Boris Baby, Water Cannons And Some Stupid Racists

Photo by LondonSLR

Here's a round-up of my latest posts from Londonist. If you clicked through and read them that would be lovely. And so would you.

EDL march results in arrests. Never ones to avoid a potential ruck, the English Defence League (EDL) marched on Downing Street yesterday in an anti-Muslim protest following last week’s brutal attack on a soldier in Woolwich.

As a slight aside to this, Kettlemag asked me to comment in the aftermath of Woolwich. Here's the article they wrote.

Westminster council’s hotel bill for putting up families waiting for housing has hit £3m in the last six months.In February, the cost had reached £2m and back in December last year, Westminster was just one of several London councils breaking a six-week limit for families to be kept in temporary accommodation. 

Court rules Boris Johnson's alleged affair in the public interest. As the whole country and not just Boris Johnson is now painfully aware, an appeal court ruled yesterday that the public has a right to know about a child the mayor allegedly fathered following an extra-marital affair

Police numbers cut but water cannons on the agenda. Figures from the Metropolitan Police have revealed that nearly 3000 officers have been cut, mainly from borough teams, since 2010.

Westminster sells off signposts. Anyone who’s ever been tempted to pinch one of London’s more famous signposts will have the opportunity to buy them at auction instead.

RMT union members working on the Piccadilly line have voted in favour of industrial action over a series of unresolved disputes.

A bridge too far? The continued debate over east London river crossings received new input yesterday after Transport for London (TfL) published the responses to its consultation. 

The former south London dog track in Catford has been earmarked for nearly 600 new homes in a £117m redevelopment scheme.

Dutch-style roundabouts with segregated cycle lanes could be introduced in London if trials taking place at the Transport Research Laboratory are successful.

12 Firefighters, A Dummy And Hadrian's Wall

On the 7-10 June 2013, a team of 12 firefighters from Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Service will be walking along the route of Hadrian’s Wall, whilst carrying a training dummy on a stretcher.

They aim to complete the 84 miles within 96 hours. This is a LOT.

They want to raise £5000 for the Firefighter's Charity and they need your help.

The Firefighter's Charity receives no government funding and rely on private donations to offer physical rehabilitation and recuperation to members of the fire and rescue community in times of need. They also help firefighters who have suffered injury, illness, stress or bereavement.

They deserve your support. Please do them a massive favour and donate a few quid. I mean, walking Hadrian's Wall with a dummy and a stretcher? That takes dedication.

Visit here to donate. 

Follow on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you.

 

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Photo by chrisjohnbeckett

So let's imagine you're sitting in your home watching TV one night. There's a knock on the door and when you open it, the police are standing on your doorstep. You've been accused of doing something unsavoury, I don't know, let's imagine you've been accused of waving your knob at schoolgirls. The police have several witnesses who say you did it; even the police say they're positive you're guilty. You're bang to rights, right?

Except you didn't do it.

You're arrested and charged, then the local paper picks up the story. Suddenly, you're that 'Local Man Charged With Sex Offence'. Because, of course, if you've been arrested and charged by definition you're guilty. Even people who know you think 'no smoke without fire' because that's what everyone not in possession of the full story and your knowledge you didn't do it thinks. But the moment it appeared in the paper, your name is irrevocably linked to that accusation. Even if the charges are eventually dropped or you're acquitted, your may have lost your job, your partner, access to your children and your neighbours think you're a dodgy perv.

Following the Jimmy Savile debacle and the recent high-profile arrests of a variety of men accused of sex offences, there's been a lot of discussion about the naming of defendants prior to conviction. In fact, until 1988, rape suspects were given anonymity under the 1976 Sexual Offences Act. Bar Council chairwoman Maura McGowan QC said in this Independent article in February that the stigma of sex offence allegations means that a defendant should stay anonymous until they're actually convicted.

