“Britain is more than just a star in someone else’s flag.”

Priceless.

If printing money is so good for the economy, why won’t the government let all of us do it?

Watch this video and see if your worldview survives the 180 test…

The officers talked to Jamie Murray, who runs the cafe, and ultimately advised him that he risked breaching the Public Order Act if he continued to play the DVDs, thereby censoring the use of scripture in a public place. When Mr Murray took advice from other Christians and lawyers it wasn’t long before the story was on the Christian Institute Website, and in the most recent Mail on Sunday, before going global.

As a Lancashire County Councillor, I don’t represent Mr Murray, but my constituents fall under the policies of the same police force, in which I was once a serving officer, so they are also at risk from such oppressive conduct. Hence I felt compelled to write to the Chief Constable, Steve Finnigan…

Dear Steve,

I have become aware over the weekend of reports in the national press and the Christian Institute website which allege that Lancashire Constabulary officers have recently advised Mr Jamie Murray, the owner of a cafe in Blackpool, that he should stop displaying certain Bible texts on the ground that they were considered ‘insulting’ and a breach of the Public Order Act. As a Lancashire County Councillor I am concerned for my constituents if this is the approach taken by the Lancashire force, and as a former officer with the Constabulary I consider this to be an outlandish interpretation of the Act, clearly outside the meaning intended by Parliament.

Can you confirm whether your officers have issued this advice?

I am sure you will understand that, given that our nation is founded and established on the Bible and the Christian religion, to the extent that we are currently celebrating the 400th anniversary of the translation of that national treasure, the King James Bible, and that the Bible and its teachings are widely acknowledged to have secured our freedoms as a people, that it is shocking, indeed ‘insulting’, to suggest that the display or quotation of texts from the Bible could ever be considered by anyone in authority to be a breach of the Public Order Act.

Can you therefore give me an assurance that the Constabulary does not consider the public display or quotation of texts from the Bible as potentially breaching the Public Order Act?

Could you also advise me, if the cafe in question is considered a public place for these purposes, whether there is any legal difference in other places, such as church buildings and other places of religious worship?

I note that this incident follows a settlement in the case of Mr and Mrs Roberts, who also complained about how Lancashire Constabulary officers treated them due to the expression of their religious views. I would like to know what actions the Constabulary has taken corporately as a result of that case. I’m sure you will appreciate that the 78.3% of Lancashire residents who identified themselves as Christian in the last available Census should know that their fundamental freedoms will be protected by the Constabulary with at least as much commitment as the sensitivities of the 1.5% of the general population who the Office for National Statistics calculates as thinking of themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Thanks,

Sam Chapman
County Councillor for Chorley South
Today, I got my response from the Constabulary…

Cllr Chapman, 

Thank you for your email concerning the incident at the Salt and Light Café in Blackpool.

A complaint was received from a member of the public concerning material displayed within the Salt and Light Café that they found deeply offensive. The Constabulary is duty bound to act on complaints made to us and as such an officer attended the café.

The café is run by a man called Jamie Murray who was spoken to by a local officer. The advice that was given to Mr Murray by this officer in relation to displaying verses or texts from the Bible was wrong.  As such, on Tuesday 27th September 2011, Mr Murray received a personal formal apology from Lancashire Constabulary which was accepted.    

The officer concerned is to be given words of advice regarding the incident.

Lancashire Constabulary would never interfere in people’s religion or beliefs but we do have a responsibility to make sure that material that communities find deeply offensive or inflammatory is not being displayed in public and this was the reason for the visit to the Café.

We hope you will understand or at least appreciate that an officer has made a mistake for which Lancashire Constabulary has apologised.

I’m glad that common sense has prevailed, and while I note no assurances have been given, and there remains an attachment to the idea that the police are there to stop people from feeling offended, at least a sense of proportionality seems to have returned. It was a pity that a Lancashire police officer could make such a basic error of judgement, and that in initial comments for the media, the Constabulary at a higher level seems to have defended that error, but their change of heart is welcome. Sadly, I doubt it will get quite the degree of publicity as the mistake that was made in the first place, and so I hope the Constabulary has a way of ensuring that no other officers make a similar mistake. This is, after all, the second time in recent years that Lancashire police have encroached on the freedom of speech of Christians on the topic of homosexuality.

