The British govt.'s approach seems to be: "Criminalise everything. Enforce Selectively"
I know I'm naturally the one who has the most optimism as indicated by my posts, so my perception of things might be worthless, but to me their approach is honestly a twofold approach of ego and laziness the more I think about it. A lot of nations in the West have governments, or at least select politicians, who sincerely believe that their authority is all encompassing and that they have the capability of carrying out the things they say. Scotland trying to criminalise what people say in their own hopes was emblematic of this, and I think people who knew of it online were too outraged and bemused to consider the impossibility of its enforcement; similar to the recent Ofcom thing being the UK's government attempt to show how committed they are to 'protecting children', the Scottish law was supposed to represent the government's commitment to 'ending racism', but as we saw from the latter and will almost assuredly see from the former, they're wet farts meant to convince the voters that the government is actually doing something. The non-draconian example I can reference is the Rwanda plan, a scheme doomed to fail through government inefficiency, piss-poor planning and not a lot of thought; all in an attempt to show people they were actually trying to address 'concerns'.
Ever since I pondered the viability of Farage being a controlled OP, it got me thinking regarding the motives of government, whether their exercises in maliciousness were actually just the result of a similar level of naivety and ignorance the people had towards them ever since Blair got in, except the average politician having their mug on the TV gives them an unearned ego that means they don't ever amend their lack of knowledge if they can help it. The selfishness demonstrated by the likes of Farage can't be unique to him, surely? It's entirely possible that the 'criminalise everything' approach by the government is the result of them taking the easy road, that by saying they made all these 'bad things' illegal and therefore 'gone' now, they think they've been prompt in addressing the concerns of the population and genuinely fixed the issue(s). They pat themselves on the back thereafter, with no regards to the scale and the possibility of enforcement since after it becomes law, the responsibility shifts to the police to enforce it and out of their hands.
Then again, I might just be going way too far in the opposite direction of the tinfoil hat wearing schizo who thinks the government is spying on
him specifically, believing the government and law enforcement to simply be too incompetent regarding most things — but especially the internet. Stuff that's instinctive to me and that ought to be common sense to everyone here, isn't even in the minds of most people I talk to in my line of work, so I've probably just applied that general sentiment broadly across our institutions. It's not just the old people. I was in a call not too long ago where I watched a guy not much older than me look confounded at the idea of using different passwords across websites, and had to be talked through implementing 2-factor authentication on the login to his admin account tied to his company's website. I didn't say anything but it inspired hope in the long-term viability of the career I had stumbled into.
I do think people getting angry instead of worried with regards to how such laws would affect the country is a positive. The slippery slope isn't a fallacy and there's plenty of precedent to support that it isn't, and people shouldn't grow complacent or believe there's no threat at all. Yes, push back against as much of the government's bullshit as much as they possibly can when they can, but all I would discourage is fear and an
excess of paranoia. I think that's the ultimate objective they try to achieve first and foremost when it comes to this shit, hoping a combination of the two will keep people quiet, compliant and inactive politically. Fortunately I don't think most people are falling for it, even if partially because of ignorance. If Null hadn't blocked access here, I... well, I probably would've learnt about it in this thread or website before I saw it anywhere else first, but still. And unless I was following this specifically, I probably wouldn't have encountered the recent developments off-site since the last I heard of it was its delayed implementation due to Elon raising a stink towards the end of 2024. To set an example, compare my assumption this act would probably no longer be a problem, to people voting in the Conservatives/Voting for Brexit on immigration. They last heard about it 'being fixed' and thus it leaves the mind. I realise how dumb that makes me out to be but if that's also representative of most the population then it helps you to understand my point of view and arguments here.
So few people know generally what their government has done that they aren't really aware there's something to be 'afraid' of, as much of a thorn and boon that is in the side of society and getting people to desire change. Most people tend not to be politically vocal online either, keeping stuff limited to news consumption and content put out by their own preferred sources. And those who still don't do the bare minimum of getting informed through wider sources do the political equivalent of 'retard strength' in my eyes. Use Tommy Robinson as an example. Him being a plant and his big demonstrations being honeypots has been discussed in this thread before, but the fact thousands of people still attend anyway despite the supposed risks and fear they ought to have is an example of this; it might be stupid, but the willingness to show your bare face at an event that'll be widely generalised as being for racists and risks your arrest at shows either dedication to the cause or a lack of knowledge. I think it also demonstrates that the media and government's hold over information was a double-edged sword, since keeping people ignorant to the best of their abilities meant anything in the law that was supposed to keep people afraid was effectively non-existent to them — they never heard of it. Up until recently I think that same ignorance which meant people weren't caring as much as they ought to was mistaken as compliance, both by people who know more than the average person about our situation and by foreigners who mock us from abroad (I think it took until Tiktok for a lot of Brits to realise how much of a meme our country is I.E. "HAVE YOU GOT A LOISONCE FOR THAT?").
