More database fun

Thousands of DNA samples taken from criminals have been filed under the names of innocent people, it was revealed yesterday.

There are 550,000 false, misspelt or incorrect names on the Government's vast DNA database, which contains more than 4million samples.

That means one in every eight records is thought to be inaccurate.

[...]

Most alarming is the revelation that many criminals are using other people's names if they are caught.

Home Office Minister Meg Hillier gave the example of somebody who was arrested, and gave their sister's name.

"That data would be on the database," she told MPs.

Politicians are worried that people could be charged with crimes they have not committed if DNA belonging to a criminal who gave their name later turned up at a crime scene.

It was stressed that innocent people could provide an authentic sample of their own DNA to prove it did not match.

However, they would still be forced to undergo the stress and humiliation of a criminal investigation.

Presumably, the police could easily verify someone's identity, simply by searching them. After all, they managed it when they arrested Euan Blair.

But, in over half a million cases, they simply haven't bothered, but have stored the DNA, without knowing for sure whether it actually belongs to the person they think it does.

And some among us want to give these idiots a database containing the DNA of every man, woman, and child in this country! Still, we shouldn't be too worried: on the basis of this showing, the Plods would struggle to organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone a DDR-style police state...

Hat-tip: House of Dumb

The morally bankrupt left

The deputy leader of the party that has ruled this country for nearly eleven years was answering questions from readers of the Independent on Monday. Along the line, this interesting little nugget arose:

David Newton, Edinburgh: Fidel Castro: hero of the left, or dangerous authoritarian dictator?

Harriet Harman: Hero of the left – but time for Cuba to move on.

She's right, of course: plenty on the left do regard Old Uncle Fidel as a hero. And arguably, David Newton was creating a false dichotomy: being a "dangerous authoritarian dictator" is no bar to being hero-worshipped by the left. Indeed, some might say that it was a necessary qualification.

But since Harman is a proud member of the (far) left, one assumes that she was proclaiming Castro to be one of her heroes. Now, how long do you think any vaguely right-wing contemporary politician would last, proclaiming his admiration for, say, General Franco? Indeed, just think how quickly Nigel Hastilow's career was killed off after he expressed agreement with Enoch Powell, a man who, so far as I am aware, was not responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people. Among those who weighed in against Hastilow was one Harriet Harman, who said that his comments demonstrated that the Tories were "the same old nasty party". If admirers of Powell are "nasty" what, I wonder, are admirers of Castro? Is there a word strong enough to describe them?

Of course, unlike Nigel Hastilow, Harriet Harman won't lose her job over her admiration for Castro, because the media, which launched a witch hunt against Hastilow, is largely ignoring this. Only the Times and the Spectator's Coffee House blog have devoted any real attention to Harman's comments, although the Daily Mail did mention them, very briefly, in passing. The BBC, which happily stoked the flames for the burning of the heretic Hastilow, makes no mention of this. Quelle surprise!

Harman's remarks expose the utter moral bankruptcy, and complete hypocrisy, that is the hallmark of the modern left. As Pete Moore of ATW, to whom I owe a hat-tip for this story, puts it "no matter how low your opinion of them, they'll always demonstrate that it wasn't low enough". Damn right!

Update: It seems that Harman is not alone in her admiration for Castro. Via CentreRight, I see that sixty-nine other MPs have signed an Early Day Motion tabled by obscure Labour backbencher Colin Burgon, which states that "this House commends the achievements of Fidel Castro".

Thought criminals make bad parents, part 2

Last October, I wrote about Vincent and Pauline Matherick, the Christian couple removed from the register of foster parents in Somerset, after they said that they would not be happy discussing homosexual relationships with eleven year-olds.

Thankfully, the Mathericks were subsequently reinstated. However, now a similar case has arisen, up in Derby:

Lawyers are to seek a judicial review of a decision by social workers to ban a Christian couple from fostering young children because they refused to sign up to new gay equality laws.

The action against Labour-controlled Derby City Council is likely to become a test case for the Government's Sexual Orientation Regulations. Social workers rejected an application by Eunice and Owen Johns, who have four grown-up children, to be foster parents because they refused to agree to tell any children in their care that homosexual lifestyles were acceptable.

The couple, who have been married for 39 years, had applied to offer weekend respite care for foster children under the age of 10.

