Fun Online Polls: Over at The Sun

I was going to cut and paste the following Prohibitionist diatribe from today's Sun, by Tory MP Philip Davies...

I DON’T want any relaxation of the laws.

So much crime is fuelled by people getting addicted to drugs, so the idea that you’ll solve that by legalising everything is for the birds. Reputable retailers are not going to start selling hard drugs, so this would have the effect of legitimising some very unpleasant people.

Drugs cause so much misery, not so much to the people taking them, but to their families and the victims of crime. It’s naive to think that by liberalising the market you will solve the problem.

(For some reason, proper libertarian Dick Puddlecote still seems to hold Mr P Davies in high regard, f- knows why on the basis of outpourings like this.)

... when their Fun Online Poll caught my eye: so far, over 20,000 votes have been cast and 85% are in favour of legalising cannabis, despite the Sun newspaper being, on the face of it at least, very anti-legalisation (but the way they manipulate public opinion is so subtle and so clever, that they might be deliberately putting the case for Prohibition so badly as to drive people the other way, who knows?).

Which I thought was not only chucklesome but also rather heartening.

People with criminal records unlikely to get jobs: shock.

From The Metro:

One-third of unemployed people 'have criminal record'

One in three of those claiming Jobseekers Allowance in Britain has a criminal record, according to new statistics. The figures show that 400,000 of the 1.2m people currently on unemployment benefits has been convicted of an offence.

Of those, 47 per cent are still claiming benefits more than two years after serving their sentence. And a quarter of claimants either have at least one conviction or have been cautioned by police for an offence in the past ten years. A further one in 20 of those have spent time behind bars... Other statistics revealed those who are out of work have far more likelihood of having a criminal record than those who have jobs - with just over half of those convicted or cautioned in the past year having claimed benefits the previous month...

‘Given that so many of these people are criminals, it makes you wonder how many are actually seeking work and available to work,’ said Tory MP Philip Davies, ‘It appears the taxpayer is paying twice. We are being attacked on the one hand as victims of crime and on the other we seem to be paying for them to go out and commit more crimes.’

Well duh, we could have guessed all this.

Putting morals aside, crime as a way of life is relatively more attractive for people with low or no earnings potential, and once you have a criminal record, it is far more difficult to get a job, so once you've started you then tend to stick to a life of crime/claiming benefits. So it would be interesting to know how many people with criminal records, ex-prisoners etc remain unemployed and how many of them manage to find a job, go straight etc.

But they twist the whole logic round and say that 'the unemployed are more likely to be criminals' rather than 'criminals are more likely to be unemployed', even though two-thirds of those on Jobseekers' Allowance have managed to resist temptation and have not turned to crime (or at least not been caught yet).

And I'm very disappointed to see Dick Puddlecote's favourite MP turn authoritarian and join in the populist frenzy.

Philip Davies and reported speech

The MSM and various 'charities' are up in arms about the fact that Philip Davies said that the disabled are second class citizens who should work for less than the National Minimum Wage etc etc. blah blah blah.

Only he never said either of those things, did he? Philip Davies simply stood up in Parliament and reported what other people had said to him. His speech is included right at the beginning of this YouTube clip* (it's not in Hansard yet):
It seems highly unlikely to me that Mr Davies would make such a claim if it weren't true, so the whole thing is a storm in a tea cup.

If, for example, an MP were to report that some of his constituents had told him that they would like cannabis to be legalised, or that some of his constituents wanted to "send all the darkies back" (and I'm quite sure that most MPs will have heard just about everything), would that MP then be castigated as a drug fiend or a racist?

Probably he would, and that's the worrying thing. How are you supposed to have a debate if you aren't even allowed to report what voters actually think and say? Whether you agree with those sentiments or not is a separate issue.

* As to the substantive issue, discussed in the rest of the YouTube clip, Philip Davies is completely right of course - there shouldn't be a National Minimum Wage in the first place. If we want to alleviate poverty, then do it via the welfare system, funded out of everybody's taxes, and don't try to fob it off onto individual employers.