Tag: society

it just gets better and better

The police and security services are to be given access to advanced travel details on more than 40 million passengers a year who travel on domestic flights and ferries within Britain under legislation to be announced tomorrow…

…It is expected that airlines will have to provide the personal online details of all passengers as they book seats and subsequently check in at the airport. There are discussions with the travel industry over what documents passengers will have to show before they can board a flight in Britain.

more on this from the Guardian.

let's dismantle some more of our civil liberties, shall we?

RECORDS of all criminal convictions and cautions will remain on police files for 100 years after chief constables overturned the principle that offences can be “spent”, The Times has learnt. …

Some six million criminal convictions, including cautions and minor offences already on record, will now be kept for life.

more from The Times

and after hearing some oily Home Office minister on the Home Service this morning trying to justify keeping juvenile’s DNA records when the samples had been taken in cases of mistaken identity … How I hate what this country is becoming.

neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours …

[Shoreditch] council, who announced a pilot for the scheme in December, plan to allow 20,000 Shoreditch residents to spy on each other using a set of 500 CCTV cameras in a deprived neighbourhood, relayed through set-top boxes. They can compare suspicious characters against a most-wanted list of Asbo “offenders” and report them to the police.

isn’t that nice?

more on this from El Reg

thought for the day

from A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s wonderful play about Sir Thomas More.

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

if you’ve never seen it, it’s available on DVD. I recommend it very highly. For a play set in the times of Henry VIII, it’s remarkably appropriate for the times we live in now.

village life

it’s nice living in a village, and today we had two reminders of why …

went up to the Post Office with a couple of parcels to post. I’d managed to mistype the postcode on the label for major_clanger‘s Big Box of Goodies, and when they checked it, I had the road wrong as well [sigh] – clearly, yet another badger moment.

never mind – the guy in the post office just hung on to it, and said to phone him when I found out the right address.

then we popped along to the village off-licence to put in an order for some wine. We normally go in and tell them what we want, then collect it the next day. But David from the Little Tipple gave perlmonger, the wine, and some eggs and carrots a lift home, while I popped to the chippy for our lunch. I know, I know, but the *smell* …

in other news, we had to put some stuff in the loft this afternoon, and we got the cashmas decorations out. I’m not going to put them up yet, *obviously*. But there they are, lurking in the server room in a twinkly manner.

all's fair …

perlmonger and I went to the greasy spoon for lunch. This is not important, except as background for why we were “reading” the Daily Mirror and the Sun.

the usual page 3 girls were well in evidence, and further into the paper were photos from this Royal Marine initiation thing that’s all over the news, with nekkid soldiers and so forth. And both papers hid the soldiers genitalia, either by blacking them out, or pixellation.

is it me, or is this hypocrisy of the highest order?

Tescowatch (an occasional series)

good story from today’s Guardian:

It sounds crazy to question the future of Britain’s most powerful retailer when it accounts for more than one in every eight pounds spent by UK consumers, but the next six months could see significant efforts to clip its wings.

Next month, a report from an all-party group of MPs into the future of the high street is likely to recommend an end to below-cost pricing of key goods, and curbs to stop supermarkets in general, and Tesco in particular, buying more convenience stores. The recommendations will be closely watched by the Department of Trade and Industry, which appears sympathetic to the anti-Tesco bandwagon.

we can but hope …