Okay, so far, so bad. But there's more:

But the adoption panel was also unhappy that the couple was adamant that any child in their home would have to go to church with them on Sundays. Mrs Johns, a retired nurse, is a Sunday school teacher.

The adoption panel has admitted in internal documents that Mr and Mrs Johns could feel that they had been "discriminated against on religious grounds".

Now why on Earth would they think that?

Mrs Johns said: "I would love any child, black or white, gay or straight. But I cannot understand why sexuality is an issue when we are talking about boys and girls under the age of 10."

Clearly the words of an unfit parent, and all round ne'er-do-well.

As I wrote back in October, regarding the Mathericks:

Is there even any suggestion that, were a child with homosexual tendencies to be placed with them, they would do him any harm? No - simply because a (foster) parent might disapprove strongly of some of their (foster) child's lifestyle choices does not mean that they cannot raise them in a loving and appropriate manner. I would add that I find it very unlikely that foster parents - or, indeed, legal parents, whether by birth or by adoption - commonly sit their eleven year-olds down and lecture them on the wonders of homosexual relationships, or that they take their teenagers to "gay association meetings" (whatever those are). Yet, somehow, children do not seem to be growing up permanently scarred by the absence of these formative experiences. I would therefore suggest that they are, at best, completely unnecessary.

And as for banning foster parents from taking children in their care to church: well, I think that just illustrates the extent to which far-left, anti-Christian, ideology dominates social services departments. It's fine, it seems, to sit children down and force them to hear about homosexuality, but raising them in the religion which is still adhered to by the majority of Britons - well, that's just beyond the pale!

This case is particularly ridiculous, when one considers that we have for some time had a nationwide shortage of foster parents. Banning couples like the Mathericks, or the Johns, from fostering is not going to solve that situation, and will not help any children. But for the social workers, helping children evidently comes a poor second to promoting leftist ideology.

Hat-tip: Cranmer

The subtle advance of the police state

The government has rejected demands for the introduction of a compulsory national DNA database, on the grounds that such a database "would raise significant practical and ethical issues". Senior police officers have also declared that they remain unconvinced of the need for such a database.

Of course, this is good news. The idea of compelling every British citizen to provide the police with a sample of their DNA, to be kept on file in perpetuity, is deeply sinister in itself, is a huge violation of our privacy and freedom, and is particularly unnerving when you consider the rather cavalier attitude that the government has shown towards the security of our personal records. Besides which, I think that a slippery slope argument is valid here: give the police a database of all our DNA, and it will make it that bit easier for the advocates of compulsory ID cards, and other authoritarian measures, to persuade the public to accept them.

But the news that the government will not (yet) be imposing a nationwide DNA database masks the very worrying fact that the police already have a vast DNA database. Because whenever anyone is arrested, the police take their DNA - and keep it. In 2001 the law was changed to allow the police to keep the DNA of people who had been acquitted, and they now have a database containing DNA samples from approximately 4 million people, hundreds of thousands of whom have never been convicted of any criminal offence. Per head of population, this is by far the largest such database in the world.

Other manifestations of a burgeoning police state are all around us, most notably the government's plan to force us all to carry ID cards, which the Home Office minister Liam Byrne assures us "will soon become part of the fabric of British life" and "another great British institution without which modern life...would be quite unthinkable". I don't know about you, but I don't find that possibility to be all that alluring. But that's the way the future is looking: databases and ID cards for all.

I'm a professional...get me out of here!

Britain is experiencing the worst "brain drain" of any country as highly qualified professionals settle abroad, an authoritative international study showed yesterday.

Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years.

There are now 3.247 million British-born people living abroad, of whom more than 1.1 million are highly-skilled university graduates, say the researchers.

More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate.

The figures, based on official records from more than 220 countries, will alarm Gordon Brown as tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent on educating graduates. The cost of training a junior doctor, for example, is £250,000.

There are, of course, particular problems with emigration and immigration in relation to the medical profession. The fact that we are importing large numbers of foreign doctors, while simultaneously telling thousands of British-trained physicians that they should look to other countries for employment, for example. In these circumstances, we shouldn't really be surprised if doctors take that advice.

More generally, there are an abundance of reasons why people might choose to leave Britain. Some will leave for purely personal reasons, and others will have more political motives. As examples of the latter, the shadow immigration minister Damian Green cites taxes and government interference, and he's probably right, although I would guess that the present excessive levels of immigration into Britain might also play a very significant role in encouraging people to leave. As would crime levels. And plenty of other things too: just read a few posts from this blog, or any one of a large number of others, to see some examples.

