UK security? Where?

[Reginald]

This would be laughable if it wasn't so bloody infuriating.

Today protesters got into the house of commons and were wrestled to the floor. They were just "pro-hunting" protesters, they could have been armed terrorists.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3656524.stm

A man dressed as batman gets within grenade throwing
distance of the balcony of Buckingham palace.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3657158.stm

Manchester airport may as well just sit there with a big blue neon sign over it saying "Terrorists strike here!"....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3629336.stm

So this is what you get when you are being protected by the government. I've said before and I will say again. I won't live in fear of terrorists, they can do their worst but I tell you It riles me that the government sells itself as the great protector of the people and yet things like this happen. If you can't stop this sort of stuff don't even have the AUDACITY to imply that you can protect me.

Pathetic, risible but unfortunately.............Typical.

 

[Jon_in_london]

This would be laughable if it wasn't so bloody infuriating.

Today protesters got into the house of commons and were wrestled to the floor. They were just "pro-hunting" protesters, they could have been armed terrorists.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3656524.stm

A man dressed as batman gets within grenade throwing
distance of the balcony of Buckingham palace.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3657158.stm

Manchester airport may as well just sit there with a big blue neon sign over it saying "Terrorists strike here!"....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3629336.stm

So this is what you get when you are being protected by the government. I've said before and I will say again. I won't live in fear of terrorists, they can do their worst but I tell you It riles me that the government sells itself as the great protector of the people and yet things like this happen. If you can't stop this sort of stuff don't even have the AUDACITY to imply that you can protect me.

Pathetic, risible but unfortunately.............Typical.

While I agree that the Parliament thing and the Manchester airport thing are disgracefull, I have to disagree with the common opinion on the Batman at the Palace jobby.

Firstly, the Royal Family were not at the palace so security would not be screwed up to its very tightest. Secondly, armed police are trained to make dynamic, tactical risk assessments when faced with the possibility of firing on a person. What we saw the other day was that this training works very well. The officers correctly assessed that the man was not a threat and that dropping him would be disproportionate. This is a success not a failure!

Tell me, what do you think the tabloids would be screaming if batman has been killed? Blood thirsty police! no doubt. Lets have an Inquiry! no doubt.

 

[Reginald]

Jon, Point taken about them not gunning him down.

I will say though that he shouldn't have got as far as he did.

In all of this my thoughts go to the police. In many ways they are being used by the government as both a public relations exercise (high profile arrests of "terrorists") and a whipping post as and when it suits. I respect the work they do, I am convinced that the apparent failure of security in this country is a strategic failing at the highest level. That and a healthy dose of good old fashioned media and public manipulation.

 

[zenith-nadir]

Jon, Point taken about them not gunning him down.

I will say though that he shouldn't have got as far as he did.

If a guy in a Batman suit is allowed to scale the palace then something serious has gone wrong with palace security. But that is just my opinion, perhaps I am just out-of-touch when I find guys running around in Batman suits a wee bit odd.

 

[Jon_in_london]

If a guy in a Batman suit is allowed to scale the palace then something serious has gone wrong with palace security. But that is just my opinion, perhaps I am just out-of-touch when I find guys running around in Batman suits a wee bit odd.

Oh, they are a group called fathers4justice, they are fathers who have lost access to their children. Their MO is to dress up as comic-book superheroes and stage high profile protests.

The other thing about airports- with the exception of Heathrow and now London City Airport which are 'designated' and therefore have to chip in for their policing, all the others are privately run but publically policed and have to be policed out of the pockets of local boroughs/counties. Even with LHR and LCY, the owning company with fight tooth and nail to avoid any security measures that are expensive, interfere with passenger flow, or may in some way alarm passengers.

 

[aerocontrols]

If a guy in a Batman suit is allowed to scale the palace then something serious has gone wrong with palace security. But that is just my opinion, perhaps I am just out-of-touch when I find guys running around in Batman suits a wee bit odd.

There's not a security system in the world that can keep out the Dark Knight when he's on the prowl.

 

[zenith-nadir]

There's not a security system in the world that can keep out the Dark Knight when he's on the prowl.

So true...so true...what the heck was I thinking...

