For Queens and Country.
The opening ceremony of International games are a chance to put your best frock on and show the world your defining features – the Weegies are too tough for frocks, they donned thick wool skirts and skitted round Celtic Park dressed as Tunnock Tea cakes. God knows what we would have got if they’d all been pansies.
John Barrowman emerged from under a kilt to kiss the manly ‘bride’ and show the 42 commonwealth countries where homosexuality is illegal exactly what they were part and parcel of as they dodged the massed Terriers in the wake of the Loch Ness monster. The Forth Bridge was supported on a tower of Irn-Bru cans. Glasgow Pride!
Sky helpfully told us that ‘the Queen would be dropping in’ but ‘no parachutes this time’ – the anti-monarchists cheered at the thought. Madge is getting a little hefty in her dotage; liable to make quite an impression in the sacred turf.
Primary School pupils could join in the fun and gain points for ‘identifying the cultural dance of Scotland’ and Scotland’s ‘heritage and aspirations’ – I suppose growing up thinking that kissing cup cakes and mythical monsters are what your country stands for is better than taking up Jihad.
From somewhere they found 3,000 volunteers still able to get off the sofa and dance enthusiastically to show that not all of Scotland had embraced the deep-fried Mars bar culture. It took six months to find them though.
Harriet Harman emerged on cue in London to demand that those who run around on the sofa brigade’s behalf – the horses and the Premiership footballers – hand over more of their ill-gotten gains to fund spaces for the nation’s army of fat kids to run around in. We used to call them ‘school playing fields’. Now we have ‘specialist sports academies’ for those who have magically managed to acquire an interest in sport without the benefit of a school playing field. Predictably, Harriet wants ‘more women on the boards of sporting organisations’ and ‘increased targets for women participating in sports’ – I had no idea there were such targets to be ‘increased’.
The Conservative government is said to have sold off 10,000 school playing fields – in its 1997 General Election manifesto, Labour pledged to bring the then Tory government’s ‘policy of forcing schools to sell off playing fields to an end’ – though the BBC presenter Tim Harford says until five years ago, the estimate was that 5,000 playing fields had been sold in that time, and that included the land belonging to 3,000 schools that had been closed anyway.
Labour promptly sold off another 200 playing fields and 1,000 smaller pieces of surplus school land to eager developers. As usual they are as bad as each other. Labour may be taking the government to task now for failing to ‘capitalise on the 2012 Olympic expectations’ of healthy kids – but you just know that if they got a chance to cover the playing fields of Eton with concrete, preferably with its currently most famous ex-pupils still wheezing in the middle of the field, they would be personally stoking the cement mixers.
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The 1976 Adoption Act allowed adoptees to trace their natural parents. Adoption was originally all about protecting middle class adopters from the fearful prospect of the working class girl turning up on their doorstep and demanding the return of her baby – over time, the focus became protecting the child.
In the 60s and 70s there was much emotive conversation of the subject of the right of the child to know his/her natural parents – we were told of genetic illnesses that the child had the ‘right’ to know about. Those with a family history of Glaucoma, for instance, are entitled to free testing from age 40.
The same argument is now being applied to those children born of donor eggs or sperm. The child should have the right to know their true parentage.
‘Children can frequently feel a deep sense of loss if they don’t know about their genetic parents, despite having very loving social parents.’
These arguments are perfectly valid – but surely they should apply to all children, and not merely those born of specific circumstances?
How about DNA testing of all children and their birth Mothers? I do realise what a problem this may be for the 5% of Mothers who give birth to children who are not the child of the man named on the birth certificate – a figure which could be as high as 20 – 30% if anyone ever has the courage to release the ‘Liverpool Flats’ survey which allegedly attributes that figure to the number of children born in a set of Liverpool flats who turned out to be nothing to do with the man named on the birth certificate. (It would be Liverpool, wouldn’t it?)
What is a little local embarrassment for the women compared to the mental and physical health of the children? Think of the childreeeeen!
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Best not to have a murder in the family right now. It may feel like the worst thing that could happen to someone you know and love, the most heinous crime imaginable, but Scotland Yard has other priorities these days.
Murder squad officers are being drafted into Scotland Yard’s overstretched child abuse investigation teams to cope with a huge increase in cases.
The Met boosted the size of its sex offences and child abuse unit after the Baby P case to almost 1,200 officers and staff. But the numbers budgeted for had not been realised with a high level of absence with 50 officers on maternity leave and another 150 being diverted to other investigations, including Operation Yewtree which examined Savile and other celebrities.
