Criminal Courts Charge from a Criminally Inclined Government

May 5th  2015

 

It seems this country is hurtling towards being  a fascist State with most of the population denied any sort of proper justice as a corrupt Government steamrollers over citizens by tightening the screws of oppression little by little so people barely notice until it is too late.

The two articles below aptly described my own first hand experiences  and so I copied them from solicitors Clarke Kiernan website:

Criminal Courts Charge

Criminal Courts Charge

The Lord Chancellor introduced a measure that will impact significantly on any person who finds themselves involved with the Magistrates’ Courts on any road traffic matter such as speeding, careless driving, or any other technical or low level breach of the law where the incident occurs after 12th April 2015. The idea was said to be ‘to make criminals pay for the criminal justice system’. He called it the Criminal Courts Charge.

In reality, the people who will be paying will be those ordinary working people who make a simple error and who, because they are normally law abiding, will have the income or assets to pay this extra cost. Regular offenders will tend not to have any income or assets to meet the payment. Non payment of this penalty is punishable by imprisonment no matter how low level the allegation.

If your case goes to court and you fight the allegation believing in your innocence or simply wanting to explain the circumstances to reduce the penatly, if the magistrates disagree with you they must order you to pay an extra £520 for the privilege of having the case tested, no matter how brief the hearing. The charges increase if the case gets to the crown court no matter how it gets there.

Nowadays ordinary law abiding people will have to make decisions on whether to accept a fixed penalty or whether to make false admissions for a police caution based on financial considerations rather than guilt due to the clear threat that now exists of a large extra financial penalty no matter how low level the misdemeanour or punishment.

Often people will not have taken legal advice and will not understand that taking a police caution for an allegation of eg common assault or petty theft will be recorded as a criminal record by the police and will disqualify you from many occupations, from helping out at your child’s school, restrict travel to other countries…

This is not an idea to make criminals pay, it is a way to make ordinary people pay for a system that is part of the State and payable by the State. It is an indirect further tax on working families. It is tarring people with the ‘criminal’ label indiscriminately. The impact is to convict more people, more easily and more cheaply whether or not they are guilty of a crime.

The item below was also copied from solicitors website : http://clarkekiernan.com/rant

Rant

Excuse us if we rant in a direction you do not agree with. A quote from Megarry J in the case of  John v Rees [1970] Ch. 345, Ch D and which was re-used in Moss v The Queen [2013] 1 WLR 3884, PC sets out a philosophy that we like:

“It may be that there are some who would decry the importance which the courts attach to the observance of the rules of natural justice. ‘When something is obvious,’ they may say, ‘why force everybody to go through the tiresome waste of time involved in framing charges and giving an opportunity to be heard? The result is obvious from the start.’ Those who take this view do not, I think, do themselves justice. As everybody who has anything to do with the law well knows, the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases which, somehow, were not; of unanswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of fixed and unalterable determinations that, by discussion, suffered a change.”

If you look at what has been happening to the Criminal Justice System (as well as the civil system) for some years you ought to wonder how consecutive Governments can get away with concentrating on the administration of the systems to the undoubted detriment of Justice. It has become more important to Government to convict members of the public quickly and cheaply. Not only are defendants and their lawyers put under pressure to prepare the cases against them rather than trust the crown prosecution service and police to do their jobs. No longer are the prosecutors expected to do their job; Government seems to have given up on them and decided that the best, easiest, cheapest way of convicting people is to get the people to carrry  out sufficient work for the prosecution that they evenutally convict themselves – guilty or not.

The protection people had was with defence lawyers who would stand up for and protect the person’s rights. Government sorted that one out. The legal aid system is being destroyed so that those who cannot afford to pay for representation have to make use of lawyers who are underpaid and overworked. It might be denied by Government and by legal aid lawyers but it is simple business sense that you get what you paid for.

Not only has Government reduced remuneration for the legal aid lawyer to a ridiculous level but they intend to do the same again and also to reduce the number of firms able to carry out the work on legal aid. The service is to be reduced to a level most people will not believe until they (unexpectedly) find themselves in need of the assistance and discover that if they want to see their solicitor outside of the Court to prepare their case and take advice so that you are ready for the hearing then you will probably find you have to travel to the other end of your county where you will see a young, inexperienced, support staff member because the firm will not be able to afford to employ enough solicitors of quality to service the work at the level people will need in order to assert their rights.

