Ched Evans and Sheffield United

There is a great deal of talk about whether the footballer Ched Evans, recently released from his five year jail sentence for raping a 19-year-old woman, should be allowed to return to his job playing football for Sheffield United, who are being subjected to a great deal of pressure not to do so.

I don’t condone rape, or any other criminal act come to that, and whatever the rights and wrongs of the Evans case he has been to prison and punished for his actions and should by all reasonable standards be now allowed to pick up his life as best he can. The punishment handed down by the court was five years in prison, not a life-time ban from continuing his career, any other sanction smacks to me of the lynch-mob mentality.

It’s said that he is a role model for young people and for that reason alone he should be barred from playing football in the future, as if he’s the first and only footballer to fall foul of the law.

On 6 May 1990, Tony Adams, of Arsenal crashed his Ford Sierra into a wall and when breathalysed his blood alcohol level was found to be more than four times the legal drink-drive limit. What sort of role model was he to young people with the sort of behaviour that could easily have resulted in someone being killed? On 19 December that year, at Southend Crown Court, he was imprisoned for four months. Not only did he continue to play for Arsenal after his release, in 2004 he was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame!

And who can forget Eric Cantona, convicted of assault on a fan in 1995 after launching a 'kung-fu' style kick, in the full glare of the TV cameras?
Originally sentenced to two weeks in prison, Cantona’s subsequent appeal resulted in him being given instead 120 hours of community service. Not only was he re-signed by Manchester United, he went on to become their captain and after leaving football became a minor film star!
Now he’s a real role model, I’m just not sure for whom.

How about Manchester United player Mads Timm, in March 2005  sentenced to twelve months in a young offenders' institute for dangerous driving after the car he was racing on a public street hit another vehicle, again an action which might well have resulted in someone being killed.
Was he castigated like Ched Evans? Hardly, after his release Timm was allowed to remain with the club who were not subjected to the same sort of pressure Sheffield United are currently experiencing.

One footballer who did end up killing someone was Lee Hughes. On 23 November 2003, Hughes lost control of his high-powered Mercedes and, on the wrong side of the road, hit another car killing a passenger and severely injuring the driver and another passenger. Hughes fled the scene of the accident and didn’t turn himself in to the police until 36 hours later, too late to be breathalysed.
He pleaded not guilty and during his trial was accused of driving too fast in wet conditions and was described as driving "like a madman".
He was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and on 9 August 2004 was sentenced to six years imprisonment.
Hughes continued to play first class football after his release, and he’d killed someone!

And it’s not just footballers, many other sportsmen have been convicted of various, often serious offences and still been allowed to continue their careers after paying their debt to society. 

No sport is perhaps more in the public spotlight than Formula 1 racing.
Force India driver Adrian Sutil was convicted of assault occasioning grievous bodily harm on 31 January 2012 and received an 18-month suspended prison sentence, along with a €200,000 fine, small change to a F1 driver, and far from being banned from racing as an ‘inappropriate role model for young people’ in February 2013 Force India announced that Sutil would return to the team to complete their driver line up for the coming season.

Is the current hysteria because Ched Evans didn't race a car on a public road, or drive whilst drunk, in both cases putting innocent lives at risk, but because his crime was rape? Is that offence more serious than causing death by dangerous driving, or are those advocating continued sanctions against Evans themselves guilty of double standards and prejudice?

The Usual Stupidity

While I haven’t blogged for a while two bizarre examples of human behaviour recently caught my eye, which I can’t resist commenting on.

The first concerns Sophie Dazell, who at the age of 20 has already racked up eleven convictions for assault, vandalism and failure to comply with community punishment orders.

Back in court at Manchester last Tuesday for (again) failing to comply with a community order imposed for an attack upon police officers, her pathetic excuse was that she’d gone to Belgium for breast enlargement surgery.
This is a criminal who has previously failed to complete an un-paid work order and failed to comply with a curfew by refusing to wear an electronic ‘tag’ as it ‘wouldn't look good’ when she appeared on late-night adult TV programs.
Despite her record of complete and utter disregard for court orders she was, once again, set free.
Me? I’d have revoked all previous community orders and on account of her record of non-compliance with non-custodial sentences banged her up for a month, and see how that impacted on her ‘adult TV’ work.

