'On yer bike'

The event of the week here on the Isle of Man was the passing of our uncrowned king, the comedian Sir Norman Wisdom. The meeja gave it big coverage. There will be a ‘state’ funeral with the cortege going the whole considerable length of the Promenade in Douglas followed by drinks at Sir Norman’s Bar at the swanky Sefton Hotel. That should ensure a big turn-out!

The Brokeback Coalition has launched its reform of welfare benefits and the general theme seems to be ‘Get on your bike and get a job’, as the ineffable Chingford Skinhead, Norman Tebbitt, so delicately put it, like the Victorian lady (left) who is dressed for cycling in the days before lycra. The cost of welfare is about 5 times the cost of the defence budget. The manuals of benefits rules run to 9,000 pages (nothing like the 30,000 pages of tax rules – the biggest in the world, even more than the US IRS - but quite enough, thank you). To do something about this plus the immigration problem, they might care to copy our Government’s practice; you don’t get benefit until you have lived and worked on the Island for 5 years. So no illegals and no dole bludgers! The chaterrati are going apes**t over the ‘unfairness’ of stopping child benefit to parents earning more than £44,000 (just under twice average earnings). They don’t mention that 50% of the population receives some kind of benefit that has to be paid for by 100% of the working population.

They have already made an almighty cock-up of immigration by putting a quota on non-EU immigrants. This means that a highly-skilled person from the US badly needed by Ford could be refused whilst thieving Romanies from Eastern Europe are unstoppable. The financial pages report of a company that, taking Cameron at his word that UK business must be much more proactive in seeking contracts in India, recruited a high-flying Indian lady to advise them on how to go about it. The Immigration authorities threw her out. One wonders what the quota is for high-flying Indian lady business advisors. Mind you, intelligent behaviour is not to be expected form an outfit that calls itself the ‘Border Agency’ when the UK, being an island, doesn’t have any borders.

Let us now see what Kittenheels intends to do about the frightful assault on civil liberties during the rule of the Blairbroon nomenklatura. She could start by making a bonfire of the thousands of new criminal offences they created. No wonder Mugabe was an admirer of Blair. He must of thought of him as a disciple. She could reinstate the double jeopardy rule that for centuries had prevented the authorities from pursuing people found not guilty by a jury of their peers until they got a result. She could revert to the old rule barring evidence of ‘previous’ in criminal trials; although Blair was a member of the Bar he must have skipped the lesson when it was taught that the function of the court is to try the offence not the person.

She could dump the outrageous Human Rights Act. Here is a contemporary comment:

The experience of the twelve years since the HRA passed into law is a troubling one, for it has seen the passing of perhaps the most illiberal body of legislation for two centuries. The DNA database expanded to all arrested, regardless of their guilt or the triviality of their alleged crime; hearsay evidence permitted as a matter of routine; bad character evidence routinely admitted; arrests permitted for any crime, even those that do not carry prison sentences; defendants facing accusations impossible to rebut through witness anonymity; and a marked increase in minimum sentences, hugely reducing judicial independence.

Instead, she has adopted Hattie Harperson’s disgraceful Equality Act that criminalises just about everybody. It was described by a commentator as the worst piece of legislation in English legal history.

She promises to introduce a Freedom Bill. How low have we fallen that such a thing should be necessary?