It's worth noting that the government (or more pathetically, just the BBC by itself) does more to make people afraid of not paying their TV Licence than it does saying illegal shit online. You could put it on bad optics, or it's a by-product of them wanting their cake and eating it too. Assuming it's not just a consequence of laziness being mistaken for tyranny like I raised near the start, then they simultaneously want people to be afraid of speaking their mind online but at the same time not making the populace too angry at that to inspire a want for change. This has lead to the situation we're at now potentially: people want that change, are indeed angry, but are also fully willing to express themselves because they were never made aware of their own gag since the government was never open and proud about it.
Big acts committed by the populace, which are spread everywhere via news and social media, will stick in the minds of people much longer and keep a position of prominence in their thoughts over the monotone "The Ays have it" of parliament voting even more of our liberties away. And the meagre number of arrests made don't help paint the picture of an all-seeing government that knows everything you do, it shows an overstretched police force making a handful of easy arrests to give the impression the internet is now 'safer' as promised by the government and fulfil their obligations and targets. It's why they'll advertise the seizure of a butter knife, it all to foster the idea of action and competency, but I think it has helped quite a lot in desensitising people to the threat of the police whilst also fuelling vitriol. I think we even beat the Americans first to that viewpoint on the Right.
If you think about it, it's really bizarre to consider that fixes to our free speech and privacy may be incoming in the future (2030s) as a happy consequence of people's narrow focus on immigration, all because the prior governments refused to fix the one issue they were elected for. The slow work in trying to control speech and free thought would all be flushed down the drain down to their refusal to fix the sole concern people had. Like I said, I don't think a lot of people are even aware of the restrictions we have in expression because they're so laser focused on immigrants. It goes in hand with my other post about Farage being an awful plant, since if the government indeed possessed actively malevolent motives behind everything they did, with their end goal being to crush us into compliance under a totalitarian state, they've done a rather bad job of it, all things considered. People tend to explain away this inconsistency as being "anarcho-tyranny" I.E. 'Malice through incompetence and selective law enforcement' but it just appears much more like incompetence on the surface to me. Even when they arrested Southport rioters yet did nothing about the Gypsies and browns in an earlier riot in Manchester, just as Farage is unable to read the room regarding immigration and his supporter's view on Muslims, most British politicians are still operating in principles 20 years out of date, believing most would condemn the arrests of the former but wholeheartedly support the arrests of the latter, which evidently wasn't true hence the birth of "Two-tier Kier".
Say the Ofcom shit is being rolled out now to help stop the spread of information and keep people ignorant, shouldn't they have tried this during lockdowns when people were stuck in their homes with nothing but the internet? Seems like an awful lack of foresight. It's either being rolled out now due to growing fears from the government about spreading discontent, or it's all tied into the government's current kayfabe about trying to 'protect young women and children', brought in from the previous one. This explains the slew of news articles talking about Andrew Tate, attributing the crossbow killer's motivations being misogynistic in nature, and trying to tie the Southport killer's motive into it. The media is also hand in hand with this. with he 'Adolescence' netflix show emphasising the harmful influences on young boys which are making them violent towards girls, and today the documentary on that murdered MtF teen (Brianna?) is airing and apparently emphasises the danger of social media and how it also harms young girls (Yes, I know). The home office also asserting that incels were a greater risk to people than Islamic terrorists is also a product of this; this kayfabe also makes Labour doing nothing to reverse the steps taken against transgenders make sense, since it ties into it the idea of protecting vulnerable women. If it's indeed all tied up in that, it's just another example of politicians being extremely slow on addressing people's concerns since this bill and the worries that led to its creation were outlined all the way back in
2017. The government are either incompetent and slow-acting tyrants, or so woefully inefficient and only willing to drag their feet to do things that any consideration of malevolence is
overestimating them in my view.