My second gripe is with the Allendale ‘Care’ Home and the Greater Manchester Police.
When 83 year old Walter Crompton applied a doctor-prescribed morphine patch to his wife’s arm, who was unlucky enough to be resident in the above ‘care’ home, they reported him to the police who searched his home, arrested him on suspicion of administering a noxious substance (remember, this was doctor-prescribed medication), kept him in custody for seven hours, interviewed him twice and banned him from contacting his wife.
It took three months before the Criminal Protection Society, sorry, not allowed to call the Crown Prosecution Service names, decided there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to proceed.

I don’t know who is worse, a ‘care’ home who so patently doesn’t care, denying a suffering lady her prescribed pain killers; the Greater Manchester Police, manifestly incapable of telling the difference between a caring husband and a criminal, and who have so few criminals in Manchester they can afford to waste days investigating what Detective Superintendent Joanne Rawlinson called ‘a potentially serious incident’ when she defended the indefensible; or the CPS for instead of throwing this stupid would-be prosecution straight into the bin took three months to conclude there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to support a prosecution.

Sometimes I despair of the CPS, and especially the Police, for being blind to common sense; my disgust for the Allendale ‘Care’ Home knows no bounds.

The Met Office and Doublethink

I an constantly amazed at the sheer blatant hypocrisy of the Met Office when it comes to global warming (have you noticed that now there is no evidence that the climate is in fact getting warmer it’s been subtly switched to ‘climate change’?).

As recently as 2009 Rachel Warren, a ‘climate expert’ at the now discredited University of East Anglia, presented a report in Copenhagen saying that Europe, including Southern England, would be subject to “enormous increases in drought over the 21st century” and we were warned that in future we would have to swap our lawns for gravel beds and our roses for cacti as the ‘global warming’ changed Southern England into a semi-desert – well try telling those on the Somerset Levels that!

Now, of course, the flooding is all down to ‘climate change’ (note no mention of global warming anymore) so says  Dame Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, even though she admits there is “no definitive” proof” of this. Even ‘call me Dave – hug a hoodie’ Cameron “very much suspects” that there is a connection ie he thinks there might be, but doesn’t actually know.

As for global warming, well it isn’t! Even the Met Office, the arch disciple and prime mover in this discredited theory now has to concede it, and buries it’s findings in a report issued last Christmas Eve, in the hope that no-one would notice

see here

and here

In essence, in2011 the Met Office’s computer model prediction had shown temperatures over the next five years soaring to a level 0.8 degrees higher than their average between 1971 and 2000, far higher than the previous record year, 1998. However, their new graph published last Christmas Eve shows a lack of any significant warming for the past 15 years and that this trend is likely to continue. Hence, no global warming, ah but we have climate change instead!

The BBC, ever the devotee of ‘global warming’ tried desperately to downplay the story, claiming that even if the temperature rise had temporarily stalled it would soon reappear., no facts of course to support this ridiculous statement.

It should be remembered that the UK’s Met Office has played a leading role in promoting the worldwide scare over global warming along with its ally the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, ever since the global-warming-obsessed John Houghton, then head of the Met Office, played a key part in setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988.

In short, they all have something to gain and will change their findings to suit their theory as often is as necessary, in the Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ this is ‘Doublethink’ the ability not only to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time and believe them both to be  true, but to KNOW they are both true!

(1984, by George Orwell)

Orwell would be proud of them.

The Highways Agency Want to Control You

When part of the M62 in West Yorkshire was made into a ‘managed motorway’, with variable speed limits enforced by speed cameras on over-head gantries, I suspected it wouldn't be long before the 50mph limit in place during the conversion works was made permanent.

Now I read that the Highways Agency, currently converting a stretch of the M1 south of Barnsley into another ‘managed motorway’ is ‘consulting’ on establishing a permanent 60mph limit when the conversion is completed, again enforced with over-head mounted speed cameras.

They, the Highways Agency, claim that this is to comply with EU directives on pollution.

As a frequent visitor, as a driver, to our European neighbours I can’t help but remark that such ‘directives’ if indeed they exist at all except in the mind of the Highways Agency, don’t seem to apply in Germany, where the autobahns have no speed limit at all, or in France where their motorways have a limit of 130 kph, or about 80mph.

Perhaps cars in France and Germany don’t cause pollution.

Another somewhat worrying aspect of this ‘consultation’ is that Parliament set the national motorway speed limit at 70mph, not the Highways Agency, and speed cameras were only supposed to be erected in locations with an established record of fatal or near-fatal accidents, and not as a blanket coverage.

The use of speed cameras on ‘managed motorways’ seems to be a direct contravention of this principle and the proposed near-permanent 60mph limit an usurpation of Parliamentary democracy.

It’s nothing to do with either pollution or safety of course, it’s all about control!

