It's not a crime so why harrass us?

You wouldn't think taking a picture is a crime would you? In fact unless you're taking it in a restricted area it isn't, though a lot of people including professional photographers are having a hard time getting the police to believe this. Some areas like military bases would be fairly obvious, some however aren't and are in fact tourist attractions.
The problem lies in Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Authorisations under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 confer extraordinary powers of stop and search. They can be made where expedient for preventing acts of terrorism.

The areas are chosen based on their likelihood of being a terrorism target. More than 100 exist in London alone, covering areas such as the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and other landmarks. Every train station in the UK is covered by a Section 44 order. However it has been used to prevent pictures being taken of policemen too as well as the plastic plods.

Independent

Police have been accused of misusing powers granted under anti-terror legislation after a series of incidents, ranging from the innocuous to the bizarre, in which photographers were questioned by officers for taking innocent pictures of tourist destinations, landmarks and even a fish and chip shop.
Police are allowed to stop and search anyone in a designated "Section 44 authorisation" zone without having to give a reason. But amateur and professional photographers have complained that they are frequently being stopped and treated as potential terrorists on a reconnaissance mission. Last night the Government's independent reviewer of anti-terrorism laws warned police forces to carefully examine how they use the controversial legislation.
A BBC journalist was stopped and searched by two police community support officers as he took photographs of St Paul's Cathedral. Days earlier Andrew White, 33, was stopped and asked to give his name and address after taking photographs of Christmas lights on his way to work in Brighton.
And in July Alex Turner, an amateur photographer from Kent, was arrested after he took pictures of Mick's Plaice, a fish and chip shop in Chatham.

It's being spun as a lack of training in the complex legislation, but from where I stand it's being used as a tool to intimidate the public and make them afraid of the state and its servants. 13 years of Labour have eroded our civil rights to the stage where people are becoming afraid of their own shadows.
Labour have used Anti-Terror legislation to evict elderly members of the Labour Party from their own conference for heckling a government minister, or arresting grandmothers on peaceful demonstrations against nuclear power, or the Met in 2008 using stop and search powers to search 58 children aged nine or younger. Indeed last year a total of 2,331 children aged 15 or under were stopped by Met officers using terrorism powers in circumstances where there is absolutely no evidence of children in this country being involved in acts of terrorism!
RIPA, recycling officers, council snoopers, on the spot fines for feeding ducks, it's like they're goading us into civil disobedience and yet amazingly still, people do nothing, they sit at home watch X Factor and when pressed come out with ridiculous platitudes of "Having done nowt wrong I've nowt to fear!"

We're sleepwalking into a police state and when you tell people they simply don't believe you, it's for our own good, to prevent terrorism they say, it couldn't happen to me and yet the evidence is mounting that it can and will.

In the film V for Vendetta, V makes the statement that "there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?"
And there is, but unlike in the movie, no one's listening!

As V also said, "People should not be afraid of their government, governments should be afraid of their people."

And this government is acting as if it's very afraid, yet so are the people, until we lose the fear of authority we have had ingrained into us, these things will carry on happening and the abuses will continue until we are prepared to say enough is enough.

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Fixated? No, obsessed more like.

There are some who would accuse the Green movement of being somewhat fixated on destroying civilisation as we know it. After all they want to destroy industry, power production, fuel usage, travel (Save for their own high priests travelling to international conferences) In general the extremists amongst them want us back in hair shirts and living a medieval existence.

Telegraph.

David Davis: green movement 'fixated' with targets 'crippling' economy.

The green movement is "fixated" with imposing ever tougher targets for reducing carbon emissions in spite of the potentially "crippling" costs for the economy, a senior Conservative MP has said. 

David Davis, an ex-shadow cabinet member and party leadership challenger, said Britain was already facing a £55 billion long-term price tag for its current policies and warned of a public backlash if more unpopular "green" measures were imposed.

His comments are likely to be seen as a direct challenge to the approach of Tory leader David Cameron who has made his commitment to tackling climate change a symbol of the way he has changed the party.