It's worth pointing out as well what appears to be some conflict over the point at which defendants should lose their anonymity - some seem to say when the suspect being charged, while others say when they're convicted. Being charged with a crime is not the same as being convicted (though people seem to believe otherwise). In fact, the excellent A Barrister's Wife blog demonstrates pretty clearly that being innocent is no barrier to being charged. Two cases on the blog, the paedophile and the child pornographer are particularly note-worthy - both involved failings by the police and the CPS, a climate of paranoia over sex crimes (particularly where children are involved) and could have led to the ruin of the defendants lives, not to mention potential threats to their safety, if their names were made public. The 'no smoke without fire' myth is also one which A Barrister's Wife examines and how proposed changes to Legal Aid could lead to defendants being pushed to plead guilty even when they're not.

In 2010, the coalition government put forward proposals to grant anonymity to rape suspects, but the plans were later abandoned after criticism from women's groups and Justice Minister Crispin Blunt's belief that it would prevent other victims coming forward. There's obviously a strong case for this argument - the publicity surrounding the Savile investigation prompted more victims to go to the police. Subsequent investigations have found that the police covered up allegations over a long period of time which, had they been made public, could have prevented further attacks.

But is naming a defendant in the hope that it will prompt other victims to speak out a good enough reason to lay waste to their life and those of their family? Is it even a reliable way to seek out further victims? The Savile case made national headlines. The guy accused of flashing at schoolgirls will only make the local paper. Yes, it could be just enough to lead to further crimes being uncovered (assuming there are any in the first place), but since it's the police's actual day job to, y'know, investigate a crime, it's not unreasonable to think that they would turn up further offences during their investigation. This argument also assumes a suspect is guilty until they're proved otherwise - which is against the basic tenet of the legal rights of the accused.

Defendant anonymity has a lot of public support - a ComRes survey for The Independent actually found that more than three quarters of respondents believed anonymity should be granted. That's not to say that sheer numbers should swing the argument but can that 76% really be accused of perpetuating victim-blaming or myths about false reporting?

People opposed to granting anonymity for defendants say that it amounts to protecting the suspect and I can see the validity of that argument, I really can. But it also protects defendants who are simply not guilty in the first place.

Top 10 Annoying Corporate Jargon Phrases

Well, seeing as everyone else is doing it today. In no particular order:

1. 'Reach out'
No-one just speaks to anyone any more. They reach out to them. When I hear this phrase, I imagine a gospel choir singing it and a big God-like hand stretching out.

2. 'Going forward'
I used to use this phrase all the time because everyone around me did. Then I did a writing course run by two long-time journalists who said at the beginning that if anyone used it, they would expel them from the class.

3. 'Circle up'
I had never heard this before until a couple of years ago. In fact, when I did hear it, I had to ask what it meant. It means you tell your colleagues something.

4. 'Huddle'
As above. It's a meeting. Nothing more. Yet somehow it tries to evoke something more.

5. 'Think outside the box'
I was astonished that people even still use this. But they do.

6. 'Let's take this offline'
Another oldie, but still heard in every meeting I've been to where people have something off-topic to discuss. Yet they use it with no sense of irony.

7. 'On the radar'
This is quite popular where I work. I guess the more usual phrase of someone simply saying they are aware of something didn't quite cut it.

8. 'Let's whiteboard that'
Transforming nouns into verbs appears to be popular in the corporate world. This is kind of a brainstorming expression (itself irritating jargon) where you scribble a load of old bollocks onto a projection screen by accident using a permanent marker pen.

9. 'Let's action that'
No, you're just going to do it. Don't dress it up.

10. 'Bandwidth'
Do you have time to do this project? Time is the same as bandwidth. It's just five letters longer.

Thatcher, Benefit Caps And A Completely Free Boris Survey

Photo by petach123

Here are my latest round of posts from Londonist. Please do us a favour and click through for a read.

The news that London mayor Boris Johnson plans to spend £160,000 on a survey to find out what people think of him hasn’t gone down too well with his City Hall opposition parties. So we created our own survey on Facebook.

After the last couple of weeks, we thought that Londoners would have had their fill of Margaret Thatcher-based controversy. Yet we’d be wrong. Art posters of the late Baroness Thatcher have been temporarily banned from Westminster tube station after tube advertisers CBS Outdoor deemed them potentially ‘insensitive’.

The news that Big Ben would be silenced for the duration of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral today prompted us to examine the other occasions when London’s best-known bong and/or its attendant bells went quiet. Despite press reports to the contrary today, the mechanism has been stopped on many occasions.

