Knife bin ransacked by street gang

That was exactly what I said.
The government simply pledged the amnesty for people not directly wanted by police to be able to dispose of weapons without fear of arrest.
They did not arrange for dopey local authorities to place modified dustbins in unattended public places and leave them to fill up with weapons.
Similar programs have been successfully run in the past, but they were far better organized, with containers INSIDE civic centers, libraries and police stations.

I also seriously wonder about the truth in the theft story, particularly what was taken from the container. The media will do anything for a story and blow one incident out of all proportion, insinuating that it was a national problem.
Clearly, if a local authority had been that stupid, heads should roll, but this raises another issue about government cuts and whether the council was running on temps and agency staff.
All those people died at Grenfel tower due to cuts in government surveyors, allowing developers to use their own surveyors to approve work that contravened dozens of building and fire regulations.
At the end of the day, local authorities act like zombies and are afraid to draw any attention to themselves for fear of audits making more lazy pen pushers redundant. Meanwhile, they impose more parking restrictions and bus lanes to meet their targets of scamming millions of additional pounds from motorists and people who drop a bus ticket on the ground.

 

6

Do you ever think about the stuff you post before you post it?

I mean just a little thinking and you’d have realised just how silly that statement is.

I mean come on man do you honestly believe knives are banned in the UK that nobody is allowed to own or use any knife.

I think I use a knife every day since I enjoy cooking.

This is about policies and regulations meant to try and reduce harm.

As an adult I can by knives yes some types of knives are banned but let us think about this in terms of alcohol, yes children can get hold of it but as a society we try to limit that access by have age limits tied to age (same with knives) we also make illegal certain types of alcohol, too strong stuff, or that made by unlicensed people that might be of dubious quality and content stuff that would be of more harm to people than regulated alcohol (just as some ‘combat’ knives are banned).

As with many things in society we have rules and regulations in place to reduce harm, from food and drink, to how we sell and use poisons to driving cars to knife crime.

Is telling people how they should drive their car and punishing them if they are caught doing wrong ‘idiotic’ is having laws prohibiting people from carrying knives in public that much different from having laws prohibiting people from drink driving on the open road?

Neither law can stop it happening but it is a deterrent, it make it easier to get a conviction if the drunk knocks someone over (or if someone is stabbed) and it allows the police to check on someone they think is drunk driving (or carrying a weapon).

I really wish you would give issues some though rather than just posting things like ‘idiotic’ about a complex issue that just makes it clear you have little or no knowledge about and are unwilling to research.

 

wils

This is how neoliberalism, led by Thatcher and Blair, is to blame for the Grenfell Tower disaster

In the mid-1980s, Thatcher’s government deregulated fire safety standards in homes, abandoning enforceable requirements for guidelines which the building industry could choose to follow, or not. Also complicit was the government led by Tony Blair, who, ideologically speaking, was the offspring of his Tory predecessors. Despite New Labour’s gains for working people, such as the minimum wage and Sure Start, behind the scenes the same principle of deregulation was at work.

Blair’s government further blurred the lines of responsibility for fire safety enforcement by insisting that the role of a fire inspector should be to “inform and educate” rather than enforce. With a renewed emphasis on facilitating the private sector, the role of fire safety enforcement officers morphed into being that of “business support”, charged only with keeping buildings “safe enough” and not simply safe.

As for the principal of privatisation, it was again during the mid-80s when the imperatives of private profit began to trump the need for public safety. Prior to 1984, plans for new buildings or refurbishments had to be approved by local authority inspectors. Then with new legislation Thatcher’s government allowed private so-called Approved Inspectors to compete with local authorities over contracts to inspect plans for new building work.

The impact of competition was twofold. First, in a bid for competitiveness the new inspectors drove down costs which in turn drove down quality, particularly in the skills and training of officers and inspectors. Second, competition created incentives for inspectors to please their clients, the developers, who could “shop around” for leniency.

Finally, our fire service has seen some of the deepest cuts having lost 11,000 front-line firefighters since 2010. The Fire Brigades Union has also raised concerns that the service is under-resourced, in particular in regards to aerial ladders.

But the pursuit of cuts goes back further. Again, under Blair, “modernisation” of the fire and rescue service became a euphemism for cuts. As a result, fire and rescue authorities lost inspectors and so also lost the capacity to oversee fire risk assessments.

Deregulation, privatisation and cuts: the three pillars of neoliberalism. Yet an ideology as powerful and as widespread as this one in Britain today won’t be dealt with through a handful of prison sentences. That is why a grieving society should learn the extent of the damage this pervasive idea has inflicted.

The survivors of Grenfell are not the only ones to suffer the violence of neoliberalism. Those who have experienced the sharp end of the free market know the truth of this event only too well: that neoliberalism is a threat to human life.

This is how neoliberalism, led by Thatcher and Blair, is to blame for the Grenfell Tower disaster

 

The pro gun argument that since anything is a weapon the best modern weapon should have zero restrictions makes no sense. Why is murder illegal? People are going to to do anyway. Why bother to make theft illegal? After all it's pointless since "bad guys" don't follow laws.

A gun is just not the same as a car or knife. Those things exist for a peaceful purpose even if they are misused for violence. A gun only exists to kill something be that something another human or an animal. Its use only falls into a legal question of was it OK to kill that thing. It's not like I use it go to my work like a car or to cut my bread at dinner like a knife.

Even trap shooting or other gun range activity is meant to keep you sharp for killing. In my experience the water cooler talk of what one would do if burgled is VERY common at the gun range. The target is not enough they want it to move so they can prove to themselves they are tough. The one guy who had legit used his gun in defense was somewhat of a folk hero at the range I went to.

