Battle Training Ground For The Police Planned In Portishead

Avon and Somerset Police are proposing to extend their landholding yet again to include a firearms range in an old Quarry, they have recently closed off woodland they have bought adjacent to their Head Quarters.

Project Manager Sue Harvie has said 'a substantial sum of PFI money has been ringfenced for this project' Clevedon Times 27th Jan

How much ? Funding like this when the Public Finances are in the bin, is like getting the credit card out to pay the mortgage.

Why are the Police extending their property holding in Portishead, who are they training against ? The Public are too scared to defend themselves for fear of prosecution, yet the Police are spending millions on this and

Three new Custody Centres along the M5

A New Operations Centre in Bridgewater

Another accomodation facility in Bridgewater (??)

*A public exhibition about the firearms facility proposals will take place in the Methodist church hall in High Street, Portishead, from 2.30-7pm on February 8.

Members of the project team will be on hand from 5-7pm to answer questions.

More information about the project will be available online from February 3 at www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/accomodation

Libertarian Nic Coome to stand in Devizes

Photo Credit Rohen Kapur

The Libertarian Party has today announced its Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Devizes, Nic Coome.

About Nic Coome

Nic Coome lives in Chilton Foliat, with two children - Jonathan, currently studying for a PhD in Chemistry at Durham University and Juliet, currently an undergraduate in French with Russian at Bristol University.

He has spent virtually the whole of his working life in railway industry. He started on British Rail as a sixteen year-old school leaver in 1973 as a Signal and Telecommunications Department Trainee Technician, and went through that department for several years before becoming a commercially-minded manager with Network South-East.

Since then he has worked for Eurostar and the Office of the Rail Regulator, before joining Railtrack in 2000. He has worked there since, going through the trauma of the demise of Railtrack and the birth of Network Rail. He currently works in the Planning and Regulation directorate on projects for the reform of Network Rail and the wider industry.

As well as experience in the rail industry, Nic Coome has also been the Sound Engineer at The Hexagon Theatre in Reading, working on a very wide variety of different productions. Nic believes he is very much an ordinary working man, not a professional politician.

Interests

Nic's principal interest is music. He also enjoys cricket, rugby (he is a Harlequins fan) and American Football. He recently started learning to play the Saxophone which he believes he will continue forever.

Politics

Nic had been a member of the Conservatives in Swindon for around three years and stood for the then Thamesdown Borough Council on two occasions. He was then, very briefly, a member of UKIP and stood essentially as a paper candidate for Kennet District Council in 2007.

With the formation of the Libertarian Party two years ago, Nic saw an opportunity to be a part of an exciting organisation that truly believes in individual freedom and personal responsibility. He found himself in agreement with the Libertarian Party's opposition to the bureaucratic and expensive European Union, as well as the party's call for much smaller government, and its utter rejection of big taxes and the surveillance State.

Nic Coome has been a member of Chilton Foliat Parish Council for around fourteen years and Chairman of the council for the last six.




If you want to help or contribute financially to Nic's Campampagn please contact donate@lpuk.org

Shelterbox Send aid to Haiti

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8477713.stm

Shelterbox, a Cornwall-based charity, recently shipped hundreds of boxes of aid from Newquay to the shattered nation of Haiti. What does this have to do with our Libertarian struggle? Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about human generosity and how it is perceived by various political schools of thought; I’ve come to the conclusion that Statists are extreme pessimists. This conclusion is, of course, limited by own perceptions and generalisations, but I surmise that the root logic behind state welfare- and in this case, international aid- is that humans are naturally greedy creatures and thus the Government is needed to forcefully take our money, through taxing, and spend it (rather inefficiently) on the unfortunate and disadvantaged. Now, speaking as a moderately pessimistic individual, I can’t fully blame Statists for making this assumption – just the other day I heard about a nearby animal shelter and my brain immediately painted a picture of a seemingly abandoned warehouse full of animals with no humans in sight. However, when I went to this shelter to assist a friend in choosing a pet, I was pleasantly surprised to see the place bustling with people. I saw so many people hoping to adopt a cat, dog or other animal that these animals were actually in high demand. I saw plenty of volunteers working on site and I saw entire legions of people arriving just to volunteer to walk a dog for the day. We all need to see these things occasionally to restore our faith in Mankind, and that day was my wake up call.

