The Night Mail

[Happy Hippo]

11 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

His killer attacked a prison guard while inside.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/david-bieber-life-prison-ian-broadhurst-alison-smith-b2230699.html

When he gets out he'll be on a plane back to the US in the company of a US Marshall to face another trial.

It would save a great deal of money if he were to be extradited back to the USA to face the charges he is accused of there.

 

He might as well spend time in an American prison, I'm sure he'd be much happier there.*

 

(Just seen MH's post along exactly the same lines.)

Edited May 1 by Happy Hippo
Great minds think alike.

[Happy Hippo]

I see a farmer in Derbyshire has been arrested on suspicion of murder of a burglar he shot dead in his remote farmhouse.  Another man was found outside with a gunshot wound.

 

The man with the GSW has been arrested on suspicion of aggravated burglary.  A further man caught by the police in a car nearby, has also been arrested on the same suspicion.

 

Now, since aggravated burglary is generally going to thieve whilst tooled up with offensive weapons, it will be interested to see how this pans out.

 

 

 

 

[Michael Hodgson]

2 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

I see a farmer in Derbyshire has been arrested on suspicion of murder of a burglar he shot dead in his remote farmhouse.  Another man was found outside with a gunshot wound.

 

The man with the GSW has been arrested on suspicion of aggravated burglary.  A further man caught by the police in a car nearby, has also been arrested on the same suspicion.

 

Now, since aggravated burglary is generally going to thieve whilst tooled up with offensive weapons, it will be interested to see how this pans out.

 

 

 

 

I seem to recall a broadly similar case in Norfolk where the farmer had called the police and they decided not to turn out - until after he'd defended himself.  I can't remember the outcome but I dont think the emerged without some egg on their faces.

 

Derbyshire farms call also be miles from the nearest cop shop.

[PhilJ W]

16 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I seem to recall a broadly similar case in Norfolk where the farmer had called the police and they decided not to turn out - until after he'd defended himself.  I can't remember the outcome but I dont think the emerged without some egg on their faces.

 

Derbyshire farms call also be miles from the nearest cop shop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)

Tony Martin was a bit of a nut case. His shotgun licence had been taken away from him by Norfolk police because he used a shotgun to threaten some people who had strayed onto his land. He then obtained an illegal shotgun, a repeater that could hold five cartridges. With this he shot a couple of scrotes breaking into his farmhouse killing one of them and injuring another.

Edited May 1 by PhilJ W

[Michael Hodgson]

That's the bloke, but they're not called nutters in Norfolk.  They're called Normal!

[pH]

20 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I seem to recall a broadly similar case in Norfolk where the farmer had called the police and they decided not to turn out - until after he'd defended himself. 

There’s a story (possibly apocryphal) of a similar incident in a Canadian town on the Prairies. A man noticed activity in his garage at the far end of his yard. Suspecting a burglary in progress, he phoned the local RCMP detachment to be told that they currently had no officers available to respond.

He hung up, waited a couple of minutes and phoned back to say that the RCMP did not need to respond, as he had taken his shotgun and sorted things out himself. Cue the arrival of several cruisers at high speed with full lights and sirens, in time to apprehend the very alive burglars.

 

After things had been sorted out, the officer in charge said to the householder “We thought you said you had shot them?” To which the reply was “I thought you said you had no officers spare to respond?”

[Happy Hippo]

36 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)

Tony Martin was a bit of a nut case. His shotgun licence had been taken away from him by Norfolk police because he used a shotgun to threaten some people who had strayed onto his land. He then obtained an illegal shotgun, a repeater that could hold five cartridges. With this he shot a couple of scrotes breaking into his farmhouse killing one of them and injuring another.

Regardless of the incident that followed, the fact that Tony Martin was easily able to get hold of another shotgun, does show how useless the firearms certification and shotgun licencing really is. Honest citizens who are denied these for any number of reasons, go away and grump but that is as far as it gets.  But someone with mental health problems, or who want a firearm for criminal activities, will get hold of pistols and shotguns with relative ease.

 

There are also the likes of Dale Cregan, who made a false 999 call  and  lured two unarmed female police officers into a grenade and gun ambush as they were investigating an alleged burglary.  That was back in 2012.  He had about 10 guns, including automatic weapons.  None of which were legally held.

 

Although I admire Brian's stance regarding the British Police being largely unarmed, there seems to be a growing number of incidents where officers are injured or even killed, by criminals who are armed*, and totally at ease with hacking or shooting their way out of trouble which might force a rethink in the future.