But yeah. Sorry again for the long post everybody. I know this is the most
post yet, but I think the general idea of being less afraid and worried about the government's capabilities, as well as the effectiveness of law enforcement, but keeping a hold of anger, is valid. I frequently wind up doing this because I'm just trying to be crystal clear in my perspective because I do worry about being taken the wrong way.
The argument I presented on the government might be more crackpot. It's particularly contentious because it might also imply that much of our dire state is the result of a constant string of incompetence rather than an active and concerted effort by the powers that be in making things so utterly shit. I think the presence of selfish individuals, who would be negatively impacted by action that would positively benefit the majority (think business leaders who benefit from hiring cheaply from abroad or economists whose worth is reliant on GDP going up with unending tides of migrants); people acting in the interests of their particular group whilst in a position of power, such as Sadiq's comment on terrorism way back being 'part and parcel' since he's fully aware that it's
his group doing it or the deemphasis of Islamic terrorism in favour of Hindu extremism in the leaked home office report; the inaction/neglect of those who simply don't want to do their job, thus causing consequences down the road, have muddied the waters. It leads to us trying to make sense of why our government is the way it is, and since they've been consistent in making things worse, it simply has to be a product of those in charge deciding collectively to destroy us since the idea of our current predicament being a series of long-term consequences stacking up over time by the thousands of blood cells moving through the veins of our government, authorities, and associated bodies, is too farfetched to believe.
I'll end this line of thought on two points:
First, scale: We have 25 mayors, 650 MPs and 17000 councillors. The civil service has a total of 514,000 employees. 170000 police officers. 6.14 million public sector employees, 2 million of which are employed by local governments. In order for our country to run at peak efficiently (at least as implied by the sheer numbers), every single one of those people to be giving it their all, and acting selflessly to help the people they're meant to service and ensuring everything is working as it should. I believe there's widescale incompetence, corruption, and just general laziness that's so incomprehensible, that trying to confront the issues and fix them would be an effort so gargantuan that it'd scare away even the most autistic bureaucrat/auditor. Though, if Elon and the Americans can take a crack at it (their civil service is 4 times larger than ours but their government employees number 20 million) then we could too in theory, the main difficulty is the ironclad protections in place to stop removals on a similar scale to DOGE, but I digress.
It's hard to imagine how this might affect things, because how we approach 'scale' is very selective, but that's another tangent I really can't afford to go on. I'll use Rotherham since I imagine everyone here is aware of it and I'll use that as a way to kind of help with comprehending what I'm talking about, how failings and inaction on individual levels add up. I won't cover the whole length of the saga as it's still going, but I'll just start with the initial numbers and how people who were aware of it all actually did something. With Rotherham you had a problem arise in the 1990s of Pakis grooming and raping young girls, taxi drivers mostly, to the tune of 1400 girls. Of these 1400 potential victims, only a handful (quick estimate of 15 or less) testified in a courtroom or came forward with their story.
Community workers become aware of the abuses: In present day they employ 4000. At the time, their findings merely exposed some children as being at 'risk'. The only reason these community workers became aware at all is because they had also gone after children in care homes and I imagine children at the bare minimum would push people to do something, especially if they know them personally. I don't know what number of care workers reported their fears to the police.
The police reportedly did not act on the info as it was shared with them: 2.7k officers on duty as of 2013, and can't find a figure for the 90s so it's all I got. Imagine how few of that number were told directly about the rapes, reported it to their higher ups, or didn't report it at all after being told.
42 out of 2.7 thousand police officers, in dereliction of duty, did nothing to help the victims. We can't really be sure of how many officers actually tried to do something but considering it remained a problem the number could either be worryingly low or infuriatingly none. One explanation they've given is they weren't 'equipped' to deal with the scale of abuse, which is cope. Malicious motive would say they wanted it to happen, the other is that they simply didn't want to deal with the problem that would require a systematic dismantling of the grooming network that grew under their watch. They still did nothing actionable, and I'm unsure if they even reported it to the council and that's more the thanks of the community workers mentioned above. Them acknowledging they weren't 'equipped' is also them acknowledging the scale of the problem too when it all came out, meaning it was a problem they essentially couldn't be arsed to fix.
Rotherham council take 'action' in 1997 (I don't know the exact date they were told and the date they reacted) by creating 'Risky Business' to investigate it (Might be a coincidence but naming your investigation into rapes and groomings after a movie where Tom Cruise turns his home into a brothel may indicate the lack of care from people on said council), assigning responsibility to an independent body. Rotherham council has 59 members as of present, and in theory, it would take just a single councillor to create the task force. They also hired Weir in 2000 to comply with the Home Office's study on youth crime prevention; more on her later.