Petty Little Parish Councils

I’m no fan of Parish Councils, believing them to be little people drunk on what little power they have.

In a village near where I live, with its own Parish Council, a row of terrace houses face onto a main trunk road. With nowhere to park their cars the occupants, quite sensibly, parked on a wide grass verge fronting the houses.

Until the Parish Council exercised their little power by erecting a row of bollards along the verge, preventing the cars using it and forcing their owners to park on the very busy road, with all the dangers inherent in such a move.

I was reminded of this exercise of petty power when reading of how the Queen Thorne Parish Council in Devon erected a fence behind houses backing onto a public park, so blocking one house’s gate leading from the garden to the park.

Despite this particular house having a right-of-way onto the park from the garden the Parish Council of Queen Thorne pursued a three year legal battle, at a reported cost to the Council of £14,121, twice their annual budget, before throwing in the towel on the eve of the Court hearing and removing the fence.

Not that this appalling waste of public money did anything to lead the Parish Council to regret its action, their Vice-Chairman Rodger Dodd is reported to have said that the gate in question had been put up “in a provocative manner”!

A ‘provocative’ gate, now there’s a thing I’d like to see. 

Double Think on Global Warming

I was tickled pink to read about the trip to the Antarctic by a team of ‘climate change’ scientists and ‘green’ activists from Australia, dedicated to proving that the Antarctic ice shelf was ‘melting and collapsing due to global warming’.

Far from proving their pet theory, their Russian ship became wedged in thick ice, at a time when it was high summer in Antarctica when the ice should have been at a minimum level.

So thick was this ‘melting and collapsing’ ice shelf that two ice breakers were unable to free their ship and the team of ‘experts’ had to be rescued by helicopter.

Not that this debacle did anything to change the teams pre-conceived ideas, a spokesman claiming that “it is precisely climate warming that led the vessel into its awkward predicament”.

Yes you read that right, global warming which was causing the ‘melting and collapsing’ of the Antarctic ice was responsible for ice so thick two ice breakers could not free the stuck ship.

George Orwell, in his seminal novel 1984, coined the term ‘double think’ for the capacity to simultaneously hold two mutually contradictory beliefs and accept them both as being correct.

He had nothing on the disciples of ‘global warming’.

The Value of a Free Press

Newspapers come in for a good deal of criticism, not least for all the hoo-ah over phone hacking, but the value of a truly free press in ably demonstrated by the case of Asha Khan.

Asha Khan is a Muslim trainee solicitor with the family firm of KK Solicitors in Newcastle, and is of Pakistani origin.
When her father, who had been driving without a licence for the past 18 years and had three convictions for so doing, was caught by a speed camera while driving Asha Khan's BMW she lied about who was driving, laying the blame on a colleague who worked for her.
Charged with perverting the course of justice, à la, Vicky Price, her barrister argued in court for her to be granted anonymity, a request granted by Judge Peter Hughes at Carlisle Crown Court for "cultural reasons," in that Asha Khan would be  "upset if matters are reported"  and that "culturally, it's very difficult for them (Pakistani Muslims)to say things in public". 
Well it seems to me that being upset at being exposed as a liar is par for the course, and one supposes that, as a solicitor, saying things in public would go with the territory.

Nevertheless, because of Judge Peter Hughes bizarre ruling, effectively saying that Pakistani Muslims should be given special treatment, there the matter may have rested but for the actions of the Daily Mail. Their legal challenge to this disgraceful ruling resulted in Judge Peter Hughes being forced to eat his words when he rescinded his anonymity order two days later saying, what he should have said originally, that "people of all faiths or no faiths should be treated in precisely the same way."

Asha Khan was subsequently convicted of perverting the course of justice, as was her father and the man who agreed to take the blame for the deception, but had they, and Judge Peter Hughes, had their way you and I would be none the wiser.

Secret trials have no place in Great Britain and are the very antithesis of fair and open justice and the Daily Mail is to be commended for their actions in ensuring that this was the case with Asha Khan.

One wonders how long we will continue to enjoy the protection from abuse by the authorities that a free press provides in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry, and Government proposals for curbing that freedom.
What is certain is the powers that be, from judges to Government Ministers, hate and are fearful of a free press, always there to expose their wrongdoing. How much of the MPs expenses scandal do you think would have come to light without a free press to go after these cheats?
No not much!
It would have been quietly swept under the carpet, just like the case of Asha Khan would have been.

Thomas Jefferson said in 1789, and it's as true today as it was then

"our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."