People do not, by and large, move, unless they think that their quality of life will be significantly improved by doing so. The fact that so many British people do believe this is a colossal indictment of the manner in which Labour has run Britain for the past eleven years. They may have won the last election, but large numbers of Britons are voting with their feet, and this vote is not going Labour's way.

Demonising an entire community

I have to confess that when the news that the Stephen Lawrence memorial had been vandalised broke, I didn't follow the story as attentively as I might have done. I did, however, note that Ken Livingstone had come out and claimed that it was an "outrageous act of racism", and that various race hustlers (such as the lowlife at BLINK) had made the same claim.
But while I read about the claims that evil white racists had been behind the crime, I did not see the following descriptions of the people who are really alleged to be responsible:

Officers, who have studied CCTV footage, said three suspects were seen approaching the £10 million building from a footbridge over the Dockland’s Light Railway before fleeing the scene after the attack.

Two of the suspects are described as white, between 16 and 18 years old, wearing plain dark hooded tops.

See! Evil white racists! See, Ken was right! Only:

The third is described as a light-skinned black man in his late teens or early twenties and shorter than the other two suspects. He was wearing a dark hat and had facial hair.

It's true that the police are continuing to treat this as a racist incident. But that probably says more about the cowed and politically-correct nature of the Metropolitan Police than it does about the truth. After all, one finds it difficult to imagine in what circumstances a black vandal would have an anti-black racist motive for his crime. Furthermore, as the black suspect was a few years older than the two white ones, it seems quite probable that he was, in fact, the ringleader. If this was the case, then the possibility of a racist motive would be further negated.

Regardless of one's views on the Stephen Lawrence case, and, more particularly, on the victimhood circus to which it has given rise, the fact is that vandalising a memorial to a murder victim is a particularly obscene act. Hopefully, the individuals who have done this will be swiftly brought to justice.
However, equally obscene was the speed with which Livingstone and his race hustler friends leapt up to scream "RACISM" at the tops of their voices, without bothering to produce any real evidence to back up their claim. Had they directed their false allegations against any group other than whites, they would, no doubt, have been accused of "demonising an entire community". Indeed, in those circumstances Livingstone and BLINK might well have been among the first to make the allegations of demonisation...

Too much time on their hands?

Tea and coffee could be restricted in schools to pupils over the age of 16 in plans to encourage a healthy diet.

It is an option being considered as part of a consultation exercise by the School Food Trust (SFT).

Teachers' unions say this is another example of official bodies meddling in areas where they should not interfere.

The SFT stresses it has no intention of issuing an outright ban on the traditional "British cuppa".

General secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers Mick Brookes said such advice would cut into people's civil liberties.

He said: "Words fail me.

"I can understand the anxiety about young people eating appropriate food. But this nannying really has to end."

I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with the head of a teachers' union. But I do: it's ridiculous that public money (£21 million of it over the next three years), is being spent on debating such unimportant issues as the amount of tea and coffee that schoolchildren (most of whom tend not to be afficionados of those beverages, anyway) should be allowed to consume.

Persecuted saint update

Hot on the heels of his suspension as Ken Livingstone's advisor (not to mention the impending police investigation into his financial dealings), the Blessed Lee Jasper suffers another setback:

Lee Jasper has resigned from a group that advises Scotland Yard on how it tackles gun crime within the black community.

The aide to London Mayor Ken Livingstone has stepped down from his position as chairman of the Trident Independent Advisory Group.

Mr Jasper is currently fighting to clear his name after accusations that he is linked to the misuse of public funds.

Writing to members of the group, he said the media's "politically-motivated racist smear campaign" had forced his resignation.

It's a racist conspiracy, I tells ya!

Hat-tip: Battle for Britain

Parlez-vous Francais?

No, of course not. I have a GCSE in it!

In the latest instance of the lowering of British educational standards, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the regulatory body for public examinations and qualifications, is set to recommend that the oral component of language GCSE examinations be abolished. Since pupils can already pass GCSE French (the most commonly-studied language) without actually writing a word of French, this proposed reform will mean that the only skill that a GCSE in the subject will have tested via examination will be the ability to read the language.