Now that my mind has been cleansed of doubt, I see a lot of charities making great strides with an ample supply of people willing to help in any way they can. I saw this news article detailing the efforts of this non-government charity organisation, and I realised that, contrary to what all the Labour-supporting Socialists say, our society would remain a caring, committed one even without state welfare. Remove the welfare state and charities would expand to compensate- organisations with the same goals but with a lot less mismanagement of funds. We supposedly live in a Democratic society and, to me, that entails giving us the choice to do the right thing or not. A system where the funds that we earn are forcefully removed and redistributed conjures up a certain image in my head, of a hammer and sickle, and we all know how that image has come to be construed in the free world these days.

The point to all this is that giving citizens a choice does not necessarily result in a dystopian future where children starve on the streets and this is the key message that our party needs to stress in reaching out to the nation.

First Authoritarian Outing Of Tory Party Policy

A Prisoners Earnings to Be Taxed
and the money used to fund Rape Crisis Centres

Fabian social control using the Tax system, how novel !

Strengthening Police stop and Search powers, and 'grounding' orders

The Police will love that, and abuse it the same way they did the Terrorism Act

Anybody caught carrying a knife should expect to go to jail

That's me buggered then, I had better start practicing gnawing through stuff as an alternative to carrying a tool to do the job.

Allow Police to use surveillance powers in routine cases without need for authorisation

The Stasi Charter, the DDR did this they bugged and followed people and completedly missed the 1989 revolution. Do CCHQ not watch films like the 'Lives of Others' or read books like '1989, The Berlin Wall, My Part In Its Downfall' by Peter Millar.

The Police will love this

Replace Police Authorities with Elected Police Commissioners.

No No No, Elected Chief Constables. In Swindon when the Authority said they were going to rip out speed cameras, the Chief Constable just said he was not accepting that, and would put more mobile units on the street. The Chief Constable should set out his Policing Priorities in his manifesto, not drafted by the likes of Jack Straw.

VOTE TORY, VOTE FOR AN AUTHORITARIAN POLICE STATE


This crap comes out the same day the Met was chastised for allowing a taxi Driver sexually assault forty women, because they basically could not give a toss.

Magna What?

This is not directly related to the South West England area but I feel that it is such an important story that has not been given enough attention by the media (thanks for that, Haiti) that I consider it my duty to inform. The gist of this story is that two individuals are to be tried without a jury for the first time in England and Wales for more than 350 years. The reason for this is that previous trials involving these two citizens, who supposedly stole a large sum of money from a cash depot, were interrupted as the jury were intimidated by outside forces.

So the jury are in danger every time this trial is resumed. Fair enough, but why must we take such extreme measures just to ensure security when there are plenty of other methods available that do not interfere with the rights of the accused? Keeping the jury anonymous or under guard would be excellent courses of action, in my opinion. Unfortunately, the courts do not share this view. Have they forgotten about a little thing in the Magna Carta? It states that no freeman taken, or imprisoned or in any other way destroyed, except for the lawful judgement of his PEERS. Not only is the Magna Carta a vital document in itself, but it is one of the foundations of liberty, which so many of our ancestors have fought and died for. The fact that this case better resembles a show-trial held in the 18th century than a modern day one is quite perturbing. I say that this is not a South West story but I choose to believe that the tiniest crack, no matter how insignificant, can fracture and become a ridge given time. Could this be a predicate for more cases to be held without a trial? Could this new attitude amongst our judges, combined with our manic ‘anti-terrorist- politicians become a weapon against true justice?