(on a brief side note - I am guessing you are an aviation enthusiast like myself aerocontrols, are you familiar with this great site ? )

 

[aerocontrols]

So true...so true...what the heck was I thinking...

(on a brief side note - I am guessing you are an aviation enthusiast like myself aerocontrols, are you familiar with this great site ? )

Thanks for the link, but I'm not really an aviation enthusiast, just an aerospace engineer...

 

[wipeout]

Pathetic, risible but unfortunately.............Typical.

And they also want to make us spend billions on little bits of plastic called ID cards that are so scary to terrorists that no terrorism exists in countries with them.

The system only fails if... ah... the terrorist has never committed an act of terrorism before... or has no internationally known links to terrorism... or is from abroad... or doesn't get asked for their card while carrying an AK-47, some C4 explosives and wearing a balaclava... or... er... um... lots of other reasons.

It will probably cost the average family several hundred pounds to get these cards... but who could possible not want to sign up to such a scheme to help fight terrorism?



On a similar issue, I read the human rights watchdog Privacy International's Big Brother Awards a while back renamed their Lifetime Menace Award the "David Blunkett Lifetime Menace Award" to recognize his excellence in this area.

 

[wipeout]

If a guy in a Batman suit is allowed to scale the palace then something serious has gone wrong with palace security. But that is just my opinion, perhaps I am just out-of-touch when I find guys running around in Batman suits a wee bit odd.

Maybe they just thought it was the Chief Inspector having one of his "funny turns" again.

 

[Camillus]

Looks like Batman used a distraction to at the front of the Palace and then used a ladder to get over the wall and onto the roof of one of the buildings that is right against the pavement and then ran round onto the ledge. Quite why there wasn't some sort of barrier preventing this I don't know.

More interestingly it seems the men who invaded Parliament may have had inside help to get them through security doors.

 

[Mr Manifesto]

If I'm not mistaken, this is only about using dogs to hunt foxes... right? That is, if I'm not mistaken, you can still hunt 'em, but you have to use guns... right? So what's the goddamned fuss about?

And I mean this on both sides of the fence. I'm pretty sure Australian hunters use dogs to hunt pigs, foxes, etc, and we don't have hunt saboteurs jumping in front of the f***ers every chance they get. They did that with the duck hunters in Victoria, but those morons shot everything that moved. If they stuck to ducks, it might have been a different story. But I digress... What's the big deal? FILL ME IN!

 

[TragicMonkey]

If I'm not mistaken, this is only about using dogs to hunt foxes... right? That is, if I'm not mistaken, you can still hunt 'em, but you have to use guns... right? So what's the goddamned fuss about?

I believe it's the manner of the fox's death that upsets some people, rather than a purely "don't kill the animals" stance (although I'm sure that's present, as well). Apparently the pack of dogs finds the fox and rips it apart.

Although I suspect most of the protest is from city dwellers. People who live in the country tend to be less sentimental about nature, and class the fox as vermin which kills your chickens, and the hunt as a bunch of upper-class drunks disturbing the peace.

The whole controversy seems insanely heated, with both sides using the sort of rhetoric and passion Americans generally reserve for the abortion controversy. Some hunt protesters have a history of stringing wires to trip the horses, injuring both horse and rider, potentially fatally. Kind to animals, indeed.

 

[Mr Manifesto]

I believe it's the manner of the fox's death that upsets some people, rather than a purely "don't kill the animals" stance (although I'm sure that's present, as well). Apparently the pack of dogs finds the fox and rips it apart.

Although I suspect most of the protest is from city dwellers. People who live in the country tend to be less sentimental about nature, and class the fox as vermin which kills your chickens, and the hunt as a bunch of upper-class drunks disturbing the peace.

The whole controversy seems insanely heated, with both sides using the sort of rhetoric and passion Americans generally reserve for the abortion controversy. Some hunt protesters have a history of stringing wires to trip the horses, injuring both horse and rider, potentially fatally. Kind to animals, indeed.

Okay, that's the anti-dogs-for-fox-hunting crowd covered. We'll leave aside the hypocrisy of injuring horses to save foxes for the sake of brevity. Now, what's the problem with the pro-fox-hunting crowd? Isn't it sort of more fun to use a gun to kill foxes than to get dogs to do all the work?

