ENOUGH!

I walk past a young man every week who tries to sell passers by the Big Issue magazine. This is a brilliant scheme for the homeless. All around our fair land, the young and homeless, who have no chance of getting a job until they have a home address, use the selling of this magazine to start on the way back to normalcy. The Big Issue originator thought of this scheme to help those who had the will, but not the means, to help themselves back onto their feet. We have a situation here in which if you don’t have an address you can’t get benefits so this is a way out for those that want to get off of this merry go round.

He seems a pleasant guy. This Big Issue seller is trying to sort out his problems for himself. He smiles outside the Coop store, which is his pitch. It looks like a difficult way to earn any money, but he needs to be encouraged, so occasionally I purchase a copy of the magazine. He smiles happily, and we both feel good, him for making a sale, me, for doing a little something good. The only downside is when I read the magazine, which is annoyingly a left leaning tract of politically correct news and current affairs opinions. But maybe I’d be making the man feel like a beggar if I just gave the money and didn’t take the magazine, so I take the magazine and generally dump it into the bin after a quick glance that generally annoys me.

The need for such schemes is that there is a breakdown in the way our society is working. Values have been turned upside down and the government doesn’t handle many of the things it should, which is the underlying problems with the poor and homeless that the private sector can never totally solve, but does involve itself in many of the parts of our lives that are none of their concern.

It was reported yesterday that the murderer Ian Huntley, is receiving extraordinary preferential treatment in jail. Part of this takes the form of the prison authorities instructing their staff to treat Huntley, and some of his fellow inmates as “extensions of their family” and either to use their first name or address them as “Mr.”. Mister Huntley has been granted a private room (I think they used to call them cells), does not have to wear the standard issue uniform and officers have allegedly been told to humor him and to engage in games with him, such as chess, Scrabble and darts. All you have to do to get this treatment is murder a couple of ten-year old girls and then try and commit suicide. My view is that we should help the evil bastard to die.

Someone in our government seems to know what’s best for the rest of us at every turn but doesn’t do what we do want.

This weekend there was a proposal, apparently already becoming law in Scotland, that all smoking brands be removed from the packaging. Of course they are already eliminating marketing and advertising, and now sales will almost be prohibited, except, of course, for that bit of the transaction where the country gets to collect the tax from the sale. Don’t you think there’s a moral paradox in our government making such a song and dance about the evils of smoking whilst they collect huge amounts of money from those sales?

Personally I stopped smoking about twenty years ago, and really don’t understand how I ever smoked. I have no hankering to go back, but it isn’t my business to force others to stop. They must reach their decisions for themselves. I’m happy for our governments to advise people that smoking is bad for your health, and yes, they should limit the places in which you can smoke so as to protect those that have no wish to join them in breathing the smoke. But it isn’t the job of our governments to force people to behave in a proscribed manner for the benefit of the individual concerned. That must be the individual’s choice.

We can feel the first stirrings of anger within the British hinterland as the truck drivers have started mass protests against the imposition of even higher fuel taxes that, they insist, will bankrupt their businesses. You also hear the growing whispers of discontent of an angrier population. Everyone is beginning to notice that his or her freedoms are being eroded.

Governments everywhere are making it illegal to speak on your mobile telephone whilst driving. Again I understand and agree with the reasons for this, being about safety for the driver and other road users. But it seems as if it’s only in the UK that the authorities are trying to add other constraints on our freedom. They seriously want to add smoking, tuning your radio and probably picking your nose to those things you will not be allowed to do whilst driving. How much of this garbage is the British public going to accept before they scream ENOUGH?