Sunday, January 29, 2012

"Big Society" meets "Real World"

Ah Britain...

It's a long story, but in a nutshell...

For quite a long time, however many years it was, the Labour Party under Tony Blair tried to make Britain a different place from what our mums and dads had known.

Very different.

Now, David Cameron, who likes to make people think he's a "conservative," has made up this new plan to make things more like they way they were. It's called "Big Society," in which, he figures, regular people will start helping each other, without going to the government to fix all their problems.

Trouble is, this requires the kind of people who lived in our mums' and dads' Britain, not the kind of people that Tony Blair's Britain has produced.

Here's a little example of why this isn't going as well as hoped. One of Tony Blair's friends' little projects, that gets talked about rather too infrequently, was this new thing, Not-A-Cop. Called "police community support officers," PCSOs, Not-A-Cops function just about as well as you would imagine from the name.

Here's a headline typical of their great contribution to British society and policing...

"PCSOs trash penniless homeless guy's tent, bought by local charity"

"The tent was warm and it was out of people's way in woodland.

"It was secure my own private space where I could read a book with my torch."

The tent disappeared when Mr Hicks was out walking around the town during the day.

He returned back to the area behind Witney's Windrush Leisure Centre to find the tent gone.

Mr MacKenzie said: "I inquired in the leisure centre (about the tent) as to whether they had any information and was told that the manager authorised two Police Community Support Officers from Witney Police Station to clear Justin's home away.

"Also, if the police had dismantled it then it should have been treated with respect and taken back to the police station so that Justin could have claimed it back.


And here's a funny video about it, so you can have a laugh in case you were starting to worry about this too much...


(Watch out for language...)





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1 comment:

Teresa B. said...

Too bad they didn't use those "Community support officers" to deal with the Occupy movement. Those tents whould have been gone in no time from that church over in London during the Occupy movement!