application to become a foster parent and to leave the town where she had lived for ten years.

Her ordeal began in August 2005 when she called the police after the drunk threatened her in a park in Slough, Berkshire. He had fled by the time police arrived, but they advised her to contact the council, which was running a campaign to persuade people to report anti-social behaviour. When a worker in the anti-social behaviour unit allegedly failed to take action, Mrs Clift went to a higher level. A co-ordinator claimed she became ‘very difficult’ during a phone call.

In December 2005, Mrs Clift received a letter from the council to say she had been put on the register of potentially violent people. After a four-year legal battle, the High Court ordered Slough Council to pay her £12,000 in libel damages.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************