 

I include the use of a vehicle where one is deliberately used as a weapon to:

Run over (PC Alison Armitage),

Ram into (PC Raja Bashrat Ahmed)

Drag along the road  (PC Andrew Harper)

Edited May 1 by Happy Hippo

[Winslow Boy]

59 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)

Tony Martin was a bit of a nut case. His shotgun licence had been taken away from him by Norfolk police because he used a shotgun to threaten some people who had strayed onto his land. He then obtained an illegal shotgun, a repeater that could hold five cartridges. With this he shot a couple of scrotes breaking into his farmhouse killing one of them and injuring another.

I suspect the sticking points will be in the detail.

 

Wasn't there a big hu har with Martin being accused of making the farm into a death trap or something like that.

[rockershovel]

57 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

I suspect the sticking points will be in the detail.

 

Wasn't there a big hu har with Martin being accused of making the farm into a death trap or something like that.

The Tony Martin case was a difficult one revolving around the realities of rural policing. 

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[jjb1970]

The Tony Martin case was a lesson in why we should be sceptical about what we read in the media. A lot of the press presented the case as the law gone mad prosecuting a fine upstanding English man doing nought more than defending his castle. While his victims were not persons I can feel much sympathy for, neither can I feel sympathy for Martin who seems to have fully deserved incarceration.

Edited May 2 by jjb1970

[jjb1970]

4 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I spent nine years as a consultant to defence procurement projects in the early 2000s.  Much of SMART procurement - which came in during the half-decade before I started the job - was and is very sensible, like defining what it is you are trying to achieve and let that define what you purchase, rather than just opening a weapons catalogue and deciding You Like That One.  The bit where government decided that the MoD didn't need to be an intelligent customer - it just needed people who understood how to buy stuff - not so much.

 

I did come across a few Civil Servants (I'd started out as one but we were privatised in 2002) in the MoD who clearly resented employing us (or indeed any consultants) to advise them and were grudging at every step.  I met a lot more who genuinely tried to do a good job, but were hamstrung by a system contrived to put barriers in the way of procurement, because otherwise the Treasury would have had to treble the defence budget.

 

The former group, on more than one occasion myself or a colleague (one, Mike was a famously blunt former Flt Lt) came very close to telling them that if they weren't so effing useless at their job, we wouldn't need to be paid to do it instead of them.  All they needed to do was really simple stuff like: talk to their opposite number in other project teams to see how their plans were written, write one version of a plan and keep it in a shared location so that everybody knew what the single source of truth was, etc.  I would very gladly have trained Integrated Project Teams - in fact my colleague was kept very busy teaching them how to apply their own guidance - in doing our job and been equally satisfied at putting my own employer's consultancy and many, many others, out of business.  The feeding trough for consultants in MoD was genuinely becoming embarrassing by the time I was made redundant from the industry, but the system that they can so easily exploit was put in place by politicians. 

 

It is the same system that now sees government departments spending eye-watering amounts on consultants to provide routine activities that the department should be able to do itself, but politicians who baulk at paying a decent middle-ranking CS a grand a week to get work completed, are quite happy to pay private sector consultants to create work, quadruple that amount for year, after year, after year.

 

 

I honestly wish the problem at the MoD was incompetent civil servants, as in that case the problems might be addressed by a campaign of firing and hiring new people. I used to do a lot of work for the MoD and spent a lot of time in Bristol, and contrary to what is often portrayed I found the people I dealt with highly competent and committed to doing a good job. They were good people in a dysfunctional system. 

 

Where I did see ineptitude was at higher levels in Whitehall. Even there it was in many cases less incompetence than arrogance. I had the same argument repeatedly on certain issues  such as special engines for warships, they genuinely seemed to believe commercially available engines were junk and that there was an industry anxiously awaiting the opportunity to design and build a super duper diesel engine for 8 frigates. They couldn't get the fact that even if they had the money to pay for such an engine none of the engine builders would be interested because engineering resource needed to develop and build an engine which would struggle to get into double figures wouldn't be working on designs that would sell 100's or 1000's. I explained multiple times that Wartsila, MAN et al really couldn't care less about the MoD, customers like Maersk, Evergreen,  COSCO buy more engines in a year than the MoD will buy from them over several decades, followed by huge orders for spares and support, it's their standard engine or go somewhere else.  That always went down like a lead balloon. Even the USN, which orders a lot more ships than the RN, struggles to find interest in the big equipment suppliers to deviate from standard designs as it's not worth the effort. The other issue is when they sign contracts with a commercial customer they have a delivery date, it's sent to a yard, goes through an acceptance test and job done. I know companies who actively avoid warship work as they can't face years of endless meetings, interference and efforts to change orders midway through delivery etc. If the MoD was building 100's of ships the gain would be worth the pain but the orders are trivial. I used to get orders of magnitude more booked hours for MoD work than I needed for much more complicated approvals work for merchant vessels, however in my case my employer saw political value in the military work despite being able to make a lot more doing a lot less commercially. 

