The invisible arm of the law

In the news recently, I have heard a lot about the total success of purging Medway of drugs and drug pushers. Although this might seem good news a little investigation into this has set off a number of alarm bells in my head.

I have no 100% solid proof per say, but that's mainly due the fact that I don't want to get myself flagged higher as you will see soon below!

However ... it is my firm belief that it probably went something very much like this :-

The police in general wanted to show that they were doing something positive in the war of drugs. And because they were getting nowhere fast busting the few they were catching smoking illegal substances, someone high up must have decided that they needed to take a new approach and so they switched from post- to pre- selling offences.

One bright spark ( probably an ex grower himself ) realised that to grow the illegal plants in the cold and wet UK climate, requires a lot of heating, especially to keep up the humidity.

So the police secretly went and asked all the regions gas and electricity suppliers if they could look at their records for abnormally high bills or other anomalies. And a short while later, hey presto, they got some fresh new leads { aka. names and addresses of people whose bills were different from the norm}.

They then went to the phone companies and asked to see the itemised phone contacts of these "new leads" to see if they can trace any regular line of communication, thereby confirming their suspicions. Again, a short time later and voila, a few more leads.

They might even have gone to the lengths of intercepting emails and verifying which websites potential growers or distributors used as part of their expanding collection of evidence.

Finally I have no doubt at all that they also had many of their biggest targets followed day and night, in a similar fashion to how the D.S.S. tailed my mate and ended up forced him to repay the £60 or so {see earlier blog entry}.

Now many will see this as clever investigating on their part, and I cannot deny that it has indeed seemed to have caught a lot of the growers / distributors as can be counted by the high amount of arrests there were and be seen by the vast amount of locals seemingly going a touch more stir crazy for no reason what-so-ever.

But before we rush off to pat the police on the back for a job well done, let us not forget how this all started. Which was, that "They wanted to find someone guilty of something to make them look good in the public image, and so decided to began checking private individuals utility bills for any patterns or anomalies".

Yet it is with that simple act they have blatantly chose to cross the line and are now fully invading our civil liberties. For, based upon this logic of investigation, it is clear that you are no longer allowed by English law to be an individual. You can no longer use any more ( or less) electricity or gas than your neighbour without it being monitored and flagged as "abnormal behavior which requires further investigated".

Neither should you ever allow yourself to be in telephone contact ( be it knowingly or not ) with anyone else whose usage is deemed abnormal.

For anyone with an ounce of logic or reason there can be no denying that the "big brother" superstate is well and truly here and appears to be gaining momentum every day.

And just how far will this inventive guesswork lead them?

They already have bar coding and CCTV in most high streets, and outside shops, so I guess also that anyone who now purchases extra long rizla papers, a bong { which are 100% legal to buy in this country, just illegal to use with banned substances } or a pipe { exact same logic } may now find themselves being monitored "just in case!"

But here is my final little bit of food for thought on this :- almost without exception everyone will fractures the occasional law once or twice in their lifetime, whether its by accident, rebellion, stupidity, ignorance, peer group pressure or whatever.

And the main reason why so many minor infringements go unpunished is that they also go largely unnoticed due to the fact that the police are not, or at least were not, looking for them.

With the police now seemingly happy to spend many man hours investigating people for a new myriad of reasons and with the powers to go back into your history as far back as they care to, it will not be long before many of these previously hidden crimes will become unearthed.

Once that happens, then just like the congestion charge, millions will soon find themselves being arrested or fined for something, even if it happened many years ago and has been long forgotten by all concerned.

Is this really the best way to fight crime and protect society in general from the hardened criminals and deranged psychos of this world? Or is it just a way of extorting money and massaging their conviction figures, just a lot?

Will this sort of utility bill scrutiny help rape victims, abused children, or confidence tricked pensioners? Will it save lives and take guns and knives out the hands of gang members? Hardly ... no, its a way of cowing the normally law abiding public into complete submission.

Now, perhaps more than ever, can Orwells vision of two totally segregated class of people be seen to be coming true to life.

Oh, and if your unsure of what we do to petty criminals in jail ... the latest press headlines is that the remaining tax payers are forking out so that the state can afford to pay them to play scrabble. And if that isn't the state desperately trying to use up all its resources in a mindless and anti-constructive way then I don't know what is!!!