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David Blunkett is the antichrist?

02:30 / 19.03.04

David Blunkett confirms suspicions that his heart is made of stone.

I am so disgusted by this I could puke.

05:38 / 19.03.04

I haven't read your link as I cannot bear to read anymore political crap from the Labour Government (I voted for them and now despise most of them......and I hate Howard the crook even more)

I am usually a forgiving man but I would like to see Blunkett lose his blind dog and try to navigate around a room full of razor blades

The man is either an idiot or the most fascist bastard in British politics

Sadly, with the amount of nonsensical and repressive ideas he is espousing, I suspect, both.

I do not like myself for thinking like this but he is such an out and out control freak it is getting scarey

07:59 / 19.03.04

...

.....................

................................ What?!?!!!?!

Really, there's absolutely nothing one could say about this except, "Oh. My. God."

It's not even fascist, really, just absolutely insane. What sort of mind could possibly conceive an idea like this?

08:12 / 19.03.04

My point exactly.

08:14 / 19.03.04

I don't see why he can't be an idiot and the most fascist bastard in British politics - not that this is really fascist, just (as Pingles has pointed out) completely lunatic and revolting.

I cannot understand how this government can be so penny-pinching when it comes to public services and yet so flagrantly spendthrift in matter such as consultancy for PFI, PFI in general, doing up government offices, etc. Or rather, I don't understand how they get away with it when everyone knows this is WRONG.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:18 / 19.03.04

I've gotta hand it to the guy... every time I think I've got his measure he pulls a new level of cuntiness out of the bag.
It's just crazy. Remember the movie "Brazil", where the families of people tortured to death during interrogation were charged for the amounts of electricity used?
So does Dave. Only he didn't see it as a dark satire.

08:23 / 19.03.04

OK - I'm going to propose something weird and dumb here - playing Devil's Advocate so to speak. Imagine that you've been wrongfully imprisoned. You come out and sue the government for lost earnings and compensation for the horror of the thing. So basically you get given all the money you WOULD have earned, plus a payment for your 'inconvenience'. Now let's propose for a moment that the payment for the stress and everything is appropriate and reasonable. So that's that part compensated for (ie. it's then no longer appropriate to use your pain as a way to get more money or diferent treatment because a value has been set on it and it's been paid). So that leaves you with a person who - in principle - is 'quits' with regard to pain, has had that compensated for. Then say they've had the equivalent of all their back-pay given to them. So they're now pain-compensated and have been paid a full living wage for all the time they were in prison. Could you not argue then quite convincingly that GIVEN THAT YOU'VE ALREADY GIVEN THEM MONEY FOR THE PAIN AND PAID THEIR SALARIES, that their time in prison has now been bought down to the level of paid employment? And that they've had their living costs paid for during the duration of their work and that they should now pay for it. I mean - you could do it earlier in the system and say that their back-pay compensation would have their own personal living costs removed, I guess. It would certainly sound slightly less crass.

Reading back through this it occurs to me again that it's going to sound like a total fascist trip, and that perhaps it is. Certainly it makes me a little uncomfortable. But I think the moral principle here is about whether the pain has been compensated or not. If it has, then you have to completely remove it from the equation when collating everything else.

08:39 / 19.03.04

Well, maybe if your a cold, calculating machine with no human empathy. I don't know Tom, my sense of moral repugance is such that I can't even see this as a reasonable arguement. I understand it, but when such a huge injustice has been done, I feel the state should bend over backwards doing EVERYTHING within their power to make up for the wound they have rent in someone's life. Not drag them through the fucking courts again.

I sometimes think that we ae so used to thinking and talking of the state as a rational entity, we forget that there may be emotions like predjuidice and sheer vindictiveness at work. To quote from the link
"The establishment hate me and people like me as we proved them wrong".

Can't express how disgusted I am with this.

08:43 / 19.03.04

No-one could possibly compensate me for 25 years of wrongful incarceration. If someone offered me a million to spend 25 years in prison I wouldn't even have to think twice before refusing.

One of these poor bastard's baby daughter died whilst he was inside, a large lump sum cannot ever compensate him for the time with her that he lost.

