If England is the most crowded country in Europe why are the security services cracking down on people who want to leave it?
Yes, make sure you tell nanny state where you’re going when you set out on your holidays this year or you could be in for trouble.
Under a new e-borders scheme anyone departing the UK by land, air or sea will have to provide personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel plans.
This applies if you’re just going on a booze cruise for a couple of hours or even swimming the Channel.
Your holiday will be recorded and stored on a database for ten years.
I use the term “stored” loosely – if the past record is anything to go by it’s just as likely to end up left on a train or sold to a travel agent.
As if the godawful process of booking and organising a family foreign holiday is not already enough to send you off to Butlins.
This additional red tape and check-in delay is sure to make a rainy week in Dungeness, next door to the nuclear facility, seem like Paradise Island.
Maybe that’s the intention. We’ve got to kick start the economy somehow. Everything else has failed so far. Why not try British tourism?
Tough on the law abiding
Meanwhile, for at least a decade we seem to have had no handle on illegal immigration and the figures have been grossly underestimated according to a London School of Economics study.
I doubt if the crowds waiting for the trucks in Calais have any intention of declaring their exact travel plans.
Just like this week’s crazy idea to massively increase the cost of alcohol to curb binge drinking, it seems our laws are designed mainly to penalise the law abiding.
Luckily, even our control-obsessed government doesn’t seem happy with this one. I’ll drink to that.
But this kind of ridiculous blanket thinking is not limited to the government, as this story shows.
Loan rangers
Of course, a holiday is something you might not be planning this year.
If you’re a SME installer, trying to beat the recession, it’s not easy to plan ahead.
The so-called bailout scheme to save small businesses from collapse was announced with a big fanfare, but it seems to have been hot air.
Only one in 250 small firms was able to get a loan under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme.
No matter what the Government or Bank of England does – VAT reduction, billions loaned to the banks, interest rates cut to shreds, and now ‘printing’ money – those nasty bankers are still jealously clutching their cash bags.
According to the Forum of Private Business lobby group there’s been no improvement in bank support. Half the respondents to their survey think it’s worse since we bailed them out.
All in the family
Holidays might be the least of the worries for those proprietors coming up to retirement but without any prospect of quitting.
Four out of five small business owners see their retirement prospects receding further into the distance according to this survey.
They can’t even expect their children to help them out because many of these are caught in the “sandwich generation” trap.
Struggling to bring up their own young and teenage children, they have little left to help out their own parents in retirement.
Probably better to keep the business in the family and share the burden as well as the spoils – which is what security installers the Cooper clan have done.
Running the Allcooper installation company, the Gloucester-based family team have won the regional awards for family business of the year. And that’s competing against all businesses, not just security.
There are a lot of family-based installation businesses and, when it comes to the crunch, families stick together and are, arguably, more willing to pull out all the stops for one another.
They have a vested interest in each other’s success that over-rides the purely professional. That’s a head start in anyone’s book.
Nappy nappers
There’s no argument that the police national database is a unique resource to solve crimes, sometimes in cold cases long since abandoned.
But why, after a European Court ruling, does the database still hold the DNA of those never convicted of a crime?
And until Jacqui Smith came under pressure, why did it hold profiles of children under ten and even a baby aged under one?
Was the baby a suspect or just helping with inquiries?
At a time when databases are not popular with the public and generally distrusted, this vital database should ensure it keeps public support by excluding the profiles of the innocent.
We bend over backwards to carry out every petty order from Brussels, often seemingly to our own detriment. Here is one case where the European Court’s decision needs to be acted upon.
Make my day
One of the most popular stories on our website this week has been about a robotic surveillance unit with an “optional lethal weapon” mounted on it.
No doubt this general concept would appeal to some who might see it as the ultimate solution to the problems of low level street rowdiness and litter dropping in city centres.
But could we see this kind of thing catching on with other manufacturers?
“Yes sir, the ruggedised dome comes with sub machine gun as standard, or for wide area surveillance there’s the heavy duty model with full on Howitzer.”
Robocops are probably not as far off as we think. Could we soon be seeing a robot like this Einstein model who “understands humans”?
Particularly helpful for street directions or if you’ve got a problem with energy, mass or the speed of light.
Cut out for the job
Surprisingly, cardboard police (no strangers to this column) are going from strength to strength.
Cleveland police are convinced that they deter street thieves and have set them up in Redcar where there’s been a spate of handbag and purse thefts from elderly ladies.
Amazingly, it seems to work. The paper plod are always on duty, and never need to take a comfort break, have a sandwich or spend hours filling in forms.
No doubt there have been a few long, one sided, conversations between the potential elderly victims and their cardboard heroes.
“Such a nice young man but very quiet.”
One is the loneliest number
Meanwhile in London there may be no need for cut-outs as there will seem to be more police on the streets.
So congratulations to new Met chief, Sir Paul Stephenson, for listening to the public and his own convictions.
Met Police will now be beat patrolling by themselves.
This will, no doubt, make them more approachable and could bring them valuable grassroots information they would never get if they were walking along talking to each other.
It will double their visibility and will be a deterrent against a lot of the disturbance that ruins peoples’ lives.
I’m not sure how this will go down with the beat officers themselves. The days of Dixon of Dock Green are long since past and, in some areas, two would still be the better option.
But as long as this is flexible, there’s no reason why other Chief Constables shouldn’t follow the Met’s lead.
Seen and herded
Our police do come in for a lot of stick.
But perhaps we should be thankful for their often-criticised political correctness.
When a PC is PC it, at least, stops them from letting their personal beliefs get in the way of the job.
Unlike police in Nigeria who held a goat as a suspect in an armed robbery case.
According to this BBC report, it was taken to the station by a vigilante group who thought it was a car thief who used witchcraft to change his shape.
This ‘robber goat’ story does seem a little dubious. But you can’t blame the BBC for milking it.