Of course, this won't have any impact on the majority of schoolchildren, since languages have already become minority subjects under Labour. In 2003, the curriculum was altered to remove the requirement that pupils study at least one language to GCSE, and this change has already had significant results. Last year, only 48% of pupils pursued a GCSE in French, German, or Spanish, massively down from the 83% who studied one or more of those subjects in 2000. Perhaps the QCA is hoping that by making language GCSEs easier, they will reverse this trend.

The oral examinations that currently account for half of all available GCSE marks will be replaced by "continual assessment" by teachers. This method of assessment can hardly be regarded as objective, particularly when, as Buckingham University's Professor Alan Smithers points out, the teachers assessing the pupils will themselves be assessed on the basis of their pupils' achievements.
The QCA feels that the existing oral exams are "too stressful" for pupils. Well, it is true that exams generally tend to be stressful, although I can't see why oral exams should be any more stressful than written exams. But then, a great many important things in life involve stress. Indeed, I would suggest that learning to deal with stress was a significant incidental benefit attendant upon school exams. Apparently, though, the QCA would rather shield sixteen year-olds (hardly fragile infants!) from the real world, than employ the most effective means of assessing their performance.

Educational standards are in general decline. The increasing popularity of such unacademic new subjects as the infamous "media studies" is matched by the increasing easiness of the traditional subjects. Regrettably, the QCA appears to be more desirous of facilitating this trend, than of reversing it. The result will be the more of what we are already witnessing: better and better exam results, combined with less and less actual achievement.

Our friends the police

A policeman who helped in a fatal attack on a pensioner's home can be unmasked today.

Stephen Smith, 49, used the police national computer to find Bernard Gilbert's address on behalf of an assailant hell-bent on revenge after a row over a parking space.

The officer's involvement in the tragedy can be revealed after two brothers were found guilty of manslaughter by a jury yesterday at the end of a two-week trial at Nottingham Crown Court.

PC Smith, a police officer for 24 years, resigned from the Derbyshire force before he could be sacked.

A police source said Smith had kept his pension, but it was frozen at the point he resigned.

Yeah, that'll teach him!

The court heard that 79-year-old Mr Gilbert, of Spondon, near Derby, argued with Zoe Forbes, 26, after she "nipped into" the parking space he was intending to use at their local Asda in January last year.

She wrote down his car number and passed it to her husband Mark, who gave it to a friend, Dale Phillips, who knew Smith.

The court heard that the following day, 40-year-old Forbes texted his wife, assuring her: "I've got someone on to it.

"Fingers crossed, I'll get an address. Then we'll smash his car to bits - and then his hire car and then whatever he gets after that until he dies."

Smith traced the pensioner's address and it was passed back to Forbes, who sent another text reading: "Bingo! Number 17, your time is up!"

Days later, armed with the information supplied by Smith, Forbes and his brother Steven drove to the pensioner's bungalow and Steven, 22, hurled a half-brick through the window while Mr Gilbert was watching television.

The former Rolls Royce aero worker collapsed in front of his wife Betty.

By the time a paramedic arrived, he was already dead. He was later found to have been suffering from angina.

Smith, of Oakerthorpe, Derbyshire, admitted disclosing personal data contrary to the Data Protection Act 1988 at Derby Magistrates' Court in March last year and was fined £1,200.

[...]

Smith was living with a girlfriend and their children but the couple recently split up and he now stays with his mother, Joan.

He refused to comment yesterday but his mother said he had been under stress at work at the time of the incident.

She said: "It has affected him immensely. Steve had been suffering from stress and depression - and still is - and I have been left to pick up the pieces.

"He has found a new job, but he is still suffering because of all this. Why won't people leave him alone?"

I know how she feels. You commit one tiny little violation of your duty to the public, one person - only one - gets killed because of it, and suddenly, you're the bad guy.

Cases like this provide one of the reasons why we should all be extremely wary about the ever-increasing number of databases held by various agencies of the state. Because it only takes one bad apple for the records to end up in the wrong hands. Or indeed, one government cock-up of the kind we've seen rather a lot of recently.

Postscript: In other Plod news, there's a rather entertaining argument going on between the author of the Devil's Kitchen blog, and the members of the Police Oracle forum. The comments at the Police Oracle forum, and those left by policemen in the comments section of this post (the one which started the whole thing off) are especially interesting, in illustrating the contempt with which many police officers view the general public (something which I, for one, am more than willing to reciprocate), as well as their self-righteous detachment from reality. They're rather reminiscent of our social worker friends in that respect...