 

The department I do find properly incompetent is DfT, but that's another story.

[polybear]

8 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

I see a farmer in Derbyshire has been arrested on suspicion of murder of a burglar he shot dead in his remote farmhouse.  Another man was found outside with a gunshot wound.

 

The man with the GSW has been arrested on suspicion of aggravated burglary.  A further man caught by the police in a car nearby, has also been arrested on the same suspicion.

 

Now, since aggravated burglary is generally going to thieve whilst tooled up with offensive weapons, it will be interested to see how this pans out.

 

If it's Trial by Jury then there's a fair chance they'll walk.

 

7 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I seem to recall a broadly similar case in Norfolk where the farmer had called the police and they decided not to turn out - until after he'd defended himself.  I can't remember the outcome but I dont think the emerged without some egg on their faces.

 

Derbyshire farms call also be miles from the nearest cop shop.

 

The bit that amazes me is IIRC the two scrotes were of the metal fairy persuasion; Tony Martin went back to the same Farm House after release and I was really expecting him to receive a visit one dark night.

 

The scrote that was wounded continued to be a scrote even afterwards, so obviously didn't learn his lesson; a real shame he survived in my book.

[iL Dottore]

17 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

That's because Joe Public still doesn't accept the decision by "democratically elected" politicians to do away with hanging.

You’ve highlighted a considerable problem facing many democratic Western countries: a total disconnect between the decision makers and (to use a modern term) “influencers” (media pundits, the “mediarati” etc) and the general populace.

This disconnect extends far beyond the serious matters of state - it’s everywhere, even in something as lightweight as entertainment.
 

This is exemplified on Rotten Tomatoes, where films - praised to high heaven by the critics - absolutely tank in the court of public opinion. And to add insult to injury (so to speak) the critics (and others) then refuse to even contemplate that they may have made a misjudgment but instead blame the public for being……. well, whatever.  A good example of this was the reaction of critics and the filmmakers to the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters absolutely tanking at the box office and in viewer reviews. They claim that the reboot tanked not because it was badly written, badly acted and badly directed (which it was), but because of the bigotry and misogyny of the cinema-going public.

I would go as far as to claim that one of the biggest problems facing most Western democracies is the shirking of personal responsibility. It is never “my fault”, it’s always “someone else’s fault”. And even when someone is caught “bang to rights” (or holding a smoking gun - choose your metaphor), then they have the get-out-of-jail-free-card of being afflicted by a “condition” or a “syndrome”.

 

One day, something will snap and the politicos better hope that it isn’t the beleaguered middle class.
 

My father, a keen student of history, observed that it was when the middle classes got intolerably squeezed (politically, economically, socially, financially) that you had successful revolutions: the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Mao Zedongs all coming from an equivalent of the middle class.

 

I wonder if this is an observation that the Lords This or Sirs That of the UK’s political class have made.

Edited May 2 by iL Dottore

[Dave Hunt]

I find the antics of some of the so-called influencers quite repellent. There is a restaurant chain of four establishments in our area that are clean, well appointed, staffed by friendly and efficient people and serve excellent food - not all the same but with varying decor and menus. I know the head waiter in one of them and he told me that one of these influencers contacted the owners saying that if she recommended the restaurants to her followers she would expect free meals for her and a companion. The owners told her to Foxtrot Oscar and that since she was known locally they would monitor if and when she ate at any of their restaurants so that if she made any false detrimental claims they would sue her. Apparently she hasn’t been seen or heard of since.

 

Dave

[PhilJ W]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

My father, a keen student of history, observed that it was when the middle classes got intolerably squeezed (politically, economically, socially, financially) that you had successful revolutions: the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Mao Zedong's all coming from an equivalent of the middle class.

I wonder if this is an observation that the Lords This or Sirs That of the UK’s political class have made.

I can't think of any revolution that didn't start from the middle or even upper classes. Even the Peasants Revolt leaders, Wat Tyler and John Ball came from an emerging middle class. John Ball was literate at a time when even many of the aristocracy were not and Wat Tyler was a self employed businessman. Some of those who followed them were themselves minor aristocracy. However in the aftermath the minor aristocrats got the equivalent of a slap on the wrist whereas those peasants who had merely stood on the sidelines shouting found themselves hanging from a rope. Wat Tyler is seen as a working class hero, so much so that there is a country park named after him in Pitsea, the tories when they were in power on the local council tried to rename the park but that was not successful because people still used the original name. Ironically Wat Tyler if he was alive today would probably be a self employed builder with a copy of the SUN on the dashboard of his Transit van and voting tory.