In law, a church is just as much a public place as a cafe, and allowing the encroachment on the Salt and Light Cafe would have meant that no place of worship could safely have taught what has been standard Christian doctrine for 2,000 years. For the moment at least, the preachers can preach away.

I’ve worked with the Health Service for many years now, owing to my roles in crime and disorder partnerships and their links with, and occasional management of, Drugs Action Teams. At first I worried that I didn’t understand the Health Service, and then slowly I realised that hardly anyone outside it did, and precious few inside it too. Indeed it seems designed to confuse and obfuscate. The in-joke among Community Safety personnel was to call the Joint Commissioning meetings “spanish classes”, as it seemed we went there to learn a different language.

There are a few problems with how we treat health issues in this country. Firstly we have such an emphasis on a National Health Service, that there seems to be little in the way of local accountability. You may have concerns about your local hospital, or how long it will take you to get an appointment to see your GP, and you can complain all you like to your local Councillor or MP, but in truth they have very little say, and much less weight than certain health service managers. There is an “accountability and public involvement” strand to the new reforms, which involves more scrutiny or at least more reliance on it, but I have to say I am a sceptic. A year on the health scrutiny committee showed me little real accountability, and I’m concerned that unless it is radically different in the future then we will have dealt with a toothless system by merely providing it with more gums.

So a National Health Service works against localism and direct democracy. Perhaps as the police get a Commissioner to deal with crime issues and hold them to account, should we also have a local elected Health Commissioner, to bring a meaningful link to the people over the massive sums of money that are committed it the name of health care in his country?

One current concern in Health is the priority to tackle “health inequalities”. This isn’t simply about recognising that some people are healthy, and others less so, and if everyone were healthy they would be more equal – no, this is, in the words of one of the bullet points today “improving the health of the poorest, fastest”. I don’t know whether this is the manifestation of some well-intended charitable feeling toward the ‘poor’, or a reckoning that this is a way of investing in hot-spots which will return on the investment in a number of ways which would be more limited if the investment were in better-off communities. Perhaps it is yet another occurence of the idea that people who take responsibility for themselves, and achieve a basic standard of living, are not deserving of help, which must instead be concentrated on the victims of capitalism, who can be identified by their low incomes? How can we treat people equally if your health matters less to the government when you can be bothered to earn a decent income?

I am concerned that the concentration on ‘health inequalities’ is socialism in disguise, and brings with it the inevitable bad consequences of socialism, one of which is systemic inefficiency. Under this heading we may simply be investing in that part of the population most resistant to responding to such an investment, and achieving much less bang for our buck than investing in the more responsible. Decades of ‘regeneration’ programmes have left many areas simply dependent on regeneration funding, and especially vulnerable in times of austerity. Providing drug addicts with an endless supply of clean needles and methadone, telling generations of young women to engage in safe sex rather than waiting till they are truly ready, and flooding dingy health centres with posters and information leaflets to be studiously ignored by the local populace may simply be a way of spending money without having any real positive effect. Being poor is no vice, but neither is it a virtue, or always a matter of necessity.

There is a risk that, in pouring our health monies down the drain of a focus on the poorest, we will further establish a three tier system, where the richer can buy their way out of he health system, the poor spend their time trying to escape its attention, and the people in the middle yet again have the privilege of paying for a service which is not provided to them to the degree that they pay for it, and is simply another form of tax on responsible behaviour. As these taxes proliferate, there will be fewer reasons for anyone to be anything other than poor.

In all my days, I’ve never had a say in whether I want to be in the European Union and, as it happens, I don’t.

If the idea of Parliament having debates based on petitions has any virtue, it would be in giving us a choice in those matters where the metropolitan elite are least representative of the nation as a whole, and a referendum on membership of the European Union, and the opportunity to reintroduce the death penalty for grievous crimes sound like good places to start. Like you, no doubt, I don’t have high hopes that the elite will let the people have their way over either of these things, but I feel that it is worse if we do not try – so here is a link for the Daily Express campaign to leave the EU, and I’ll update you on the death penalty link when a proper campaign has been established in a few weeks time – at the minute there appear to be dozens of petitions on the death penalty to choose from.
One advantage of each of these petitions, is that they would require us to overturn the Human Rights Act, disincorporate the European Convention of Human Rights and be rid of the nonsense of ‘human rights’ thinking.