England under Blairs viderutvikling av thatcherismen "utvikler" seg.
Nedenfor følger artikler fra Aftenposten og Daily Telegraph som
belyser dette.
Konklusjonen i den siste lyder:
"There is indeed a thin blue line between civilisation
and barbarism, and in this country it grows thinner by the hour."
Kapitalismen kjennes på sine frukter.
Karsten Johansen
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/sport/d155855.htm
Britisk politi frykter mer fotballvold
Engelske hooligans kan komme til å sørge for den mest voldelige
fotballsesongen på mange år.
Den nasjonale kriminalstatistikken for Storbritannia (NCIS) avslørte søndag
en liten nedgang i antall arrestasjoner sist år, men samtidig at de tøffe
blir tøffere. Det betyr utstrakt bruk av våpen som kniver.
- Det har vært et økende antall episoder hvor våpen blir brukt, sier NCIS'
Bryan Drew til Sky.
Sjokkerende Hundrevis av engelske fotballfans ble deportert fra Belgia i EM
etter sjokkerende scener, med bråk i påvirket tilstand som
gjennomgangsmelodien. Episodene som sjokkerte TV-seerne framskyndet en lov
som britiske myndigheter nå har vedtatt. Den forbyr bråkmakere
utreisetillatelse fra de britiske øyer.
Loven skal først og fremst forhindre at hooligans drar ut av landet, men
enkelte mindre tiltak er iverksatt også innenlands. Fotballrelatert vold var
på høyden i 1980-årene, med nærmest ukentlige episoder. Nå har myndighetene
klart å få bukt med problemet.
- For ti år siden hadde vi rundt 10.000 arrestasjoner årlig, nå er vi nede i
like over 3000, sier innenriksminister Lord Bassam til BBC.
Politiet frykter nå høyteknologien, som for eksempel organisering via
mobiltelefoni og internett.
Smartere Drew mener bråkmakerne nå blir smartere, og dermed vanskeligere å
motarbeide. Mer politi innenfor stadionmurene gjør at bråket kanaliseres
bort fra fotballen, og blir vanskeligere å kontrollere.
- I tillegg kommer nå hooligans fra hele det sosiale spekteret. Folk med høy
utdannelse og gode jobber kan også komme til å bli innblandet i dette, tror
Drew.
Sunderland hadde i fjor flest arrestasjoner blant sine fans, 223 viser
tallene fra NCIS. Chelsea lå på andreplass med 168. Southampton var best i
ligaen med bare 15 arrestasjoner.
(NTB-Reuters)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac1601715957616&rtmo=gwwYGfbu&atmo=7FlQA
nAt&pg=/et/00/8/13/npaed13.html
Anti-paedophile group is linked to National Front
By David Bamber and Rajeev Syal
A FAR-RIGHT group with links to the National Front is organising
demonstrations against suspected paedophiles.
The National Democrats, a group founded by former members of the National
Front, has set up a website called Paedophile Watch to "out" suspected child
abusers with leaflets and demonstrations.
The site, which also lists newspaper reports containing the names and
addresses of convicted sex offenders, may also be linked with Antimatter,
the anti-paedophile group whose campaign prompted riots and led to innocent
men being driven from their homes. Police have been investigating the group
after letters wrongly identified two men in South London as child sex
offenders.
The organisation gave out leaflets to neighbours of Michael Horgan, of
Brockley, and Victor Terry of Croydon, neither of whom have criminal
records. Both are namesakes of two other men, also from South London, named
as paedophiles by the News of the World.
Last night a reporter posing as a member of the public contacted the
Paedophile Watch number posted on the website and was told that if he
supplied a paedophile's name, address and details, leaflets could be
distributed near the abuser's home. The male voice on the end of the
telephone, who refused to give his identity said: "We obviously want to help
anyone who has a child abuser living nearby. If you give me the details we
will check it out."
Police are studying the group's letters, which read: "A paedophile is in
your area. Thanks to the News of the World we can now target this man." The
person's address, telephone number and alleged offences were also given. The
tactics bear the hallmarks of far-Right groups, according to Mike Whine, of
the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who said said that such organisations
were quick to jump on the bandwagon and whip up violent sentiments in the
hope of recruiting new members.
Mr Whine said: "The National Democrats have been at the forefront of this
move and organised demonstrations against paedophiles two years' ago. The
anti-paedophile groups share members and information on child abusers and
the National Democrats may well be connected to Antimatter."
The News of the World campaign, which has so far led to five innocent people
being hounded as sex offenders, comes at a time when ministers are being
forced to remove thousands of names from the sex offenders' registers
because of the new Human Rights Act.