In order to achieve what the government wants to see happen to criminal defence work it is essential that they not only reduce the number of firms, they also need to ensure firms have the minimum number of solicitors and maximum unqualified support staff and then to get the price even lower the firms will not be required to have any offices. Those who can afford to instruct good firms like ours will do so much better than those who have to manage on legal aid. That is not in fact the criminal justice system we like to see. It is not the system our government should be forcing upon us.

In order to see the ways in which Government has managed to increase the burdens on defendants to convict themselves you only need to study the Criminal Procedure Rules that are carefully drafted to add to burdens for defendants in a way that ignores and overrides their statutory protections. Notwithstanding that the prosecution takes months usually to bring a case to court for the first hearing, they are encouraged to give minimum disclosure of the case the defendant is expected to meet at the first hearing but the defendant is then expected (compelled) to identify all issues they will want to rely upon notwithstanding the disclosure is inadequate and there has been no opportunity to investigate matters, check availability of witnesses, seek any expert evidence or just generally give decent instructions and take good advice. There is no leeway given for people whose first language is not English or have mental health and/or learning difficulties.

MODERNISING MONEY

Money creation should only be used in the public interest

 

The same banks that caused the financial crisis currently have the power to create 97% of the UK’s money. They’ve used this power recklessly, putting most of the money they create into property bubbles and financial markets. And now they’re back to their old ways.

We need a change. The power to create money should only be used in the public interest, in a democratic, transparent and accountable way. The 1844 law that makes it illegal for anyone other than the Bank of England to create paper money should be updated to apply to the electronic money currently created by banks.

Banks create new money, in the form of the numbers (deposits) that appear in bank accounts, through the accounting process used when they make loans. In the words of the Bank of England:

“When a bank makes a loan, for example to someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house, it does not typically do so by giving them thousands of pounds worth of banknotes. Instead, it credits their bank account with a bank deposit of the size of the mortgage. At that moment, new money is created.” (Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1)

Conversely, when people use those deposits to repay loans, the process is reversed and money effectively disappears from the economy. As the Bank of England describes:

“Just as taking out a loan creates new money, the repayment of bank loans destroys money. … Banks making loans and consumers repaying them are the most significant ways in which bank deposits are created and destroyed in the modern economy.” (Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1)

When new money is created, it should be used to fund vital public services or provide finance to businesses, creating jobs where they’re needed, instead of being used to push up house prices or speculate on the financial markets.

 

Creating a Sovereign Monetary System

 

This proposal for reform of the banking system explains, in plain English, how we can prevent commercial banks from being able to create money, and move this power to create money into the hands of a transparent and accountable body.

 

It is based on the proposals outlined in Modernising Money (2013) by Andrew Jackson and Ben Dyson, which in turn builds on the work of Irving Fisher in the 1930s, James Robertson and Joseph Huber in Creating New Money (2000), and a submission made to the Independent Commission on Banking by Positive Money, New Economics Foundation and Professor Richard Werner (2010).

Taking the power to create money out of the hands of banks would end the instability and boom-and-bust cycles that are caused when banks create too much money in a short period of time. It would also ensure that banks could be allowed to fail without bailouts from taxpayers. It would ensure that newly created money is spent into the economy, so that it can reduce the overall debt burden of the public, rather than being lent into existence as happens currently.

PDF Download:

Download Here (Free, PDF, 56 pages)

 

BELOW IS AN EXTRACT FROM THE ABOVE PDF

 

SOCIAL & ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

7. TACKLING UNAFFORDABLE HOUSING

Problem: Around a third of the money created by banks goes towards mortgage lending (and a further significant proportion goes towards commercial property). This creation of money to buy pre-existing assets (i.e. houses in limited supply, and the underlying land which is in fixed supply) leads to prices rising. Rising house prices make banks even more confident about lending further amounts for mortgages (since rising prices mean that they are unlikely to lose money even in the event of a default and repossession). This becomes a highly pro-cyclical process, leading to house price bubbles.

