arming Britain

These kids and their gangs, it’s like mass generational suicide.

It’s like those Amazonian tribes who killed themselves en masse when the white man came and cut the trees down. They knew that there was no hope, that if this what what the world had to offer them now on they may as well say: “No thanks, we’re good. It’s not worth the trouble.”

Well that’s what these kids in gangs have got going on. A lot of them live shitty no-hope lives in shitty no-hope slums; they don’t care if they get killed. It’s not bravado. They just don’t care.

But we shouldn’t encourage them.  And in a way that’s what seasons like Channel 4’s disarming Britain really achieve.  Every time a new story breaks about a fatal stabbing a bunch of kids think “Shit, it’s dangerous out here.  We need to get us some knives.”  Every time a new area is labelled ‘Britain’s Worst’ all the kids think “Shit. We can be badder than them.”

Yeah, there’s a lot of kids killing each other.  But instead of demonising them, parents need to engage with their youth.  Not necessarily just in terms of parents to their respective children, but rather of everyone in society accepting their parental role over our youth. 

Young people never have any direct involvement with civil society other than through school or the legal system – both (arguably) oppressive institutions.  They have no reason to feel like they’re part of the grown up world at all.  So they made their own world with its own hierarchies, and its own loyalties, and its own oppression.  It’s like Lord of  the Flies.

The answer isn’t fear.  Too many people are scared of kids.  They’re not monsters.  If you treat them like human beings then they behave like human beings.  That means a kind of mutual respect.  You’re still the adult; but through your behaviour you’re showing them what it means to be an adult too. 

The last thing you want to do is cower when you’re faced with them, to give them a sense of disproportionate power and stature.  That’s when the trouble begins.  If you behave like a pussy then they’ll treat you like a pussy.

Watch, I’ll probably get robbed by a 15 year old on a mountain bike now.

Filed under: Uncategorized

greedy fuckers

The government are taking more out of our hard earned and already pitiful wages than at any time since the height of Tory belligerence in 1991, says a story in the Sunday Telegraph.

The proportion of household income taken in tax rose from 34pc to 34.6pc in the first quarter of this year – the highest level since Spring 1991.

Calculations by Capital Economics, based on figures from the Office of National Statistics, show that if you earn about £23,800 the taxman now takes £8,222 a year direct taxes.

And what are they doing with our money?

We have two stupid, profligate overseas adventures in the Arab world that are costing us dear in people, money and international goodwill.

The technology and infrastructure of surveillance has been extended nationally to an unprecendented and truly Orwellian degree.

Politicians themselves squirm in sleaze and corruption scandals while the rest of us struggle to continue our wretched, exploited and numb lives.

No matter what party is in power all this will continue. Elections offer no choice. No wonder no one votes.

Filed under: politics , money, politics, tax

Bloody Bastards

As if life on the shop floor wasn’t shit enough. Now retailers have clubbed together to dispense vigilante justice by creating a database of workers who’ve been sacked after accusations of theft or dishonesty. No matter if there’s no proof; all that is required is suspicion, neatly reversing the age-old principle of “innocent until proven guilty”.

Employers are able to enter the details of any employee that they’ve sacked or has left a job “whilst under investigation for acts of dishonesty toward the company including theft of money or merchandise, falsification or forgery of documents and causing damage to company property.” Later, when they are thinking of hiring new staff, managers are able to enter applicants’ names in to the register to see if they have left their previous job under any suspicion of wrongdoing.

Bosses can enter the details of sacked workers regardless of whether they’ve been convicted of any crime. You’re guilty until proven innocent.

This diabolical scheme is called the National Staff Dismissal Register and is the brainchild of business pressure group Action Against Business Crime, a joint venture between the British Retail Consortium and the Home Office. They claim that proper investigation of dishonesty is “time consuming and costly” and that “the current system of employment references is too easily circumvented.”

As I understood it an employer can’t give you a bad reference; if they’ve got nothing nice to say then they just say nothing at all. If your manager has good grounds to suspect that you’re guilty of some crime then the onus is on them to report you to the police. Without following proper legal processes, flawed though they are, any suspicion they have is just that: mere suspicion.

The scheme is clearly open to abuse. All kinds of petty prejudices and rivalries get played out at work, it’s in the nature of competitive hierarchies. Now a boss who holds a grudge against you can not only sack you, but also shut you out of the job market altogether. It is, in effect, an employment blacklist operating outside of the legal system.

Shit, I’ve worked in retail and when you’re on the minimum wage you’ve got to hustle to survive. Everyone’s on the fucking take, from the area manager to the checkout girl. It’s part of the culture. But there’s no solidarity, because anything that you take is one less thing that they can take. It’s certainly not pretty.

AABC stress that their register has been developed in full consultation with the Information Commissioner, which makes you wonder what the fuck he’s there for. But they say that gathering this kind of information on people is not new and already done in other sectors. Use of the database will aparently be restricted to “those categories of jobs where taking on an applicant with a previous dismissal for specific reasons poses a risk to the company,” although they admit that this will in practice include most jobs.

The scheme apparently meets all data protection laws, which means that staff will be informed when their details are logged on the register and they will have the opportunity to alter any information held on them that is incorrect. In practice though, since all that is recorded is a suspicion, there would be no way to dispute the validity of the information held on you. Irdial from Blogdial gives the legal lowdown: “Entries have traditionally been regarded as ‘accurate’ if they accurately reflect what the source says. so if an employer passes on that he believes a particular employee had stolen from him, an entry that says “employer X informs us the Y stole from him” is “accurate” – even if Y didnt steal from X.”

The only next step would be to sue the employer for defamation of character. Except that you can’t get legal aid for defamation cases, and the thought of some minimum wage retail worker scraping together the pennies to hire a legal team that could take on a big box retailer like Asda beggars belief.

This is a nightmare of truly Orwellian proportions, significant to raise me out of my long standing writer’s block and wax polemic about its implications.

That big business thinks it can circumvent the legal system is scandalous, but completely unsurprising given the enthusiasm shown for databases of personal information here in Airstrip One.

According to the BBC, Harrods, Selfridges and Reed Managed Services have already signed up to the scheme. It went live at the end of May.

Good thing its only retail or most of the chief executives of FTSE500 companies would need to be on there too…

Filed under: Uncategorized , business, crime, databases, surveillance