The legislation, which seeks to incorporate the European Convention on Human
Rights into British law from October 2, states that all citizens have the
right to privacy unless this is outweighed by other grounds, such as
protecting the public from criminals. The move to drop names follows
warnings that the register of 110,000 names will be declared unlawful under
"right to privacy" clauses unless it is urgently amended.
The problem arises because, in addition to paedophiles, the present register
contains the names of people convicted of what civil rights groups consider
"one-off" offences. Home Office insiders last night reassured the public
that nobody considered a danger to children would be taken off the register
and that the only people likely to be dropped would be those convicted of
lesser offences while paedophiles will remain on it.
Among those likely to be removed from the register are adults convicted of
engaging in consensual sex acts not involving children, such as group
homosexual and sado-masochistic acts, and young people involved in underage
sex. A review of the register is being carried out and proposals will be
unveiled in the autumn.
At present all sexual offenders are kept on the list and have to report
their whereabouts to local police but John Wadham, the legal director of
Liberty, the civil rights pressure group, said that removing some of the
names would make the register more effective "because police are obliged at
present to keep tabs on a large number of people who pose no danger to
children".
He said: "I think there are likely to be challenges made by people who are
not a threat to children who will argue that the restrictions on their
privacy are not justified. It is really an opportunity to make the register
better focused on paedophiles and sex offenders who are a real danger to the
public."
Meanwhile in Austria, Dieter Böhmdorfer, the justice minister, yesterday
raised the possibility of his country publicising information about
convicted paedophiles, saying it appeared to be the will of the public.
Mr Böhmdorfer, from the Right-wing Freedom Party, told Austrian State radio
that making such information public could be necessary to protect victims.
Saying that such a move could only take place within the context of the
country's laws, he said that the information should not have the character
of a "witch-hunt". Editors of leading Austrian newspapers have already said
that they will not take part in such a campaign.
The debate over whether information on convicted paedophiles should be made
public follows the recent campaign by the News of the World which published
the names and photographs of alleged paedophiles.
The sinister ethos of the baying mobs
By Dr Theodore Dalrymple
ALTHOUGH I have long had few illusions about man's capacity for evil, I
watched some videotapes two years ago that shocked me more profoundly than
anything I had ever seen. The police showed them to me because they wanted
medico-legal advice in the case of two parents who had sexually abused their
own children for months, if not for years, and who sold the videotapes of
their abuse worldwide at great profit.
In a perfectly ordinary house, in a perfectly ordinary residential area, the
parents had constructed a veritable torture chamber. There the mother,
stripped stark naked, repeatedly raped her own naked children, strung upside
down by their ankles from the ceiling by a rope and a winch, with various
household objects. This was after she had first beaten them on the buttocks
with a rod until they bled. Her husband "directed" the performance from
behind the video camera.
If I had not witnessed these scenes for myself, I should not have believed
they were possible; and it was difficult, I confess, to think of anything
but the death penalty during these scenes, of which many hours over many
months had been recorded. Here was no momentary lapse, no sudden rush of
blood to the head, but the prolonged and deliberate sexual torture of
children.
Indignation, however, should not disguise from us the fact that many sexual
offences against children are not remotely of this severity or seriousness,
nor are they of unique wickedness. Quite often in the prison, in which I
work, I meet pathetic old men who have merely exposed themselves to children
in the park, or mentally handicapped young men who have indulged in the kind
of activity that, had their chronological age equalled their mental age,
would scarcely have raised an eyebrow.
But there is a tendency to lump all sex crimes against children, and all the
criminals who commit them, together, as if there were no relevant
differences. And the ferocious indignation expressed against such crimes and
such criminals is in my view highly suspect.
Last week I was on night duty in the prison. A prisoner had foolishly let
slip to his cellmate that he was on remand for a sexual offence against a
child. Technically, of course, he was still innocent, since he had not yet
been found guilty: but though so many prisoners consider themselves to have
been unjustly dealt with by the police and the courts, there is no innocence
until guilt is proven where sex offenders are concerned. They are guilty if
charged.
The prisoner's cellmate lost no time in broadcasting the charges against him
to the rest of the prison, which then erupted into a baying for his blood.
By the time I arrived, he was the most terrified man I have ever seen. He
believed he was about to be torn apart, limb from limb; and were it not for
the thin blue line of prison officers, no doubt at some time he might very
well have been so dismembered. For myself, I have never heard any sound more
spine-chilling than that deep-throated baying for his blood.
Among those who bayed in this fashion, there were many who were habitual
armed robbers, violent drug dealers, muggers of old ladies, murderers,
wife-beaters and so forth. Everyone likes to think that there is someone
lower on the human scale than himself, of course, and among prisoners it is
automatically assumed that the lowest form of human life is a sex offender
against children. One offence of indecent assault is worse than 100 street
robberies or 500 burglaries: and vengeance is mine, saith the habitual
criminal.
