Monday, September 12, 2005

PUNISH PARENTS, NOT CROOKS: AMAZING PRIORITIES OF THE BRITISH LEFTIST ELITE

The following news report (originally from the "Daily Mail") appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on Sept., 11, 2005. This would have to be just about a perfect example of where Leftist sympathies lie. Both crooks and Leftists think that there is no such thing as right and wrong (at least as it applies to them) so it should be no surprise that Leftists want to protect crooks and hurt ordinary people

Parents who smack their children should face time in jail, according to recommendations made by government advisers in the UK. They say mothers and fathers who are convicted for regularly smacking children at home in front of brothers or sisters should go to prison and be treated in the same way as those who attack or abuse children.

The recommendation comes from the Sentencing Advisory Panel, which two years ago said street muggers and thugs should not be jailed unless their assaults involved weapons or caused lasting damage to their victims.

The advice on smacking, in a report ordered by former Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf, is intended to form the basis for instructions to judges and magistrates next year,



INCORRECTNESS ABOUT SCOTLAND

Academics who challenge received wisdom are often given a tough time. Michael Fry's history of the Scottish Highlands has been greeted with a volley of insults, the most ludicrous comparing him with David Irving, a writer who denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

Mr Fry's offence is to have tackled what is generally regarded as one of the most shameful episodes of Scottish history-the Highland clearances. The accepted view is that in the early 19th century, hard-hearted, wealthy aristocrats brutally cleared their estates of tens of thousands of farming tenants to make way for (more profitable) sheep. Many of the evicted emigrated to America; the stayers eked out a miserable subsistence from fishing and small-holding on barren coastal strips.

Mr Fry does not deny that some brutalities did occur. But, he says, they were the exception rather than the rule, otherwise the Highland population could not have risen as it did from 337,000 in 1755 to more than 400,000 in 1841. This explosion, he argues, made traditional agriculture-which was marginal at best in much of the Highlands-quite uneconomic.

A few landowners responded with evictions. But many more spent huge sums trying to build an alternative economy. Mr Fry estimates that the Countess of Sutherland spent about 100m pounds($178m) in today's money shifting tenants to coastal towns with new industries such as fishing and mining. Only when these experiments failed did emigration (much of it paid for by landowners) increase, leading to a drop in population in the late 1800s.

At the beginning of Mr Fry's period the Highlands were virtually a different nation from the Lowlands of Scotland. Behind their impenetrable mountains, language, social structure and the whole way of life were distinct. Lowland Scots regarded Highlanders with distrust as dangerous and troublesome neighbours. Curiously though, and largely as a consequence of the influence of Sir Walter Scott, both Highlanders and Lowlanders "now regard themselves as members of one nation"...

Mr Fry's version of Scottish history has led Brian Wilson, a former Labour MP, to label him a "clearance-denier". The bad name given to landowners by Mr Wilson and others is partly why Scotland leans politically further left than the rest of Britain... in his challenge to the leftist consensus, Mr Fry is shaking the foundations of the newly devolved Scottish state. That, in some eyes, is a real crime.

More here. NOTE: I have previously posted some of Mr Fry's comments in his own defence here

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