Mr Davis told The Independent that it was "unsurprising" that more than half the public no longer believed in climate change as it now appeared that the earth had been cooling rather than warming over the past decade.

"The fixation of the green movement with setting ever tougher targets is a policy destined to collapse," he said.

"The ferocious determination to impose hair shirt policies on the public - taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds - would cause a reaction in any democratic country.

"Many of the people signed up to the green movement instinctively believe in statist, regulatory, dirigiste regimes. They forget these approaches have failed many times before."

Well the man speaks the truth, many of the Green movement are naive, mostly the ordinary membership or followers. Indeed many like me have no problem with recycling and reducing pollution  and finding more efficient ways to do something, but at the top, well that's where the problem lies, it's the fanatics, the watermelons who drive the agenda, latching on to causes designed to destroy the economy and/or cause hardship to ordinary people via taxation or in extreme cases loss of livelyhood or even (if they get their way through Green energy) death by a thousand power cuts.
The Green movement more or less grew out of the destruction of communism and socialism in Eastern Europe and shows certain signs of statist communitarian behaviour in being virulently anti-capitalist despite the fact that capitalism in various forms is an efficient economic system which out performs any other economic system when given free reign. When the economy is shackled however to a political mentality, that's when the problems begin, that's why communism died in Russia, in the end the West was producing childrens toys with more complex integrated circuitry than the Russians could produce for their bloated military machine, something had to give and inevitably it was communism. The followers or hardliners however did not learn the lessons and indeed are trying to impose a similar system on the West by stealth and thus has grown the Green movement seeking state control over industry and dedicated to the downfall of the West's economy because this is the only way they can win as unfettered the West would out perform and find ever more efficient ways to protect the environment using technology and the intelligence of a free population.

This is one of the reasons the UK needs to be freed of statist political parties as well as the EU. Both stifle free expression and market forces, both seek to impose ever greater restrictions on freedoms and rights in the UK. They are fast moving towards a state where The State grants rights rather than accepting that people have inalienable rights. This is what the Greens amongst others want, they want to control people to force us to do as they want (though not necessarily what they do) They want high taxation, high costs, no population movement because that puts us in their power, they'd then control us rather than serving us.

It's not just the Greens though, the big 3 of political parties in the UK have similar aims, they often think of themselves as the masters rather than the servants. They deny popular wishes, break manifesto promises go back on their words whenever it suits.

This cycle needs to be broken, only parties dedicated to personal freedom should get your vote, there are very few out there, but a start would be any party that wishes to bring us out the EU. Once we are free from the big state we can then start to free ourselves of the restrictions imposed upon us by our home grown authoritarian politicians.

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Oh bullied were you?

Well according to Baron Martin of Trough Springburn they were.

BBC

Former Commons Speaker Lord Martin has said MPs were "bullied" into referring their expense claims for investigation.

Lord Martin, who quit over his handling of the expenses crisis, spoke during a Lords debate on setting up a standards commissioner for peers.
He said journalists with no "prima facie" evidence would justify running stories on MPs by persuading someone to call for an investigation.
"Vexatious" complaints were often made against MPs in marginal seats, he said.
Lord Martin was elevated to the Lords after being effectively forced out as Commons Speaker in May over the way he had handled the row over MPs' expenses.

Once again proving that those at the top simply don't get it, still I'll make the case again and though (as far as I know) no MP would be seen reading this blog  without a gun to their heads*

It wasn't your money, it was mine and you stole it!

You robbed the people you were meant to represent, don't give me that guff about it being in the rules because you wrote the rules, you ruled on the rules and you used the law to try and prevent the truth coming out that cost me money too!

Bullied? If I had my way you and your fellow troughers would have been disbarred from ever representing the public in any shape or form and had all your assets seized as compensation and then put into public stocks for pillorying.

You lied, you cheated, you stole and now you whine about how we found out, still all me, me, me with you lot isn't it?

* Nice thought though ☺

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