 

[TragicMonkey]

Okay, that's the anti-dogs-for-fox-hunting crowd covered. We'll leave aside the hypocrisy of injuring horses to save foxes for the sake of brevity. Now, what's the problem with the pro-fox-hunting crowd? Isn't it sort of more fun to use a gun to kill foxes than to get dogs to do all the work?

Firing a gun from horseback might be difficult, especially with lots of other horses around, and a quarry that hides in the bushes.
They reserve the guns for hunting birds, and leave the horses at home.

I wonder if anyone's tried fitting a fox with wings, and then they could shoot upwards? Or even better, shoot dogs into the sky from a horse-mounted catapult, at a fox sailing around with helium balloons. My only issue with hunting is that it seems pretty dull.

 

[The Don]

My own, very skewed summary of the fox hunting argument goes something like....

Country Bumpkin: Hunting with hounds is the only way to effectively keep fox numbers down

Townie Chav Scum: How many do you kill ?

CB: about ten a year

TCS : doesn't sound too effective to me, anyway isn't it cruel ?

CB: no the foxes love it

TCS: so being chased by dogs for hours is fun before being ripped to pieces is it ?

CB: foxes aren't like us, you don't understand our country ways

TCS: what like killing almost any animal that comes into your sights ?

CB: we are the guardians of the countryside, your countryside

TCS: what, the one where you shout at us if we go on your land

CB: yes, without us the countryside would go to rack and ruin

TCS: so instead of rapeseed monoculture we would have trees and stuff growing there ?

CB: YOU TOWNIES JUST DON'T ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND OUR COUNTRY WAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


We are all reactionary. They want to keep hunting because they enjoy it.

 

[Jon_in_london]

There is a ligitimate problem with foxes. They have no natural predators anymore and they cause havoc on farms and also eat any other remnants of our wildlife they come across. They do need to be controlled but poison and traps are too non-specific leaving the only options of either shooting or dags. Shooting poses some problems because its best done at night eejits are prone to shoot people by mistake. Happened three times recently!

Basically I wouldnt piss on either side of the debate if they were burning but it makes me quite angry that so much taxpayers money is wasted on this rubbish.

Once we have found a cure for cancer and AIDS, discovered the secret of fusion, put an end to war and hunger and sorted out the f£$ing railways! then maybe we should spend some time and money on the best way to controll foxing fox numbers.

 

[Seismosaurus]

Okay, that's the anti-dogs-for-fox-hunting crowd covered. We'll leave aside the hypocrisy of injuring horses to save foxes for the sake of brevity. Now, what's the problem with the pro-fox-hunting crowd? Isn't it sort of more fun to use a gun to kill foxes than to get dogs to do all the work?

It's simple - they enjoy hunting, and they don't see any good reason why they should stop just because other people want them to.

 

[Hutch]

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said of fox-hunting "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible" (or something like that).

Mostly (as the Yankee sees it) foxes and hounds have always been seen as an Upper Crust diversion, after all it does cost a bit to own and outfit horses, dogs, and wear that bloody ugly red jacket. So the "lower levels" of society have always found it a good way to poke fun at the "snobs"

I think it's a big consiparacy myself; I've travelled between London and Glasgow/Edinburg several times by train and there isn't enough forest left in all of England to hide one den of foxes much less a whole passel of them. (No fair counting Wales!)

edited to correct Wilde quote

 

[Camillus]

The pro-hunting lobby believe they have a right to hunt foxes in any way they see fit. They enjoy hunting, which is supported and followed by a broad swathe of people who live in the countryside.

The Labour Party has been commited to abolishing hunting for some time now but the pro-hunting lobby have never had to worry about it because they have overwhelming support in the House of Lords and no Bill outlawing it would ever pass. On this occassion, though, Tony Blair is so desperate to win back the support of his backbenchers that he is throwing them the sop of banning hunting and using the Parliament Act to force it through if the House of Lords oppose it. This has severely upset the pro-hunting lobby because suddenly they are faced with the prospect of having a democratically elected body overrule their unelected supporters.

It's going to be an interesting next couple of years.