How the British state wastes your money
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
BBC News - Domestic abuse victim admits harassment charge.
His "ex" tries to contact him on his release from prison. The women he abused so violently as to land him there. Does she call him repeatedly? Does she camp out on his doorstep and refuse to go away? No, she messages him on Facebook.
He complains to the police and the matter ends up in court. Why? He could unfriend her. He could hide her messages. She presented no threat to him. Quite the contrary. How can her actions possibly justify spending taxpayers' money on a court hearing? Who, for that matter, told this man that the state is there to screen his messages and deal with the dramas arising from his relationships? Why did he not end up in court for wasting police time (and our money)?
I cannot understand how anyone can justify this level of state involvement in personal lives. Nor how such matters can be given such serious attention by the police when none of the crimes against me were given any of their time at all - beyond issuing a crime number for my insurance.
The British State is run for the benefit of the dregs of our society. We respectable citizens are nothing to it but the source of its funds. Let's not debate how libertarian our ideal society would be when surely we can all agree that a state policing the Facebook messaging of its underclass is in serious need of scaling back.
Too cynical surely, OldBob? Say it ain't so.
Posted by: Tom | Thursday, August 22, 2013 at 08:32 AM
One crime instantly 'detected' perpetrator found and arrested without resist.
All good stats for the force, boxes ticked, never mind the public interest.
Posted by: OldBob | Wednesday, August 21, 2013 at 11:54 PM
Hmm.
Posted by: Tom | Wednesday, August 21, 2013 at 12:32 PM
None, unless they chose too. I was cynical about the claims of a friend in the judiciary who told me that it had been packed with New Labourites during the Blair/Brown regime, but this makes me wonder. The judge could and should have thrown this out. Yes, there is - stupidly - a law against harassment, but this kind of easily-blockable nonsense is nothing or at least de minimis.
Posted by: Tom | Wednesday, August 21, 2013 at 12:31 PM
It's becoming increasingly clear that the enemies of liberty are trying to construct one of their famous “narratives” here: viz., that trolling - which has been around for decades, and is fairly easily dealt with - is a new and pernicious threat from which only state regulation of websites can save us. There is no other explanation for a trivial case like this being taken so seriously at a time when our enemies' media wing is so obsessed with the alleged “problem”. Does nobody find it odd that this whole panic comes just a few months after the government was shamed into watering down Levison as it applies to websites?
Posted by: Sam Duncan | Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 06:23 PM
In this whole process, how many people had to listen to his tale of woe and *not* say "FFS, just unfriend her, job done"?
Posted by: patently | Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 04:49 PM
"Who, for that matter, told this man that the state is there to screen his messages and deal with the dramas arising from his relationships?"
Why, the State did, of course! Via all those fakecharities they secretly fund with our money..
Posted by: JuliaM | Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 05:53 AM