It took 2 years for a competent person to join the task force after its creation in '97. I can't find info on whether it was particularly active prior to Janye Senior or not, with most of their investigations being conducted in the red light district of Sheffield. If the task force is like-minded to the apathetic police force, it's possible they were doing pretty much nothing prior, but I'm probably be uncharitable. They weren't really focused on the grooming gangs until Senior joined, and it took a further two years for her to find evidence of the grooming network — which the aforementioned police were probably already aware of — and when she reported her findings, the police suggested she forward it to an anonymous drop box to protect the victims identities. They then did nothing with it. It's also possible she had no copy of her findings either so it might be gone forever due to a lack of police care. Anyway, Risky Business, in the article I could find giving some info on them, merely called them a 'small team' of youth workers, so somewhere between 5 and 12 people maybe. Let's say they had the full 12 with Senior being the 12th member. The team was also only funded in 2001, so with that in mind, the fact it didn't her long at all to uncover the systematic abuse after it was funded could indicate the ease and sheer blatancy with which grooming was present.
Anyway, it took an additional 10 years for it to come to light despite the sheer quantity of evidence, and only because some of the girls who had been groomed had aged and reported their experiences to the police combined with some actual journalism on behalf of the press. During this period of inaction we had the Weir report, Heal reports too, acting as pleas to the police essentially to do something. They didn't. The main explanation they give is a lack of resources (Essentially trying to leverage the exposure of their inaction to not having enough money and officers), the motive assigned and further revealed via whistleblowing is a fear of backlash and accusations of racism. Self-serving higher ups who don't want to bother. Who knows how many officers retired between the reveal of mass rapes and grooming and the actual findings coming out. Regardless, what their action and regard for the whole thing is evil, but their pure self-interest is the point I made of all this. Incompetency, avoiding potential headaches, actual
sloth in the biblical sense; their attempt to shift blame to others is a viable defence to them and one that might totally clear their conscience. It's the level of awfulness I think of character I think is so rampant throughout the muscles of our state, representing how things came to be as they are. The only viable defence is for officers who had no idea (which could be upwards of the 2k mark), or who were told, reported it to their higher ups, and expected someone more experienced and supposedly more competent than themselves to get the right people on it. We saw that with Angie Heal, who'll I touch on below. In that case, the fault is with the higherups and not the PCOs, but some officers in the article I linked were personally familiar with the groomers and did nothing (Possible in-group bias for officers who share the perpetrator's race) so the fault is at multiple levels of the hierarchy.
So, to sum: 59 councillors + 2700 police officers + 4000 care workers (How many of these cared for children I'm unaware of, but today Rotherham says they have
200 workers caring for the wellbeing of (99 children for every 10k kids, 50k people aged
0-19 in Rotherham ergo 495 children more or less.) + 12 (Risky Business as a whole) + 1 (Angie Heal, hired by police as drug analyst. She sent several associated reports to higherups on the abuse she discovered, which she found because many of the drugs that were being confiscated were found in the possession of grooming victims. She sent reports in 2002, 2003, 2006, and left the force in 2007 - probably due to being ignored) + 1 (Adele Weir, similar to Heal, hired for an unrelated matter: trying to reduce crime in the youth. Despite being hired for that purpose, similar to what I was talking about above how the government will do something just to keep up appearances, her actual efforts went largely ignored despite uncovering 270 victims and she was censured and let go for working 'beyond her role'.) = 2973 (or 6773 if you want to count every care worker) people, give or take, who were in or around area who worked on behest of the government. I would add Andrew Norfolk too but he's a journalist and therefore wouldn't fit with the rest (The media having 1:1 opinions in line with the government or trying to parrot what they think is popular with their main samples being pensioners or university students is a whole other issue). Anyway: 2973 can be counted as having direct or indirect involvement in potentially helping uncover and fix the rampant grooming and rapes.
