I read in the Telegraph today about a woman who has been told she can’t have planning permission to put a caravan on her organic vegetable garden to enable her to live near the plants she is growing. Fair enough, you might say.
However 20 miles from her garden a group of ‘travellers’ have bought a field, laid drains and built houses, all without planning permission – and no-one is doing anything to move them. It appears there’s guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers that to remove them and their dwellings from the land would infringe their ‘human rights’.
If this story is true then we are a long way down the road to abandoning the Rule of Law and the principle that all are equal before it favour of privilege (literally, ‘private law’) for minorities. which will bring the Law itself and those who enforce it into well merited contempt.
Similarly Newsnight reports that some people broke into a school in Notts. on Monday intent upon staging a ‘protest’ to disrupt the working of a nearby coal-fired power station. They were arrested but are complaining about being treated as if they were terrorists, when they wanted to ‘draw attention to the carbon emissions from the power station’. None of them have been charged, it seems. What about breaking and entering, for starters?
Again there seems to be a growing willingness to let the end (especially something greenish) justify the means used to ‘protest’ about it. This must stop!
PaulJ's bench.......... 