Edited May 2 by PhilJ W

[Winslow Boy]

What really galls me with restaurant customers are the ones who make reservations and then don't show up or even ring to apologise. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised as good manners seems to have gone right out the window nowadays - everyone scared of offending if they use the wrong pronoun if they say thank you.

[PhilJ W]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

My father, a keen student of history, observed that it was when the middle classes got intolerably squeezed (politically, economically, socially, financially) that you had successful revolutions: the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Mao Zedongs all coming from an equivalent of the middle class.

The same applies to Che Guevara and the Castro's. The Castro's were at one time supported by the FBI (because of Batista's links with the mafia) but that was stopped when the mafia obtained some compromising photographs of  J Edgar Hoover. So the Castro's went to the only other world power, Russia for help which was given on condition that they espoused communism.  That resulted in the Cuban missile crisis.

[Hroth]

15 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

I can't think of any revolution that didn't start from the middle or even upper classes. Even the Peasants Revolt leaders, Wat Tyler and John Ball came from an emerging middle class. John Ball was literate at a time when even many of the aristocracy were not and Wat Tyler was a self employed businessman. Some of those who followed them were themselves minor aristocracy. However in the aftermath the minor aristocrats got the equivalent of a slap on the wrist whereas those peasants who had merely stood on the sidelines shouting found themselves hanging from a rope. Wat Tyler is seen as a working class hero, so much so that there is a country park named after him in Pitsea, the tories when they were in power on the local council tried to rename the park but that was not successful because people still used the original name. Ironically Wat Tyler if he was alive today would probably be a self employed builder with a copy of the SUN on the dashboard of his Transit van and voting tory.

 

The error that Ball and Tyler made was to forget the proverb "Never trust a Dick"...

 

[Oldddudders]

Drat. I had thought What Tiler? was a monthly mag for decorators.

[rockershovel]

1 hour ago, PhilJ W said:

I can't think of any revolution that didn't start from the middle or even upper classes. Even the Peasants Revolt leaders, Wat Tyler and John Ball came from an emerging middle class. John Ball was literate at a time when even many of the aristocracy were not and Wat Tyler was a self employed businessman. Some of those who followed them were themselves minor aristocracy. However in the aftermath the minor aristocrats got the equivalent of a slap on the wrist whereas those peasants who had merely stood on the sidelines shouting found themselves hanging from a rope. Wat Tyler is seen as a working class hero, so much so that there is a country park named after him in Pitsea, the tories when they were in power on the local council tried to rename the park but that was not successful because people still used the original name. Ironically Wat Tyler if he was alive today would probably be a self employed builder with a copy of the SUN on the dashboard of his Transit van and voting tory.

Lenin was a minor aristocrat, or at least land-owning minor gentry supporting himself on "family money" during his exile in Switzerland. He was well aware of the danger posed by the middle and upper-middle classes, in early Soviet times the possession of a wristwatch could lead to execution. 

 

He was also the originator of the policy of "mobilising the intelligentsia", by which he meant not only the academic elite but also anyone with a good secondary or any tertiary education. 

[Michael Hodgson]

28 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Drat. I had thought What Tiler? was a monthly mag for decorators.

You need https://www.checkatrade.com

 

 

[Oldddudders]

7 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

You need https://www.checkatrade.com

I think their daily rates might be a bit high for me.....

[PhilJ W]

5 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Drat. I had thought What Tiler? was a monthly mag for decorators.

No, thats his cousin the roofer. (A tyle is an old name for a brick).

[SM42]

1 hour ago, Winslow Boy said:

What really galls me with restaurant customers are the ones who make reservations and then don't show up or even ring to apologise. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised as good manners seems to have gone right out the window nowadays - everyone scared of offending if they use the wrong pronoun if they say thank you.

 

Mrs SM42 has a family trait ( or it could be a national thing, not enough information to establish that with certainty  but it looks possible) that essentially means that if you have to be somewhere at a certain time, then that is the time you leave the house, or at best you leave 30 minutes after the time your spouse advises would be a good time to leave for the airport, station or anywhere a timetable is involved.

 

Thus we are often late for our restaurant bookings. 

 

OK, mostly around 10 minutes, ( we eat local)  but I do wonder how long they leave it till you are considered a no show. 

 

Not so long ago we were outdone by a couple who arrived 45 minutes late, but they kept the table. I appreciate that they may have phoned to let them know.

 

Andy