Sovereign money as a solution: There is a need for a number of policy and tax reforms to address the problem of unaffordable housing (particularly in the UK). However, removing the ability of banks to create money will remove much of the fuel for house price inflation. House prices that rise at a lower rate than growth in wages will mean that housing becomes more affordable over time.

8. SLOWING THE RISE IN INEQUALITY

Problem: House price bubbles have the effect of transferring wealth from the young to the old, and from those who cannot get on the property ‘ladder’ to those who can. This is a significant channel through which wealth inequality is further increased.

Furthermore, the fact that the nation’s money supply must be borrowed from banks means that we are having to pay interest on the entire money supply. Household income data surveys show that this has the effect of transferring income from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%. (See Chapter 5 of Modernising Money for further details).

Sovereign money as a solution: As discussed above, removing the ability of banks to create money should have a dampening effect on house price rises, which in turn will reduce the rate of growth in wealth inequality.

The creation, by the central bank, of money that has no corresponding interest-bearing debt, means that there is a stock of money that is effectively ‘debt free’, and no need for members of the public to borrow simply to ensure that there is money available in the economy. The resulting lower levels of private debt will mean that less interest is paid overall, and therefore less income is transferred to the top 10% of the population. Again, this will slow the rate of growth in inequality.

 

 

Tory and Lib Dem MPs have decided terminally ill patients should work or starve

written by Tom Pride  from Pride’s Purge – an irreverent look at UK politics

Back in 2011, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs joined together to reject an amendment which would have exempted terminally ill cancer patients from benefit cuts.

They decided that if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness such as cancer – but have been given more than 6 months to live – you will have to work or starve.

Here’s a previous blogpost about that:

The government has finally done something so outrageous even I can’t be bothered to satirise it

This decision by coalition MPs was so outrageous that after intense lobbying, there were some concessions made by the government.

However, in a bizarre piece of upside-down DWP logic, it now seems that if you have less than 6 months to live – you will be refused benefits.

This is from the Chester and Ellesmere Port Foodbank blog:

Jenny

Jenny came to the Chester and Ellesmere Port Foodbank last month, having been diagnosed with terminal Cancer. Her prognosis was three to six months. She already suffered with several chronic illnesses preventing her from working over the last two years and was in receipt of Disability Living Allowance. Having no family she was trying to “put her house in order”, ensuring all her bills were paid and saving up for her funeral. Her DLA was stopped; the reason given was that as she was not expected to survive the required time, she did not qualify for this benefit! She came to the Foodbank not for herself but to bring a neighbour who had mental health issues and short term memory problems. He had been 30 minutes late for his appointment at the Benefit office (he had forgotten the time!) and had therefore been sanctioned. He had not eaten for three days. They were both given a meal and the time to talk of their problems and referred to the appropriate agencies for food vouchers and further support and help. Several weeks later Jenny came to the Foodbank to thank everyone for the help and food that was given and the kindness and support that was shown in their time of need. Jenny died three weeks later.

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So let’s be clear about this – if you are terminally ill and you don’t have the financial means to keep yourself for the remainder of your life – you will have to find work or starve.

I know some people will argue that Jenny could have appealed the decision which would have been overturned, or she made a mistake when she was filling in the forms which could have been rectified, or the DWP made an honest mistake themselves and Jenny should have gone back to them and argued her case harder. But she can’t now, can she?

Because she’s dead.

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There are just 5 weeks left to reach 100,000 signatures to trigger a government debate on disability cuts. Please sign the War on Welfare petition:

War on Welfare 

GOVERNMENT INSPIRED FRAUD

SNOOPING COUNCILS ARE ALSO JUST PLAIN CORRUPT & EVIL

YES, THIS IS THE UK WE ARE TALKING ABOUT

I can top the story ‘Council Snoopers Check if Elderly Transfer Homes to Avoid Care fees’ (Daily Telegraph October 19 2013) with what is probably a nastier abuse of public office by councils I have experienced.

I became a single parent, entirely reliant on the benefit system because the mother of my baby son became acutely mentally ill with schizophrenia on his birth, causing maximum disruption to our lives.