Like you don't buy a Corvette to go the speed limit do you? Even if most times you plan you like to know the ability to go faster is there. Well with guns the range is the speed limit and a home invasion is hitting that gas pedal and doing 120 MPH. If all you do is the speed limit you wonder what 120 is like eventually. You need a Ar-15 since it's a Corvette. You could own this nice pistol Camery but that is not fun!

After a while a gun owner wants to kill someone. He wants to be tested. Not that they will commit a mass shooting more like they don't lock doors anymore and just hope. You can't reason with that since the goal is death.

The whole argument is just ridiculous. They hope people who want gun laws don't understand the gun culture. So you will just believe anything they say. For example the "what is an assault riffle debate" depends on that. Believe it or not gun owners they are very simply things to understand. It's not hard to learn anything about it besides accuracy in combat without seeing one.

Cleaning, assembling, what bullets I want and why, modifying them. I learned all those things before I shot a gun. I and many others know why you focus so much on the silliness of knife laws.

 

It gets better

British Police Force Hard at Work Keeping Spoons Off the Street

 

6

LOL oh man you get your opinions moulded by Middy Robinson

Thing is that we do have a knife problem in the UK (and hah ha the occasional spoon) and it is serious people are dying (oh but hey how about that spoon ha ha) especially tragic is the number of young people that are involved (ha ha but look at the spoon ha ha a spoon)

Now anyone that has looked into this issue, who isn’t a neoliberal, has come to the conclusion that this is in large part due to the neoliberalist policies that have been enacted in the UK over the last 30 years.

Cuts in Social Services has resulted in problems within families been not spotted early.

Working and welfare policies have put people under greater pressure.

Competition based education systems have resulted with problem students been more likely to be excluded (as they bring down the schools stats) than been helped and squeezed education budgets mean schools often don’t have the resources anyway even if they wanted to help.

Cuts in Social Services has resulted in them not having the resources to help children that have been excluded.

Cuts in grants to community based projects mean many that would have helped have been forced to close.

And also part of neoliberal ‘austerity’ police numbers have been cut especially community policing meaning less police officers there on the street in the affected communities.

*

Also to put it into context for Americans, because we do not have easy access to guns in the UK the murder rates are much lower than in the US.

There were 726 homicides in the year ending March 2018 that’s for the whole of England and Wales (about 56 million people) in one city in the US, Philadelphia, there were 351 homicides in 2018 in a population of only around 1.6 million.

 

Huh. If I were a blonde lady I'd start a conservative blog too. That's easy money.

That said I'm with 6 on this one. There are several cooking implements in that photo. Turkey knife, sandwich knife, chef's knife sharpener. Sure you can turn them lethal like you can with a good brick, but those are clearly tools.

 

Good knives are worth serious money in a country were guns are illegal and they're famous for cattle and butchers. Sausage anyone?

 

Oh man, you have got to be kidding me

Lets forgive them for stabbing people because their welfare cheques werent big enough

You ARE a nutcase

And competition based schools? So have an athletics carnival where everyone gets a certificate for participating, no one gets identified as, or called a winner...that kind of shit is going to stop some of them from turning in to little crims later on

Oh, my god lolz, oi oi oi

Ha!

 

Hey buddy, what kind of knives? I want an OTF knife really bad, but one that has a really good quality if you know what I mean.

 

Well, at least you included Labour that time

So you do think there are left wing neoliberals lolz

And guaranteed you voted for Tony Blairs New Labour, cos he told you all the shit lefties wanted to hear before he got in

 

knife bins.. cute, hold my machete. / also this didnt happen .. this is fake news nothing to see here..

 

Britain is a political clusterfuck

thank god for 1776

 

Since nobody else has said it, I'm going to. Is it just me or do all those kids in that photo (post #32) look like rejects from some muslim country that hates western values and have been committing a high proportion of the crimes since Merkel and May started ruining their own countries by letting them in?

 

They look like trash we should throw into concentration camps and gas. Is that what you want to hear?

 

They're just kids.

 

Yeah, its not really a great ad for immigration

 

I am thankful my great great great grandfather stole some shoes all those years ago

 

VG

What are you on about? Nobody is saying that people should be forgiven for committing a crime

This is about trying to understand why people turn to crime.

How are you meant to tackle crime if you don’t understand why crimes taking place?

I mean this is the problem with many on the right they don’t seem to want to find insight or seek solutions.

Again what the fuck are you talking about? Do you even know? This isn’t about sports day this is about setting up a false equivalence market place within education that has the effect of corrupting schooling into learning for the test rather than been about rational thought and questioning inquiry.

So you’ve never really read my posts? Are you lolzing at your own ignorance is being ill informed funny to you?

 

Orison

What are trying to say - are you ‘English’ that you post ‘What the hell happened to this country’ I mean what has happened? Do you know - do you care?

Are you saying this because the people in the picture are not white so you are wondering why these Asian looking people are in the UK – do you wonder why that might be?

Is hell for you having people of different races, colours and creeds in your country?

Which leads to the question so what would you do with these people, lock them away, get rid of them somehow, what?

Also are you saying other places don’t have a violent crime problem how about the US?

Surprisingly both Birmingham Alabama and Birmingham UK had 111 homicides in 2017 but the thing is that Birmingham Alabama has a population of only 209,880 people why Birmingham UK has one of 1.086 million

Which makes Birmingham Alabama a lot more of a dangerous place to be.