Four London boroughs saw a benefits cap put in place today ahead of a national rollout.
Couples living in Croydon, Bromley, Haringey and Enfield will see a cap of £500 per week, while single people can expect no more than £350 per week, as part of the government’s drive to cut benefit payments.

London’s solitary air ambulance could gain a companion if plans to seek funding from the City are successful.

FSA abolition - City loses one regulator, gains three more. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has been abolished and replaced with three new organisations to oversee banking. But as abbreviations abound, who does what?

Plebgate rides again. Former chief whip Andrew Mitchell has made a complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) over the Metropolitan Police’s investigation of last year’s ‘Plebgate’ allegations against him.

How To Be A Really Annoying Junk Mailer

Charity bags, free newspapers, takeaway menus, bits of badly-shorn paper asking if I need a cleaner/gardener/plumber/man with a van, leaflets for local businesses and taxi cards. Otherwise known as a pre-emptive strike on my recycling bin.

Last year, I managed to eliminate quite a bit of this by getting a sticker for the door from Stop Junk Mail.org.uk. Obviously there are still a few leafleters who ignore it, businesses who think it doesn't apply to them (local councillors around election time are particularly guilty of this) and people who don't speak English. I did manage to nab one repeat offender - deliverers of the local freesheet - and pointed out the sticker, whereupon the guy tried to engage me in a debate about whether a newspaper is the same as a leaflet, but mainly the sticker has done a fine job.

But it's not just prospective cleaners and dodgy Chinese takeaways who deliver junk mail. Oh no. Royal Mail do it too, and your cheery postie has been instructed to ignore 'no junk mail stickers'. The good news is that you can opt out of Royal Mail junk mail. The bad news is that, in the words of Boromir, one does not simply opt out of the Royal Mail junk mail scheme. I filled in a card requesting to opt out and sent it off. Two weeks later I got a letter cunningly disguised as junk mail and addressed 'to the Householder' which demands I fill in a form and send it off. But as Stop Junk Mail points out, there's no confirmation of registration, your opt out expires after two years (RM don't remind you to renew it) and you can't do it online, so Royal Mail make it as awkward as they possibly can.

A combination of opting out of the edited version of the electoral register and the mailing preference service (MPS) take care of random companies sending me unsolicited mail, but annoyingly, companies who I do actually have dealings with seem to see my business with them as a green light to send me reams of paper destined for shredding. Barclaycard sent me a monthly letter offering me 0% deals until I found a checkbox to stop it, Santander seem to not understand the option on their own website for paperless billing and my home insurance company send frequent letters offering finance on god knows what.

Whenever I fill in a form, I always indicate I don't want junk mail yet it never seems to stop them sending it. Mango clothing bombarded me with catalogues and spam after I bought one item online until I lost my rag and revenge-spammed their Facebook page to tell them to stop.

All I need now is to stop the Inland Revenue writing to someone at my house who has never lived there and TfL from pursuing a person who actually lives at a completely different address.

Twitter Mobbery And Free Speech

Anyone who spends a decent amount of time on Twitter has probably come across Old Holborn. Many will probably have been offended by him at some point because he was kind of a twat and tended to post things to wind people up. Some people tweeted abusive messages back to him, some flounce-unfollowed him. Some ignored him. Some reported him to the police.

On this occasion, Old Holborn had tweeted some rather uncomplimentary things about Liverpool, Hillsborough and the death of Jamie Bulger. Crass? Yes. Offensive? Yes. Illegal? Well, um... The resulting outrage emanating from the general direction of Liverpool led to Holborn's real name being exposed, along with his address, phone number and details of his employer. He also received death threats and the aforementioned complaint to the police.

Much as I disliked some of Old Holborn's tweets and thought the persistent anarchy schtick was rather juvenile (though I'm sure someone will be along to tell me I wasn't reading it ironically enough or I've missed the point or something), here's the thing. He was exercising his right to free speech. We seem to now have this bizarre and absurd situation in this country where someone can actually accuse you of a criminal offence simply because you offended them. It is, pardon my vernacular, fucking madness to be able to hold up a piece of statute and tell someone that because you didn't like what they said, you're going to complain to the police.