Of that figure, we have 3 named individuals we can regard positively, no questions. We know from the treatment of Weir and Risky Business dissolving in 2011 (and the fact they named it such) show that the Rotherham council are generally representative of what I'm talking about, a lack of care and doing the bare minimum because appearances are all that matter (if implants of extreme ego are universal at all levels of government then Weir acting beyond her duties to a positive end would offend them since she's 'ignoring orders' essentially). The only consideration is the same we can warrant to the police officers, just was we can't be certain of how many were in the dark there, we also can't be sure which of the 59 in the council were responsible for creating Risky Business (thus aware of the grooming) and hiring or firing Weir (her being fired was because she kept forwarding reports on abuse to police and the council, acting above her station, thus those who fired her, as well as the their subsequent dissolvement and firing. Maybe there was friction within the council, with some good councillors who were doing their jobs properly and others who represent the problem? The only way to explain the council's lackadaisical attitude to it all is that they might not have deemed a few care worker reports as being worth the amount of effort and cost it'd take to uncover all of it, and Weir's report of 270 victims might have appeared like hyperbole compared to the relative handful of child care councillors who reported the grooming to them.
Regarding those care workers, getting a figure there requires some ass pulling. May 2014 the caseload for the child exploitation team in Roth was 51, and 16 were at risk of exploitation or being exploited. At present 200 workers are assigned to children in Rotheram, and the number of children being looked after potentially is up to 490 (based on Rotheram saying there's 99 children being cared for every 10k kids in Rotherham), could be a lot more or less, we can try to make a number. That infers a caseload of 2.45 children for every care worker (2-3 essentially) and with 67 cases total, we divided that by the number of 2.45 = 27.3 (33.5 if you round down the number of children per care worker) so the figures we get are 27, 33, or 67. Those figures represent the number of care workers who are aware personally of the abuse, not factoring in anybody else but the council and those workers. 27/33 represent figures where care workers are assigned a pair of victims, 67 represents a figure where X-number of workers are assigned to at least 1 victim. (I'm not going to touch the info I found where they could be assigned 16 cases each) Considering how light the council's reaction was, and factoring in a smaller population, I'll go with the 33 figure.
1 (Senior) + 1 (Weir) + 1 (Heal) + 11 (Including all of Risky Business. This number could be higher or lower.) + 33 (Care workers) + 59 (I'm being generous and including the whole council. I would pick a number based entirely on how few people are required to do create a task force and my perceived lack of overall care, but the Risky Business team number and number of care workers who reported the abuse were based on some presumptions already) = 106. The number could also go as low 47, discounting the entire council for being complicit in covering it up, so I will.
47. It could have increased over the years, or it could be lower assuming only a handful of care workers raised the issues they had to the council and not every member of Risky Business was as committed as Senior was, but I'm going off track as is. Out of hundreds, only 47 people were committed enough to role to recognise that there was a problem and something had to be done about it. And what makes that figure particularly upsetting is that they had no idea they were being pretty much ignored or disregarded by those who considered their worries beneath them, putting them out of mind entirely. Risky Businesses constantly reported their findings, constantly had interviews with affected children, but it never amounted to anything because their existence was merely to keep up appearances (Risky Business, in one instance, were tasked with training dog walkers) which is more important than taking a viable course of action, because action requires effort, time, and money. So yeah, it was easier and less involved for the council to pay the salaries of 12 people (quarter of a million pounds a year going off the average support worker salary) than do anything more. It was easier and less potentially damaging to their image for the police to simply ignore it. 42 were charged for their inaction, but they were low-level officers. The police constables in charge during all this, Richard Wells, Mike Hedges, Meredydd Hughes, are totally off scot free despite Hughes being named in the independent inquiry. So potentially the number of people who knew of the problem who either wilfully did nothing despite knowing, participated in suppressing it, or didn't even bother considering there could be a problem could be far higher than we know.
So yeah, this autism (numbers, scatter-brained arguments trying to both attack and defend the points I'm making) are why I think the argument that the state is filled with too many lazy, selfish and ego-driven people for the government's actions to be the result of a unified directive to make us suffer and act as tyrants over us is somewhat viable.
But as horrible and scary as it might be to see that we're held together with nothing but cheap glue, tengujo, and politicians trying to shield it from the wind that is public discontent, there's some positive to gleam from this: all it takes is a few, well-meaning and competent people out of thousands to bring about positive change, collapsing the shoddy structures that the self-interested individuals and lazy erected to do as little as humanly possible. And if one considers the dominoes for Rotherham were first to fall in 2001, finally culminating in investigation, prosecution and finally being revealed to the public between 2008 and 2011, who knows what dominoes have already started to fall over?
(
I might have been able to gather more accurate numbers if I consulted this first but they'd be similar anyway)
Anyway. Have a good one.
