Round-up for yesterday
Having finally got some sleep after three long days at work, I decided to get round to posting a full blog entry. It’s going to be more of a round-up rather than one long piece.
(1) The Jewish cemetries getting vandalised. This is terrible, but it hardly counts as “a community under siege” as Melanie Phillips calls it. Let’s face it, this is a couple of incidents by a gang of probably neo-Nazi white thugs, the like of which has existed on the fringes of British society for decades, and the vast majority of people would report whoever was doing this if they knew. I wonder why some Jewish writers seek to exaggerate the situation …
(2) A guy from Cyprus yesterday got ten life sentences for raping several women in north London and Hertfordshire. It transpired that this man had 21 previous convictions for sexual assaults in Cyprus, and this led to the obvious question of whether it should be so easy for foreigners to enter the UK. Well, this guy entered under the same rules as everyone else from Cyprus does, and the vast majority of them are not criminals, much less rapists. Bear in mind that the UK has one of the more stringent sets of rules for entering and leaving the country for other EU countries – on the continent, one usually doesn’t need to show a passport, or any ID at all, to travel across borders (besides which, land borders are crossed by thousands of minor roads, and it’s impossible to secure them all short of using the “old east” approach). Perhaps police forces should make public details of people with multiple convictions for sex offences, but I don’t want to see the UK go down the US road whereby any non-citizen with a criminal record can simply be kicked out, regardless of how much of his family lives there. (Update: the G8 summit is discussing setting up a world database of paedophiles, but not all sex offenders abuse children. Why no database of repeat sexual offenders of any sort?)
(3) So Bob Geldof doesn’t like people selling Live8 tickets on eBay. He thinks they’re scum, and that eBay are “pimps” for allowing it to go on. He even advocates people sabotaging the auctions by posting bids of tens of millions which they couldn’t possibly afford. Well, if these people win the bids, they are obliged to pay, regardless of how much! (Or perhaps they can withdraw their bids just before the close of the auction?) But so what if people have got something and want to sell it to make a quick buck? And what about people who get tickets and then find that they can’t go? But eBay has always sold pretty much anything and everything, and besides which, where would people go? People think of eBay automatically when they think of selling things online or of online auctions. It’ll take a bit more than a controversy over online ticket touting for this to change.