Instead of the benefits system providing a ‘safety net’ enabling families to survive difficult circumstances, the maladministration of it systematically  destroyed our lives a little bit more every year, causing me to lose my house when it should never have been lost, for instance.

Finally becoming homeless in 2011 and evicted at only 24 hours notice by the fraudulent, dishonest Lehmans Bank’s equally fraudulent subsidiary mortgage lender SPML, the local council said it was not obliged to fulfill it’s statutory legal obligation of housing my son and me on the grounds that I was ‘Intentionally homeless’ because, in their view, I ‘should never have bought my house nine years previously because’,  the  council housing official said, ‘I’m gobsmacked you bought a house. As a single parent of your age, you should have realised you would never be able to work again’. This is a direct quote.

The poisonous council housing official said that it was her opinion that what I should have done was, instead of spending the £80 000 cash I had left from the forced sale of a previous, larger house (sold to avoid re-possession) to buy another one, I should have spent the £80k on renting a property. Then, when all that money ran out, I would have been able to claim the housing benefit allowance to pay the rent and therefore I would not have become homeless.

I was supposed  by this screamingly stupid person to have this gift of clairvoyance which if applied to everyone would require that no person should ever ‘take the risk’ of buying a house in case some time in the future unforeseen circumstances prevent them from earning an income and they cannot pay their mortgage which will inevitably lead to eviction – and it’s all their own fault for not being able to see into the future.

I was specifically told that I should have known that is what I should have done, rather than buy my own house ! It was made clear to me that the council official thought I had done something ‘wrong’ buying a house and she personally  disapproved of me buying a house and she had the opinion I should have rented accommodation and that is what she would have done, she said.

Therefore, this idiot continued, when I bought my house I would have known that because I would never work again I could not pay my mortgage and that would eventually cause me to be evicted (nine years later) & therefore I had willfully and deliberately caused my own eviction  thereby fulfilling the legal definition of being ‘Intentionally homeless’ by deliberately doing, or failing to do something that ultimately caused my homelessness.

This is a legal construct which allows councils to label a homeless person a ‘willful wrongdoer’ who because they made themselves deliberately homeless, does not deserve the support of the housing & benefits legislation designed to support people in statutory need.

While it may be reasonable to have the concept of being ‘deliberately homeless’ available so that it may be properly used to prevent obvious abuses of the social housing system, the sort of circumstances described above are a clear and quite ludicrous abuse of law. It seems impossible to imagine any court could allow this obvious abuse.

This is also not a unique case. I have come across many other examples of this legal point being mis-used and abused on a regular basis by many local councils up and down the country to enable them to avoid housing people they are legally obliged to house under Parliamentary legislation.

The completely sick joke about it all is that all of this is driven by the simple lack of having sufficient money in relevant housing budgets to properly deal with whatever housing issues need dealing with according to the law as it stands. But Government expenditure actually rises exponentially as a direct result of maladministration like this.

By mis-using and abusing law to weasel out of housing people in need just to apparently to save money, it actually ends up costing a vast amount more money because the State simply ends up spending much, much more money dealing with the various consequences resulting from people being made entirely homeless by a vindictive, deceitful & downright wicked State. This is demonstrated again and again by the disgusting behaviour of dim and small minded Government officials in both Central Government and in particular Local Councils who just make up the rules as they go along to suit their own warped minds.

So, in my particular case, no money whatever was actually saved by failing to obey the law which said the local council had a legal obligation to house a child & parent made street homeless overnight by a rapacious and dishonest and fraudulent mortgage lender.

My son and I spent over seven months in slum-like bed & breakfast accommodation in a cosy arrangement with Pakistani owners and the council which paid them about £1500 a month. I was told by one of these Pakistani’s colleagues how he also had a lucrative sideline in various criminal activities, including the criminal importing & exporting of empty container loads of wine to falsely evade & reclaim VAT and other customs duties.

Then there were other, huge, but not easily identified expenditures as a vast job creation scheme swung into action to gobble up thousands of hours of social services and council employees time dealing with all the ‘meetings’ ‘reports’ writing and box ticking that went on to deal with this ‘case’ which still rumbles on and looks set to continue rumbling on to infinity.

