Back when I were a young lad, there was a simple distinction between the two main UK parties. The Tories were all for economic freedom but were big on very strong police powers. Labour couldn’t understand economic freedom but used to be against giving too much power to the police.
How times have changed; the Tories are raising VAT and Labour disappeared into a fog of Big Brotherism. To me it looks like both parties have pilfered the worst aspects of the opposition while keeping hold of their original bad habits, so we end up with two parties both wanting more control over the economy and both wanting people locked up for any reason possible.
And it’s not just locking up that they like, they also like making it easier to lock people up. Like, fer instance, taking DNA from everyone in an entire city to rule out involvement in one murder.
MURDER squad detectives were last night under pressure to order a mass DNA screening to flush out Joanna Yeates’s killer.
An MP led the call for all men living in the same city as the landscape architect to give saliva samples to the police as their investigation makes slow progress. Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, said the need to catch Joanna’s killer overrides the questions of intrusion and invasion of privacy in a mass screening.
Three things:
- No, it doesn’t – casting such a wide net is entirely unjustified.
- British police have shown repeatedly that they cannot be trusted with DNA that they should have destroyed, so volunteering to give them any isn’t exactly smart.
- There has been no news from police that they are hunting for a male suspect, has there? Yet this MP is only encouraging the DNA testing of men. Either she knows something we don’t (which she shouldn’t about an ongoing investigation) or she’s just assuming that only men could be doing such a thing.
I’d like to hear from Ms McCarthy about her reasons for this. Does she know more than the rest of us; is she revealing too much about an ongoing investigation than she should; or is she just a rampant sexist? The public need to know…