In these situations the compensation money should not be considered as a fair recompense, pain paid up in full, it is merely all that we can repay- the money. It's not sunny afternoons in the park, watching your children grow up or moolit walks with your lover- all of which you have been denied of in prison.

I believe that freedom is not something you can put a price tag on.

To ask for payment for the torture these people have endured is frankly, sick.

I had suspicions but I'm now certain that Blunkett is a sociopath.

08:52 / 19.03.04

KCC - whith regard to your point I think it's a question of ideology driving it. The PFI thing continues the retraction of the social contract which Thatcher started and promotes Britain as a US imitating, pro-business enviroment. Perhaps they see money eventually returning as tax receipts or whatever.

Big article on PFI in this weeks Private Eye, folks.

Have just caught myself haing a fantasy of somehow being on Question Time and glassing David Blunkett with one of those little water glasses. God, I hate this government.

09:05 / 19.03.04

Well, yeah, obviously it's ideology driving it (that Pte Eye article is a good recap, btw, and worth a read if you like having your blood boiled). But why can't people call them on the ideology? How does the ideology become so entrenched that it's impossible for people to stand up to it?

09:12 / 19.03.04

Especially when it's blatantly obvious that it doesn't work!

09:32 / 19.03.04

I think it's too deep in the politcal culture of this country now, it's the strand the unities both the Tories and Labour.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

11:28 / 19.03.04

A bit of an obvious point no one's raised in this thread, or in the original article : If this is 'fair' then why aren't actual criminals who are guilty charged for their use of Her Majesty's Hostelries?

It seems a bit fucking rich (excuse the pun) to bill wrongly imrisoned innocents for board and lodgings, but expect the taxpayer to foot the bill for the fucking rapists, murderers and thieves among us.

Or am I a fascist?

Tryphena Absent

12:22 / 19.03.04

Tom, the problem is that you're assuming that those wrongly imprisoned will recieve adequate compensation and I betcha anything that isn't the case. These people have been locked up with a load of hardcore criminals for who knows how long because someone made a dreadful mistake. If that happened to me then I'd expect exactly what you outline and I wouldn't want to give any of it back because I'd have been failed by the system that the government says works.

Blunkett's a twat. He can't tell his left from his right. I propose that he needs to die. It's obvious that cutting out his tongue and stopping him from hearing would only cause an ascension.

12:23 / 19.03.04

Well, maybe if your a cold, calculating machine with no human empathy. I don't know Tom, my sense of moral repugance is such that I can't even see this as a reasonable arguement. I understand it, but when such a huge injustice has been done, I feel the state should bend over backwards doing EVERYTHING within their power to make up for the wound they have rent in someone's life. Not drag them through the fucking courts again.

I completely agree that dragging them through the courts again is appaling, but the rest doesn't work. I mean - if the financial settlement doesn't compensate them for the pain then what does it do? It's supposed to be an estimation of the consequences of the time in prison, the anguish and all that, and an attempt to turn that into comprehendible financial terms. I'm not saying that's necessarily the right approach, but it is the approach that we've taken as a society - if someone is wronged in such a way they get it compensated for in the abstraction of currency. I mean, we're all comfortable with the idea that people get paid for their time and that they on the whole have to do things that they don't want to do in order to live. This is only an enormous concentration of that policy - there are only minor qualitative differences. I mean frankly you could argue that if they're not adequately conpensated for the horrors they've experienced then they should be appealing their award and getting more money from the government.

With regard to why the imprisoned don't pay for their accomodation - well in a way they do: they're not able to get any work of any kind or earn any money. The principle would be - I imagine - that the person who is released from a wrongful imprisonment is given money appropriate to loss of earnings, so in principle is retrospectively considered to have been able to earn money during their time in prison, and presumably at a higher level than the Home Office would charge for the accomodation. Given that they were 'able to earn money' (in a sense), and given that the issue of their pain and inconvenience had been abstracted out into a different agreement, it would seem only reasonable that they should pay for their accomodation.

12:25 / 19.03.04

Anna - absolutely, I'm very much talking about the principle and not the actualities of the situation. Just saying that given the system that exists at the moment that there is an argument in there somewhere that explains this kind of behaviour, even if we consider it to be flawed, clumsy or wrong.