Finally, Government money is now being spent on paying an extortionate, unnaturally inflated rent to my private landlord who happens to be a banker, to pay his mortgage on the house I now live in, so he may become even richer by having the State buy him a house to rent out.

This house could, instead, be owned by the State, rather than a private banker landlord on the make and would then result in a mere fraction of the money that is being spent by this incompetent State maladministration being needed.

This particular maladministration of a housing issue I have personally experienced & described above comes at the end of a long catalogue of other abuses from my local council which include the ‘snooping’ whereby they discovered I was a company director by virtue of me having spent £20 on the paperwork of setting up a Ltd company with a view to becoming self employed in the future.

The council used this information (gained only by a ‘snooping’ process) to confabulate it into the idea of me earning money so justifying them to withhold council tax benefits and never repay what they wrongly/illegally withheld, thereby successfully milking me of some thousands of pounds from my sole income of single parent benefits.

It all quite takes your breath away really.

BANK ROBBERY IN CYPRUS BY EURO CONMEN

Thieves are attempting to steal ten percent of all bank savings deposits in Cyprus banks. The thieves are European Union financial conmen from Germany.

The cause of the whole credit crisis, which started when Lehmans bank became so fraudulent other banks refused to lend to it, is simply that banks in general are too dishonest, too greedy and too fraudulent to be entrusted with the control of the money supply.

Banks control the money supply by constantly increasing it by lending money they do not have. They simply borrow off each other in a constant merry-go-round to balance their books. This is how they create 97% of the money supply – by creating debt.

Lehmans fell off that merry-go-round when even the other banks thought Lehmans were creating too much money out of nothing because the more a bank lends the more interest it earns which it can keep as profit. This becomes ‘real’ money which the banks keep as profit and which is eventually spent by these greedy profiteers into the wider economy – after they have bought their  flashy gold diamond encrusted Rolex watches and mansions !

It is simply a license for the banks to print money for themselves which is why they pay ludicrously high bonuses to their disgustingly rapacious employees.

Now the banks are desperately trying to claw back all that money they recklessly and dishonestly created which is why they are refusing to lend money to business’. The banks are actually sucking back as much money as possible to reduce their own debts before they go bust like the Cypriot banks, meanwhile cheerfully pocketing the excruciatingly high, usurious, interest rates they squeeze out of borrowers.

This is exactly what is causing the economic meltdown, loss of millions of jobs, loss of millions of homes, destruction of national economies and misery for  tens of millions of people.

The Cypriot banks are going bust and being bailed out because they were seriously greedy and dishonest and now they have been found out. All the banks have behaved in a similar way and ALL are devious, out of control monsters that ruin our lives.

Politicians are to frightened to stand up to them.

A completely different model of money is needed like that suggested by the ‘Positive Money’ campaign for a more honest system of money not held in the stranglehold of the privately owned banks.

How insane can  it be that privately owned banks control the money supply and entire national economies, house prices, our jobs – everything ?

It is a really nasty system. Why hasn’t the Government done something about changing it ?

BAD AND BUREAUCRATIC STATE EDUCATION SYSTEM

To the Head Teacher of my son’s school.

 

from a parent exasperated with the appalling quality of State education  in the UK.

 

Dear Head Teacher,

 

With regard to the detention my son received for writing a ’cheeky’ comment when the IT ‘technician ’ logged him off the internet yesterday.

 

I spoke further at length to my son about this incident and I am unhappy about the issue as follows.

 

I understand that he is being punished for being cheeky and I have absolutely no argument with that, but I am unhappy about him being logged off the internet because it appears to have been ill considered, inappropriate and, perhaps, downright silly & bureaucratic if his explanations are correct – and they seem to be.

 

My son tells me that in the IT lesson he was required by the IT teacher to produce a powerpoint presentation, to include illustrations. This involved legitimately accessing the internet to acquire relevant images to illustrate the presentation.

 

He wrote the two words in the Google search box  ‘Troll Comic’ to specifically access an image he had previously seen which he wished to use for this presentation, the subject of which was racism. I questioned him closely about this and he showed me this image when I googled it and it is clearly exactly the right image that would be appropriate in my son’s mind to illustrate the presentation as he  explained to me. He told me it was a suitable cartoon image which clearly appeared to be a ‘black’ person and my son intended obtaining a similar type of image but illustrating  a ‘white caucasian’.