It was this scale of values that was in evidence in the Portsmouth housing
estate in which the anti-paedophile disturbances took place last week.
Middle-class people seldom understand to what extent council housing estates
in this country resemble prisons in their ethos: except that there are no
prison officers to keep savagery within bounds, and no walls to keep the
inmates in. Even the argot is the same. For example, complaining to the
police about the conduct of anyone else on the estate, no matter how
dishonest, anti-social or dangerous he might be, is known as "grassing", and
brings swift and violent retribution - just as it does in prison. A person
who lives on a British housing estate is assumed to owe more loyalty to the
neighbour who torments, abuses, burgles and attacks him than he does to
obedience to the law - just as in prison.
The anti-paedophile mobs in Portsmouth were therefore members of a deeply
criminalised section of society, the habitual violence and disorder of whose
lives was almost certainly considerable. Moreover, child abuse of one kind
or another is almost universal on such estates, though it occurs with the
connivance of the state, and often at its expense. For it is precisely in
such estates where illegitimacy is now the norm, and where serial
stepfatherhood is what most children can expect to experience during their
childhood. And it was certainly no surprise to me to learn that one of the
leaders of the anti-paedophile mob not only had a conviction for assaulting
a policeman, but had to be told by the police to take better care of her
three-year-old son who had been found wandering naked in the street while
she was giving a television interview. (The same woman was paid £1,100 in
fees by the media.)
It is in these conditions, of course, that abuse of children - to say
nothing of other forms of neglect, such as complete indifference to
education - are most likely to occur. It is on estates like these that a
mother is most likely to throw her adolescent children out of the house
because they do not get on well with her latest psychopathic and violent
boyfriend: a pattern I have seen repeated on innumerable occasions.
It is precisely on such estates that teenage pregnancy is most frequent,
where it is not uncommon to find mother and daughter to be each nurturing
illegitimate babies of precisely the same age in the same household, where
uncles are younger than their nephews, where full siblings are rare but half
and step-siblings are common, and where the age of consent to sexual
relations has been completely abolished - as often as not under the
complacent gaze of the supposedly responsible adults. Complete disorder in
the relations between the sexes reigns, and the resultant violence is of a
degree and severity of which the complacent middle classes have little idea.
In other words, the people living on such estates conduct themselves in such
a way as to maximise every conceivable form of abuse of children. The
demonstrations against paedophiles were thus a startling example of the
psychological mechanism of projection, that is to say the mechanism by which
a guilty person accuses another of the misdeeds or crimes of which he
himself is guilty. For example, a pathologically jealous man, who accuses
his sexual companion of having or wanting affairs with other men, is often
flagrantly unfaithful himself: he accuses her of what he himself is doing.
In a sense, therefore, the people of Portsmouth were demonstrating against
themselves.
The unfortunate Member of Parliament for the constituency in which the
disturbances took place, Mr Syd Rapson, could scarcely condemn the mob
hysteria without himself becoming a victim of it. To condemn the
demonstrators would have seemed to them as if he were a defender of
paedophiles, perhaps even a paedophile himself. We saw in Portsmouth the
British mob's true vocation for tyranny. Indeed, there were alarming signs
in Portsmouth of the potential for real fascism in this country: not the
touchy-feely Blairite variety, but the boot and fist variety.
We have a large population of people in this country who feel themselves
deprived of something (the good life, however defined) to which they feel
themselves entitled by virtue of drawing breath, but which they have not the
means to achieve. They are constantly humiliated by their failure, and by
the circumstances in which they live. They are looking for someone to blame
for the consequences of their own choices, someone upon whom they can
project all their guilt and dissatisfaction.
All it would require for authentic fascism to develop is a severe economic
downturn and the rise of an evil demagogic genius. The News of the World has
already given us an intimation of what can be done in this direction, and
there is some evidence that fascist groups have been fomenting, or at least
taking advantage of, the trouble in Portsmouth.
I do not underestimate the lengths to which paedophiles will go, or the
damage they may do. How could I, when I have seen the videotapes brought to
me by the police? But the uncomfortable fact is that vastly more damage is
done to children by parents who imagine themselves firmly, even violently,
opposed to the sexual abuse of children, which they do much to promote by
their style of life.
Moreover, even the vilest of crimes must be punished by due process, not by
lynch mobs with passions stirred by demagogues. Revenge, said Bacon, is a
kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought
law to weed it out. There is indeed a thin blue line between civilisation
and barbarism, and in this country it grows thinner by the hour.
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