Tuesday 26 February 2008

Grrrrrr

Very tired today so my apologies if this turns into more of a rant than I intend. My favourite moderate newspaper has been running a campaign to bring back the death penalty. I'm not going to have a go at the paper for pandering to their readership, or that readership for being who they are. My bile is reserved for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who while is happy to rail against embryological research and campaign against abortion can't bring himself to say that the death penalty shouldn't happen full stop. What kind of spineless wet is the man? What constituency is he worried he will alienate if he does? What part of "Thou shalt not kill" does he not understand? Has he never in his fifty-two years in the church read the Sermon on the Mount?

The other thing that caught my eye this morning was this piece from Iain Dale about an email he had received. On one hand I agree about the nanny state, there is far to much proscription in schools as was show over the child who wasn't allowed to ware her faith based ring a while back. On the other very little of the discussion is about the most important line in the original email: Of course, they ripped the kitchens out of this school years ago. We shouldn't be making rules about chocolate or going to the chip shop to get the kids to eat healthily, we just need to give them the old the cardinal points of fingering a murder suspect, motive, means and opportunity. Opportunity means a canteen in every school serving a good selection of balanced meals, means means they should be priced to the market[1]; motive is the difficult one, I would hope that if we get a generation of children growing up under the previous two conditions they may develop a taste for wholesome food on their own. That is almost certainly rank optimism, it may even be just as gullible to suggest that teaching this generation domestic science may catch their kids but I just fear that there are some people that consider obesity like benefits as a right.

While I'm probably not going to go as far as Dizzy and say that Jacqui Smith's new seizure plans are "quite possibily the most anti-liberty, anti-justice policy ever", since I can think of a few that could well be considered worse including most of the anti-terrorism measures, anything that makes peacefully protest less lawful, compulsory or even effectively compulsory by hanging essential services or benefit entitlement on them ID Cards, I do think that (almost miraculously) she has continued the tradition that each Home Secretary is more fascist than the last, this runs all the way back to Kenneth Clarke (it is fair to say he wasn't to the right of Kenneth Baker).

[1]Of course beanz meanz heinz(scroll down to 1967, I love that factoid)

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