 

It was therefore quite wrong for my son to have been arbitrarily logged off the internet and the ‘technician’ should have had the common sense to enquire of him why he appeared to be just googling comics to apparently – in the mind of the technician – read them in a lesson which would have then constituted an inappropriate use of the internet. But the technician failed to do their job properly in this respect.

 

It is therefore quite understandable why my son thought this was stupid and was consequentially irritated. This triggered my son’s response of ‘cheekiness’ in writing a silly comment  – ‘stop watching me you pervert’ – as his natural response.

 

I have pointed out to him that he should have written a non-cheeky, more intelligent reply and perhaps bothered to explain why he had googled that search term. But he didn’t because children are immature and behave accordingly. He now agrees with me he was wrong  and that it was immature and he should have written a more mature comment which would have resolved the issue more intelligently.

 

My son also told me he thought it was always pointless trying to defend himself against ‘wrong’ disciplinary accusations from the school and he never did this because it had always been his experience that it just got him into even more trouble in the end – even if he had been blameless in the first place.

 

This is something he has often repeated over many years and different schools and I know of some past incidents whereby my son has been absolutely blameless about something, but ‘has accepted the rap’ rather than try and defend himself. I think this is wrong and demonstrates an inadequacy of disciplinary procedures and it was not the generally the  experience I remember as a child.

 

This demonstrates the law of unintended consequences which is probably the single most defining evil of bureaucracy and the stupidity of the bureaucratic mind.

 

When my son explained how the school has a system of ‘policing’ the internet by means of having a full time ‘technician’ sitting hunched up over a computer all day randomly monitoring any IT lessons or other computer access by pupils, I was, frankly, astonished at the waste of money this represents and the nightmare overtones of Orwellian surveillance and thinking and apparent need to battle with the pupils perceived remorseless disobedience in inappropriately accessing the internet.

 

It seemed to me inconceivable that the average private school would waste the cost of a full time salary in this manner, or that it would accept that pupils were so uncontrollable that this was the only suitable option.

 

I just found it offensive to see what I perceive as the sort of State type control freak bureaucracy being used to deal with an issue, as opposed to the more sane solutions used by the more sensible world of the non-governmental, non-State world which tends to do things more sensibly and effectively.

 

I would make the point that simply making efforts to physically prevent pupils from accessing the internet inappropriately is probably utterly pointless because while you can do this in  one  environment such as either school or home, this will merely encourage pupils to be even more determined to inappropriately access it elsewhere, such as friends houses, mobile devices etc.

 

It is quite obviously physically impossible to completely prevent pupils inappropriately accessing the internet for this reason and therefore it is simply pointlessly bureaucratic and actually more harmful in the longer term to waste time and money to effectively actually encourage pupils to do the very thing you don’t want them to do in the first place.

 

Like drugs, it can’t be stopped in this blunderbuss, mindlessly coercive & bureaucratic kind of way; only by properly educating people can appropriate behaviour be achieved.

 

 

The only way to prevent any form of ‘crime’ or inappropriate behaviour is to train  people’s minds to be moral and law abiding etc and not to seek to achieve this effect by force, fear or the violent and repressive coercion of authority, because this will almost certainly achieve exactly the opposite effect.

 

It has always been the responsibility of the teacher taking a class to ensure any pupil is not doing anything ‘inappropriate’ and to employ a third party ‘policeman’ sounds horribly Orwellian and 1984’ish – with these unintended consequences I mention which have been wasting money on a salary, wasting your time, the time of the class teacher, my time, and alienating the pupil and the parent, and generally leaving a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. All the typical consequences of bad management and bureaucracy.

 

Which is why I am writing this.

 

Yours Sincerely,

 

From a  parent exasperated by the futile and bad management of State schools providing a lousy standard of education to UK children by the mindless pursuit of bureaucracy instead of getting on with the real business of genuinely trying to provide a decent education.

 

The State education system is idiotic, bad and utterly sub-standard in just about every respect and, like many parents I am completely appalled at it.