Section 127. No one to blame but himself. @old_holborn twitter.com/CueballHead/st…
— JUSTICE for the 96 (@CueballHead) April 20, 2013

This is effectively the government telling us what we can and can't say. And some people are charging happily headlong into using that legislation to shut other people up when you don't agree with them. And for anyone who comes along and suggests that the notion of free speech means one can be racist, homophobic (or anything ist/phobic for that matter), you are wrong. The piece of legislation held up in the above tweet is nothing to do with hate speech or discrimination.

People are so busy looking for something to be offended or outraged about that they can't seem to see the logical conclusion of these kind of ludicrous abuses of free speech. Because the government would never report someone to the police because they were offended, would they? No, of course not.

Oh god, I've become Old Holborn.

Mayor's Question Time & Other Stories

Photo by acornuser

Well, one other story. I've been busy, you see.

Mayor's Question Time - the edible bus stop edition. After the fiasco of last month’s failed grilling of London mayor Boris Johnson (in which he referred to London Assembly members as “great, supine, protoplasmic invertebrate jellies”), we wondered what could possibly be left to discuss. A lot, it seems.

Met encouraged rape victims to drop claims. An Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report found that a rape victim had been ‘encouraged’ by the Met to drop her claim against a man who later murdered his two children. The Southwark Sapphire unit are also said to have pressurised other victims into dropping their allegations to improve detection rates.

International Women's Day

Today it was International Women's Day.

If you ignore all the 'but what about the mens' on Twitter, there was a lot of press about various women's issues. One of them was the Home Office telling us that we 'must do more to end violence against women and girls'. There's clearly a rich seam of horrible shit to be explored here.

For starters, how about sorting out the Met's Sapphire unit so they don't pressure women to drop rape allegations for the sake of their detection stats. Or not imprisoning women for reporting rape. Or not ignoring women who report domestic violence. Or accepting that domestic violence isn't just about a slap upside the head. Or not subjecting women to a daily cavalcade of tedious and offensive sexual harrassment. Or not telling women that objecting to a daily dose of tits in the media makes them humourless, ugly and jealous. Or not believing that women who are raped are to blame. Or not helping women who tell the police that they are in danger. Or not dismissing vulnerable teenagers being abused as liars and slags. Or not prioritising car crime over rape. Or not telling female debators (or 'girls' as the Spec says) at Glasgow University that jeers about their looks and breast size are 'all part of debate'. Or the police not committing the sexual assaults themselves to save the public the bother.

Just a thought.

Happy International Women's Day.

Awesome Fish Pie

I love fish pie. Not the ready meal ones you get in the supermarket - I have yet to find a decent one and I've tried a few - but a proper home-made one. Here's a recipe for one.

Serves 2

1 packet mixed seafood
1 salmon fillet, skinless
1 small cod fillet
1 box smoked oysters
Fresh dill, parsley
About 6 spring onions
2 hard boiled eggs
Zest and juice from one lemon
Mashed potato
Some grated cheese for topping, a very mature cheddar is probably best

For the sauce, butter, flour, milk, salt & pepper

Hard boil the eggs while you chop up the herbs and spring onions, grate the lemon (avoiding grating your fingers at the same time). Also boil your potatoes though if you really can't be arsed to make your own mash, there's absolutely nothing wrong with using instant. Run the eggs under the cold tap to cool them down, then slice. Mash the potatoes using a bit of butter and milk.

Grill or pan fry the salmon and cod, just enough to make it easier to break up into bits. You can obviously substitute any other fish if you prefer, or just use a mix of seafood and prawns. Scallops go quite well in this too. The smoked oysters are gorgeous and give it a bit of extra flavour.

Make the sauce the usual way (melt the butter, stir in the flour to make a paste, then add the milk slowly). When it gets to a decent consistency, season, add the lemon zest/juice, herbs and spring onions, then put the fish and seafood in.

Tip the sauce mixture into a dish, place the slices of egg on top, then spoon the mash over that. Sprinkle the grated cheese on the potato. Bake it in the oven at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes.

The recipe is pretty flexible; as mentioned, you can put more or less whatever fish or seafood you fancy in it. You can also swap the spring onions for capers or leeks. Just make sure you season the sauce well otherwise it'll be a bit bland.