The Met – which still has 130 officers and staff investigating journalists and phone hacking – has permanently transferred 50 detectives from homicide investigation into the sex offences unit. However, there was still a shortfall with 50 posts unfilled.
A spokesman for the Met said: “This is a crucial time to ensure we are doing all we can to protect the most vulnerable group in our society.”
Priorities Petunia! Those who think they may have seen Jimmy Savile walking across the car park of the Maudsley Hospital 40 years ago have superseded the frail widow tottering home with her pension, the elderly beaten up in care homes, the traumatised ex-servicemen sleeping in our streets – as the most ‘vulnerable group in our society’.
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In America, only in America, the ‘sex-abuse police‘ threatened to cart a 17 year old lad off to the local hospital where he was to be given an injection to ensure he had an erection, where they took photographs of said erection. This is NOT sex abuse.
They needed the pictures to prove that when he had ‘sexted’ a picture of his penis to his girlfriend, that it really was his penis…..the ‘sexting’ apparently WAS sex abuse – since the picture was still on his mobile phone, it apparently comprises ‘possession of child pornography’ (he is still a ‘child’) and carries a four month jail sentence and a lifetime on the sex offenders list.
Modern courtship eh?
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I don’t think I shall bother reading the rest of the papers.
- Johnny Monroe
July 24, 2014 at 12:25 pm -
I’ve a feeling that most dependable of news-gathering sources, 25 Hour News, may be ‘borrowing’ one or two items from here, Anna!
- Moor Larkin
July 24, 2014 at 12:49 pm -
Think we’re gonna need 25 hours a day just to keep up with things………
- Penseivat
July 24, 2014 at 12:50 pm -
“Predictably, Harriet wants …………………………….. ‘increased targets for women participating in sports’ ……..”
I honestly can’t see why Harridan is complaining? Every single one of those porn, sorry, sporting videos her husband was looking at (on expenses) has at least one woman playing such a major role that her absence would destroy the storyline (I doubt if Mr Harman, sorry, Dromey, had googled “Captain Jack with his kit off” instead – he looks much too neanderthal for that). It makes me smile when Harridan harps on about the role of women when she is apparently happy for her husband to watch films where women are treated as sex objects and pieces of meat. Perhaps her feministic attitudes and policies are selective, and political?- Dioclese
July 24, 2014 at 1:00 pm -
To be honest, I think Harman might be the first one up against the wall if I ever get made dictator. And that’s saying a lot considering my opinion of Gordon Brown…
However I am very happy for her to continue as Deputy Labour Leader because that is a certain vote loser in 2015. Miliband as PM and Harman as Deputy PM? Dear God what a thought!
- Dioclese
- JimmyGiro
July 24, 2014 at 12:57 pm -
I do sincerely hope the “sex-abuse police” link goes viral. There must somewhere in the collective human condition, be a sufficient stimulus to wake the sheeple out of their collective trance; hopefully that story is it.
Does envy stop us being human:
-Fear of old age leads to the envy of the young, and the State controlling ‘love’.
-Envy of success and intelligence leads to contempt of spontaneous natural virtues, by supplanting them with fixed outcomes.
-Envy of the family and ‘happy ever after’, leads to the empowerment of sodomites and their ‘social services’.
-Envy of natural beauty, leads to tattoos, piercings, rizlas, and Doc Martins.
-Envy of liberty, leads to socialism through fashion: “Because your worth it”.I wonder who or what we will be asked to hate come the new Autumn season?
- Johnny Monroe
July 24, 2014 at 2:31 pm -
‘The empowerment of sodomites’? I didn’t realise the Marquess of Queensbury was on this forum.
- Johnny Monroe
- Joe Public
July 24, 2014 at 2:14 pm -
Your American story is reflected here in the UK.
Two 16-year olds may legally bonk, but providing photographic evidence of the tryst creates child porn.
- Mudplugger
July 24, 2014 at 10:41 pm -
But not, of course, in Northern Ireland where, despite apparently being an integral part of the UK according to that nice Mr Cameron and the Ulster Unionists, the age of consent there is set at 17.
So that theoretical couple of 16-year-olds may even be properly, officially and legally married but would be well-advised not to book their honeymoon in Northern Ireland, as any marital hanky-panky would be illegal there.
And that’s assuming they are a mixed-sex couple ……. perish the thought that they may share similar genitalia.
