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10/07/2005: "What the Dickens ..."

Another rant of considerable vintage, this, but one that's been fermenting in the back of my mind since last week. While the MSM (mainstream media, remember?) were fussing & fretting over the phatom menace of the history bill, Our Glorious Leader was saying this in his conference speech:

For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a difference. And I now understand why: the system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st-century crime - ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime - with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me: that must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights; it means deciding whose come first.

So. Anti-social behaviour, drug-dealing, binge-drinking and organised crime are 21st Century phenomena, unknown in Charles Dickens time. Well, it's a long time since I studied that period or read most of his books, but, at the risk of incurring the wrath of Charles Clarke's History Police, I really must ask what this was all about.