A Manifesto Club member took this photo of his child’s sportsday at a Derby school, in what he described as ‘an obvious act of defiance’. What is interesting is the idea that parents putting themselves under suspicion – and holding back from…
Following on from our report, The Myth of Racist Kids, we have now published an in-depth investigation of the hate-speech reporting systems that brand 34,000 children ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’ every year. Leave Those Kids Alone, by Adrian Hart, shows the extent of…
I just received an email from a man who has been stringently checked for his role in police custody suites – but who is unable to get access to a school governors’ committee meeting. ‘I am an independent police custody visitor (voluntary and unpaid) and was appointed last year but only after I underwent a stringent police check, which I understand is more rigorous than an enhanced CRB check. I have an identity card issued by the police and signed by the chief constable giving me the right to access police custody suites in my area unannounced at any time of day…
Here is an image snapped by the Manifesto Club’s Dolan Cummings, in Rochester Cathedral. Photo bans are becoming more common in Cathedrals – and not just for reasons of religious irreverence, but now for ‘child protection’ reasons. This prevention of photography of…
Further to the case of mothers whose children’s faces were blacked out in school records (for ‘child protection’ reasons), I’ve just been sent this email by a father from the north of England, who is experiencing a similar problem. He makes extremely valuable points about the futility of these photo-ban policies, which do nothing to protect children and merely ruin their memories and records of their school life. These are extracts from a letter he wrote to school authorities: ‘Whilst it is great to have such a record of my child’s time at school, it is the fact that you feel it…
‘Street pastors’ in Shropshire patrol the streets at night, and help revelers who have lost their bearings (or their feet) make their way home. The qualifications required for such good Samaritans are as follows: you must be a church member; you must want to spend their Saturday night propping up drunk people and listening to their ramblings. Also – in a sign of the suspicious spirit that reigns in religious institutions – you must ‘have a complete CRB check and be able to commit to a full training programme’. The reason for this requirement is that that drunk people (along with homeless…
Councils are up in arms over government plans to cut CRB checks for taxi drivers. The government plans to only request taxi drivers to get ‘standard’ CRBs (which checks for cautions, convictions, or reprimands), rather than ‘enhanced’ CRBs (which includes all other information on local police records, and child protection registers). Yet it is strange that ‘enhanced’ CRBs as seen as a guarantee of safety. The point about notes on police local computers is that they are unproven – they could be hearsay, or malicious allegations. So such notes are just as likely to incriminate an innocent man as they are to…
Australia is one of the few countries in the world – along with the UK – that has developed a system of on-the-spot fines for ‘anti-social behaviour’ in recent years. And like the UK – the penalties have developed in arbitrary and petty directions, such as penalising people for swearing. The Australian district of Victoria brought through on the spot fines for swearing – and gave out nearly 800 fines in 2009-10. Meanwhile, the UK town of Barnsley announced a similar crackdown on ‘effing’ and ‘jeffing’. Now Australians are out in protest, holding a ‘swear-in’ to point out the absurdity of the…
A Hull shop owner was fined £75, after a sticker advertising her shop was found on a lamppost. She denies putting it there. But still – it’s a sticker. The po-faced council announced gravely that she had ‘committed an offence of displaying an unlawful advertisement’. What this shows is: first, the increasingly free and easy use of on-the-spot-fines by councils, in a way that lacks all consistency and proportion. Cases that wouldn’t even see a judge – let alone result in a guilty verdict – are being dealt with in this casual and arbitrary manner, delivered in the same way as the…
Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera – a campaigner for gay rights who faces daily discrimination in her home country of Uganda – has been a refused a visa to enter the UK. She was due to speak at the Foyle Pride Festival in Derry next week. This freedom campaigner is the latest victim of the UK’s points-based visa system, which puts a burdensome series of barriers in the way of people trying to visit the UK on temporary visits – whether to give a talk or go to a conference. The UK was the only country to deny Nabagesera a visa. Apparently there were…
After the riots, Home Secretary Theresa May proposed giving police broad new powers ‘to impose a general curfew in a particular area’. ‘In the fast-moving situation we have seen in the last week, we need to make sure the police have all the powers that are necessary.’ Other politicians have suggested new powers to force somebody to remove their face-covering, or new powers to shut down social media sites. Curfews and communication shut-downs are the mark of authoritarian regimes and martial law. They are also completely unnecessary. Virtually every area affected by rioting was already a ‘dispersal zone’ – including Tottenham, Croydon,…
City of London police are setting up ‘good behaviour zones’. The policy was first announced in this poster here. A Flickr photo captures a good behaviour zone sign on location. The justification is that City of London Police believes that ‘there are grounds to believe that members of the public have been intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed as a result of the presence or behaviour of groups of people within the estate acting anti-socially’. As a result: ‘If an officer feels that two or more people gathering in a public place are causing or are likely to cause anti social behaviour they…