- Mudplugger
- CF
July 24, 2014 at 3:05 pm -
You might also have missed the recent case in the UK where “a schoolgirl has received a police caution after texting an explicit photograph of herself to her boyfriend, it has emerged. …
Police were called in because she was under the age of 18 and therefore both were committing an offence of distributing an indecent image of a child.”Those as young as 10 “could face having a criminal record and being placed on the sex offenders’ register.” ““We just want to get the message out there that this is a very serious offence. We need parents and children to realise this.””
So we “protect the children” by deliberately giving them a criminal record and adding more useless entries to the sex offenders’ register (or the Violent and Sex Offenders’ Register to use its proper name and set the context in which such children’s names will be placed). Even a police caution would apparently now appear in a disclosure check.
Note the classification of it as a *very* serious offence, an adjective I’d have reserved for things in the range GBH through armed robbery to murder.
- Duncan Disorderly
July 24, 2014 at 9:24 pm -
The police had to (potentially) ruin her life in order to save her. I dare say this would make a career in social work or childcare, not to mention adoption, practically impossible.
- Curmudgeon
July 25, 2014 at 2:07 am -
I’m outraged that the recipient of the picture, solicited or not, is also guilty of a sex crime. Justice has disappeared up her own arse.
- Moor Larkin
July 25, 2014 at 11:44 am -
There is no such thing a Justice. There are only individual lawyers. The Justice we get will depend on the behaviour of each of those individuals.
- Moor Larkin
- Duncan Disorderly
- Ed P
July 24, 2014 at 3:16 pm -
Revelations, or lessons of history (sorry Harridan, herstory), both strongly suggest we are reaching “the end of days”. The crumbling of civilisation into petty and irrelevant concerns is just such an indicator. Common sense is now uncommon, thanks to the insane H&S “culture” imposed on us by the EUSSR. Obama’s idiotic desire to start a war with Russia is perhaps a sign of the way it will all end.
- Jonathan Mason
July 24, 2014 at 3:26 pm -
In the USA the ‘sex-abuse police‘ threatened to cart a 17 year old lad off to the local hospital where he was to be given an injection to ensure he had an erection, where they took photographs of said erection.
Ay,dios! In the US everything is about plea bargaining and clearly this young man was denying that the dong in question was his own equipment, and the threat was a negotiating tactic. The threat was clearly over the top, but this kind of thing could not actually be done without a court order, which I think would be rather unlikely to be granted. That is a common feature of justice in the US, for example the release of a patient from a mental hospital will have to be rubber stamped by a judge, so if it all goes pear-shaped, ultimately the court is responsible (i.e. not liable), not the psychiatrist.
The issue of teens sexting each other and whether this is child pornography is controversial even within the US. The ultimate fear is that you will have groups of 13-year-olds performing sex acts together and then charging people to watch on Facebook, or something like that, so it is not quite as simple as just giving all minors a blanket waiver to privately sext each other. Another factor is that when these relationships end, there is often bitterness and the private images may become distinctly less private.
- Jonathan Mason
July 24, 2014 at 3:30 pm -
How about DNA testing of all children and their birth Mothers?
Perhaps all children should have the right to demand DNA testing to be sure that the person who they call daddy really is. If another person is found to be the real daddy, then the child should get inheritance rights to their estate as well as to the estate of the putative father. There really is no end to the legal fun that can be had if one puts one’s mind to it.
- CF
July 24, 2014 at 9:01 pm -
“The Met … has permanently transferred 50 detectives from homicide investigation into the sex offences unit. However, there was still a shortfall with 50 posts unfilled.”
That’s tiddly. According to The Register — http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/16/british_cops_cuff_660_paedophile_suspects/ — “…the NCA – [has] 4,000 people on its books tracking, investigating and cuffing paedophiles in the UK”. Surely they could have found the extra 6 suspects for a nice round number?
“The majority of cases have yet to carry charges, the National Crime Agency said. ” but that’s fine, because “The agency estimated that over 400 children have been protected as a result.”
- Pete
July 24, 2014 at 9:51 pm -
@Anna, a very thorough analysis of the many “dossiers” of Geoffrey Dickens MP, which might interest you and your readers.
http://www.saff.ukhq.co.uk/dickens.htm
This man seems to have been motivated by a level of ignorant bigotry not seen (in this country) since the 17th century, by a hatred of anyone more intelligent and better educated than himself, and above all by an unquenchable thirst for personal publicity.
- Johnny Monroe
July 24, 2014 at 11:06 pm -
‘This man seems to have been motivated by a level of ignorant bigotry not seen (in this country) since the 17th century, by a hatred of anyone more intelligent and better educated than himself, and above all by an unquenchable thirst for personal publicity.’
Now, that could be a description of another moral crusader we all know and love on here.
- Johnny Monroe
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