The fascists are coming!

...Or are they already here?

Deep thoughts. Cheap rhetorical questions. It's all good.

Alas, it's time for a broadly law-based rant. But, for once, it's important.

The Government plan on inventing a new order, called a VOO. The name sounds cute and harmless. But the order itself is, I would suggest, the most serious threat to our civil liberties that the Home Office has ever come up with. You have to admire John Reid - he's making his predecessors, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett, look like Ghandi.

"But surely you exaggerate!", I hear you cry. Surprisingly, and unusually, I do not. Here's an extract from the Home Office paper describing what these orders are all about:

"It would mean that, where an individual was known to be dangerous but had not committed a specific qualifying offence, restrictions could still be placed on their behaviour."

You could be a subject of a VOO if you have never committed a criminal offence. All it takes is for the police to decide that you're a troublemaker, and that's it - they can impose all sorts of restrictions such as banning you from a certain place, banning you from associating with certain people, forcing you to live in a hostel, and so on. Even though you have done absolutely nothing wrong.

And what kind of factors does the Home Office envisage might lead to a VOO being made?

"A person’s formative years and upbringing, cognitive deficiencies, a history of substance abuse, a person’s domestic situation or relationship with their partner or family, or possession of paraphernalia related to violent offending (eg, balaclava, baseball bat), or extremist material."

Marvellous. Applying these factors, this means that you could be labelled a potential violent offender, and therefore have your life controlled by the whims of the police, if:

• You grew up on a council estate;
• You enjoy playing rounders;
• You smoked drugs at some time in your life (David Cameron's in for it);
• You are divorced;
  
• You go skiing in winter;
• You are dyslexic.

Conceptually, this really isn't very far from genetically profiling people at birth, identifying who is, statistically, most likely to offend, and then locking them up before they can grow up into violent criminals. Both approaches involve punishing someone not for something they have done, but for something that they might do in the future.

The Daily Mail is going to love it.

Rewards for doing... what?

Trawling through BBC News in search of something to do which wasn't related to equitable tracing rules (don't ask), I came across this news story. Turns out that a cabbie in New York, when he discovered that loads of diamond rings had been left in the back of his car, returned them to their owner.

Good man. A sensible reward would be, one would think, a handshake and a fair bit of gratitude. But instead, he's suddenly found himself with:

• A huge collection of media interviews, from broadcasters both in the US and worldwide, all eager to interview what they describe as "the honest cabbie";
  
• An Achievement Award from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission;
  
• A citation from the City Council of New York City;
  
• And potentially a reward from the New York City Mayor.

Even apart from the implied, and fairly offensive, suggestion that all taxi drivers are thieves, something just seems a bit odd about all this. Call me a Scrooge if you will (but nothing worse - this is a family blog), but in everyday life, people generally don't get rewarded for not committing crimes.

If I were in a jewellery shop, for example, and the assistant turned his back for a moment, I wouldn't expect a 76-trombone parade to be waiting outside for me as congratulations for not having stolen anything. George Bush does not, we presume, have a man whose job it is to congratulate him at the end of every afternoon for having the self-restraint not to have pushed the Big Red Button that day. (Actually, he probably does - but then when the Leader of the Free World (tm) has the mental age of a foetus, that's a price we're willing to pay to avoid nuclear armageddon.) Bank clerks rarely end the transaction by thanking you for not robbing them. And so on.

I'm now awaiting the next development - every employer being required to hand out regular small bonuses for all of their employees who haven't stabbed anyone that week. Remember - you read it here first.