Should The UK Reinstate The Death Penalty?
Today in Manchester, two young female police officers, were shot dead by a man wanted for murder.
It is the worst murder of members of the police since 1966. At that time, when Harry Roberts and two others, shot dead three policemen, I was serving in a pub in North London.
The mood in the pub that evening was sombre and one of horror. Few suggested that the recent abolishment of capital punishment the year before was to blame. Although a couple did get shouted down, for proposing thoughts about dead policemen.
Remember too, that it was soon after the Hanratty case, which did a lot to discredit the death penalty in the UK, as many believed Hanratty to be innocent.
I suspect that like in 1966, there will be a lot of discussion tonight and generally despite the sex and age of the victims, I suspect there will not be a large groundswell of support for the return of the death penalty.
There does appear to be one big difference between the murders today and that of those in 1966. Harry Roberts went and hid from the police, whereas Dale Cregan today, just walked into a police station and gave himself up. Perhaps he understood the horror, of what he had done, whereas Roberts didn’t! If Cregan did, we’ve moved on in the forty plus years.
Those New Exams
I suspect, that in twenty years time, we’ll look back and say that Michael Gove’s proposed changes are wrong.
I say this because my youngest son, was the in the first year to take GCSEs exclusively. The teachers didn’t know how to teach for the new exams and the results were bad.
If change is needed, it should be gradual, not stepwise.
Romney Drops Himself In It!
Mitt Romney has some interesting views on those who vote for Obama. Read about them here on the BBC.
Now Mormon Mitt is the sort of politician, I wouldn’t vote for. But lets hear his views on Iran, the death penalty and that viral video attacking Islam.
But with a few more gaffs like yesterday, I suspect he’ll lose the election.
Did The Government Dither Over Northern Rock?
Sir Nicholas Macpherson was the senior civil servant in the Treasury, when Northern Rock ran into difficulties. He has just appeared before the Treasury Select Committee and there is a report here. This is the first paragraph.
The Treasury’s most senior civil servant has told MPs the government should have been quicker to nationalise Northern Rock following its collapse.
It doesn’t appear to me, that the government appeared to act quickly at all.
Perhaps, Gordon Brown was just being too prudent!
On the other hand, I’ve done financial modelling with loan companies and know that if you decide to run them down collecting all the payments aggressively, you can often retrieve a bad situation.
So perhaps, they were hoping Northern Rock would all come good! It didn’t!
Remember though, the bank did employ a lot of people in Labour’s heartland. So liquidation would have been a bad option for NuLabor.
Duchess Pictures Row Goes From French Farce To An Irish One
It would appear from what I’ve read and heard on the radio, that both in France and Ireland the reason for publishing was to try to prop up rapidly dwindling circulations. According to a well-know media commentator, one of the most likely outcomes in Ireland, as both the owners have disowned a unilateral decision of an editor is that a hundred jobs might be lost.
I think that the Duke and Duchess have been a bit slow here. The damage has been done and nothing will repair it. But a substantial donation to his favourite charities might help.
I also think they’ll be also be more careful where they sunbathe.
Is This £300m Home Unlucky?
It’s reported in the Standard that a house is being sold for £300m in London.
As the two previous owners died prematurely, would you want to buy such an unlucky house?
I wouldn’t even if I had the money.
And if I did, I certainly would spend that amount on a house.
Do We Learn From Football Crowd Tragedies?
In my lifetime, there has been three football crowd tragedies; Ibrox in 1971, Bradford City in 1985 and Hillsborough in 1989.
We may have dealt with the problems inside the grounds by better stadium design and rebuilding, but have we properly dealt with the problems the tragedies create for the emergency services and especially the paramedics.
Sadly, I think that it took some time for the message to get through. For example, with the latest news on Hillsborough, it becomes apparent that the paramedics couldn’t cope and this was probably the case at other non-football-related disasters in recent years. The attacks on the London Underground on the 7th of July 2005 come to mind. In that attack, how many lives were also saved as one bomb went off outside the Royal College of Surgeons?
We have to accept that tragedies and disasters will happen. But are we prepared for the worst, when they do? This week for instance there was a coach crash on the A3 at Hindhead, where three died. Did the emergency services of rural Sussex cope well?
Knowing the A14 well, what would happen if a coach crossed the dual-carriageway at say Newmarket and hit another head-on going the other way? The nearest hospitals are in Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, almost twenty miles away. Do the emergency services train for such an emergency? Or do they hope it won’t happen?
What I feel sorry about the past couple of decades is that Bradford was the wake-up call and everybody ignored it! There was a mixture there of a dilapidated wooden stand with rubbish underneath it. Just one stray cigarette was al it took.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like the wooden escalator at Kings Cross, that caught fire in 1987. It probably wasn’t that simple, but surely the engineers in London Underground must have thought about the danger, after the fire at Bradford.
But the modern safety culture may be just that. Modern!
In the 1970s, I worked on a chemical plant and an instrument that the section I worked for, found that the plant was going into a regime, where it could explode. The plant manager immediately shut the plant and informed the makers. They informed him, that what we had proven, couldn’t be measured and we should keep the plant going. Two years later their plant buried itself in a hillside, killing a number of people.
So we were right! And they were wrong! It is not a nice thing to say, as people died, because of the blinkered thinking of others.
Even today, on my travels around the UK, visiting all the football grounds, one stood out as a place, where a bad accident could happen again! Not I hasten to add in the ground itself, but in the railway station, which brings large numbers of supporters to the ground.
An Interesting Slant On Apple
I found this article on the BBC web site. I like this interesting snippet.
This is what happens when a company is too cheap to invest in research and development. Did you know that Apple spends far less on R&D than any of its rivals – a paltry 2% of revenues, versus 14% for Google and Microsoft?
I’ve run R&D and you must spend to keep ahead of the game. Perhaps, Apple are too interested in making money?
But mugs will still queue up for the iPhone5. I won’t!
Carry On Baling Out
It has just been announced that Germany’s top court, has allowed the Euro bail-out to go ahead.
Will this allow the solution to go ahead? Possibly! But what about the Dutch elections?
French Tragedy
The French seem to be making a wonderful mess of the murders at Annecy. In The Times yesterday, they showed that the murder site was now covered in cows.
But it would appear that every theory and all the evidence has been freely distributed to the media, by the so-called police.
Yet again, the French police are living up to their reputation as some of the worst investigators in the world.
It does seem that this case is following all of the pattern of previous cases of British people murdered in France.
It would also seem that if you wanted to murder someone, France is the best place to do it, as you’ll never be found out.
Let’s hope that Scotland Yard can sort this one out and give the French the evidence.
The Anonymous Widower 