These are the questions that many civil-rights groups have posed in response to this, and for a while the courts were willing to reassess their decision. Unfortunately that oh-so-short debate came to a close and the Court of Appeal has ruled that a criminal trial can take place without a jury. What else could this lead to, I wonder? Could another unlucky soul be forced to be judged without a jury on the grounds that the weather is a tad bit too wet and dangerous for the Jury to risk leaving their homes? There are already cases of innocent people being wrongfully accused of committing crimes as it is without the fate of untold thousands being held in the hands of one judge at a time. All this just to ensure ‘security’ and ‘justice’? It is quite a shame that no member of the courts have read up on the history of democracy, for if they had they would have come across a grand quote by Benjamin Franklin, which I’m sure we have all read before: “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

Link to Story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8453318.stm

and...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8106590.stm

Tree-bulldozing national holiday declared

I was reading the Bath Chronicle when I stumbled upon a most controversial plan by the Bath & North East Somerset Council to build 2000 houses on 115 acres of the greenbelt surrounding Bath. What is outrageous about this is that many members of the public have voiced their concerns that such expansion will jeopardise Bath’s World Heritage status. Such criticisms, however, have fallen on deaf ears. Why, you ask? Because it is the Government, not the local council, that has set these housing targets with little regard for anything other than meeting these targets the way a good, bloated bureaucracy should. As one has come to expect in these times, there was little transparency in creating these targets and the method employed to reach such conclusions were anything but fair. The projections were made before the recession, during rapid growth and are thus based on the premise that such growth shall continue unabated. It is obvious that the Government cares little for guaranteeing open space for its constituents. Open fields are a threat to Gordon Brown’s agenda, after all, for he dislikes non-industrious areas of land (unless the non-industrious land is a concrete street block filled with ASBO‘s).

Meanwhile, the city of Bath has an ample supply of dilapidated properties that could be rehabilitated to serve these housing targets. The government has done nothing to encourage such brownfield development; why is this? Perhaps this plan will contribute to the already hefty pile of evidence that suggests that the government has become so bloated that it can’t help but overlook environmental, cultural and practical factors in big decisions. If the critics are right, our nation shall be one greenbelt less ‘green‘, Bath will lose its World Heritage status- along with all the revenue the city makes from tourism- and the politicians will have ignored their constituents yet again. All this just for some more houses? What is more disturbing is that the Government hasn’t released details on the ratio of council-owned houses to privately-owned ones. It’s bad enough that the Labour party have been giving financially disadvantaged individuals incentives to have children and allowing more immigrants in. Now those whom Brown has bribed into voting for him need places to stay, and those places might as well be built to the detriment of our heritage and environment, right?

As I said, a lot of these criticisms are being dismissed by the Government. The Government would defend itself, claiming that people have been given a chance to voice their opinions and have an impact on policy. The problem there is that many would retort that the Government purposefully made the publicly viewable document too complicated for the average constituent to comprehend, let alone gave them enough time to give feedback.

As a Libertarian, my conclusion is quite simple: such matters should not be trusted in the hands of a bloated, national government, but should be handled at the local level by a limited government - taking counsel from local residents, of course - and local businesses. Perhaps then, such embarrassing and potentially dangerous mismanagements of taxpayer’s money can be avoided.

Exciting Times Cost Money

Things should start getting a bit more exciting for the LPUK in the next few weeks, the NCC have been pondering the publicity blackout enforced by the Main stream Media. Not ones to don spidermen outfits and dangle from the House of Commons roof or a nearby bridges, we needed a cost effective alternative. Chris Mounsey our new leader has this now in hand, and when the go is given, LPUK members will be the first to know.

My job as treasurer is however to prepare for the upswing. At the the Conference I said I hoped that we could open a permanent office staffed by at least one part time official and backed up by volunteers. My target date for this is May 2010. To do this I am relying on a core of donors to guarantee the wage bill and other running costs.

However we will need office equipment of all descriptions, if you think you can donate that Louis XIV desk please let us know asap.

In the meantime we still need to up our donation rate, so please give generously as a member or as one of the LPUK's supporters. Monthly Standing order forms can be quickly set up to our account so please contact us at donate@lpuk.org