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State sponsored happy slapping and/or incitement to violence

A simply astonishing story from Alex Deane of Big Brother Watch: Smokers harrassed – with the encouragement of a school, and the co-operation of the police

On one perfectly reasonable reading of this story, “harrassed” is too mild a term. The correct word is “assaulted”. I am no lawyer, but this looks to me as though it could involve multiple crimes – not just assault but also theft, and encouraging minors to commit assault and theft, if those are separate charges.

Outrageously the fagins here are not underworld characters but the Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive School in Medway (cute name, shame about the Special Measures), Kent Police, and something called “A Better Medway”, described as “a joint initiative between the council and NHS Medway that encourages healthy living”. “A Better Medway” part-funded the project, paying for filming equipment.

According to This is Kent, quoted by Alex Deane, the first few filmed attacks featured stooges and then they went on to “other people”. I can’t quite figure out whether or not the”other people” were members of the public who participated voluntarily as “extras” in an admitted fiction or whether they were real victims. My spidey-senses are a-tingle with the suspicion of some hasty re-writing of history after hostile attention; the comments to the sycophantic This is Kent piece are gratifyingly hostile. Also, the video admiringly profiled in Kent Online has now been removed by the user.

Irrespective of whether the videos are real or fake, videos that show apparent assaults in an approving manner incite others to commit similar assaults on smokers for real.

Indeed, they incite others to commit any other type of assault that the attackers may deem is good for the victims. The law, of course, forbids people to rip the veils off Muslim women who go about swathed – though at least as many people the veils offensive as find cigarettes offensive, and there is a reasonable case to be made – as reasonable as the case for doing good by force being made by the Ciggy Busters – that having their veils ripped off might do them good in the end and help them kick the masking habit. The law also forbids incitement to such assaults. If I were to make a “burqa busters” video the police would be round in an instant, and the defence that everyone involved was only acting would cut no ice with the Crown Prosecution Service.

Why should not that law also apply in this case?

14 comments to State sponsored happy slapping and/or incitement to violence

  • We in America thank our British brethren for the preview of coming attractions, for the sneak peak at the next horror show to be unleashed upon us.

    Our current crop of ‘progressives’ get wind of this, and they’re quite likely to declare it a dandy of an idea.

    Suffer the little children.

  • The correct response to a physical assault is physical violence. We call this “self defence”…

    …and happily the perpetrators of the assault are thoughtfully providing video evidence to prove that the reason you punched that nasty little turd in the face was that he was robbing you on a public street.

  • Dale Amon

    Of course over in the US, you COULD make a Burqa Buster’s video, so long as you had a disclaimer that no live burqas were harmed in the fiming :-^

  • Howard R Gray

    This is brown shirting. Are we to experience a night of long cigarette holder extinguishing avec a punch in the face? This is Nationalsozialismus at its best, the left is true to form bringing back, health fascism and worse anti Semitism. Soon other egregious elements of the worst of socialism will be back in fashion, mass murder, cultural revolutions, one man one vote once only etc. etc.

    It has to start somewhere, so why not ciggy smoker bashing. Nice one squirrel!

  • APL

    Howard R Grey: “This is brown shirting.”

    When I first heard about this, that was my exact response too.

  • Derek Buxton

    There seem to be more and more cases of the police allowing theft and criminal damage to take place. All centred on the claimed grounds of “the good of the people/earth”. It is of course nothing of the sort, purely thuggery for it’s own sake. The hunt saboteurs were the earlier users of this tactic and proved that it worked.

  • Mark Murray

    Hypocrisy reigns supreme in Socialsm’s endless quest to destroy Western democracy.Muslims can do no wrong because they too have the same agenda.It is a marriage of pure convenience.
    Al Pacino’s character of Satan in The Devil’s Advocate summed it up when he commented something to the effect of “you change the world by changing the law”.
    It astonishes me that the people in this world that contribute the least want to tell everyone else what to do.
    “If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilisation,then be prepared to accept barbarism”.
    Thomas Sowell

  • Arty

    The upside to this is that there’s an almost one hundred percent chance that anyone breaking into your home is a smoker so you’re only doing your civic duty by beating the crap out of them.

  • Slowjoe

    I think the FOIA applies to schools.

    Perhaps the teaming hundred of hoo is worth looking at in greater depth.

    I’d love to know whether they got the permission of the governors for this project, who has provided funding, what contact they had with the police, who in the police approved it, how many kids were involved, whether any of those kids have criminal records…

    The raw footage might be disclosable, certainly it’s worth asking for in order to be able to say they are covering up.

    In the current time of budget tightening, there’s a realistic possibility of bagging the heads of a few bureaucrats, a head teacher and maybe even an idiot politically correct copper…
    Really, now is an opportunity to deter this

  • Richard Thomas

    Arty, I don’t smoke but I always carry a “throw down” pack should I ever find the need to kill someone in self defense.

  • steveg

    Running up to a child and shouting “mobile phone buster” and taking their comfort blanket from them would provoke outrage. But hey, it’s for their own good, innit? What with earhole cancer or scrambled brains or death of the English language via txting, it’s all okay, right?

  • Ian B

    However, I think it is arguable that he received plenty of indirect subsidization,

    Um, America invented this. You remember Carrie A. Nation and her hatchet?

    __
    “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”.

  • Ian B

    Oh, good start to the day Ian. Managed to insert a quote from a thread on the Lib Alliance Blog instead. Sigh.

    Need. More. Coffee.

    Here’s another attempt at the above comment-

    We in America thank our British brethren for the preview of coming attractions, for the sneak peak at the next horror show to be unleashed upon us.

    Um, America invented this. You remember Carrie A. Nation and her hatchet?

  • Ian B

    Hypocrisy reigns supreme in Socialsm’s endless quest to destroy Western democracy.

    Depends what you mean by socialism. If you mean in the marxist/communist/trade unionist rabble rouser sense, it’s not that. That is as dead as facism.

    What we are up against is that which has always been the primary driver of Statism in the Anglosphere; christian socialism, otherwise known as puritanism. The enemy of Liberty in our nations isn’t the Fourth International, it’s the Womens Christian Temperance Union. Always has been.