United Kingdom has become an Orwellian police state...

[ddeclue]

http://www.lancashire.police.uk/index.php?id=5640

Now they are placing metal detectors on the city streets to detect if people are carrying knives..

Admittedly knives can kill people but they are hardly the threat that guns are (remembering the old joke about bringing a knife to a gun fight...)

Stopping crime is an admirable goal but there needs to be a limit on the government's right to intrude on an individual's privacy.

Hoepfully we'll never go this far in the U.S.

:eyes:

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. do they detect spoons too?

and perhaps forks?

[Alexander]

2. I can see you've played knifey-spoony before.

[NYC_SKP]

4. They detect TVs, there are TV detector vans that roam about.

[truebrit71]

7. That is because you have to have a license to have a telly...

...bloody stupid if you ask me in this day and age of cable and satellite tv, but that is the only place the Beeb gets it's money from...

[ddeclue]

9. And what happens when PC's supplant TV and radio as the primary media source?

by the way I was just in Oxford for two weeks in early November for business.

[truebrit71]

10. ...won't matter...if you've got a telly...you need a license...

...

[TheBigotBasher]

26. The BBC broadcasts over the internet

In theory that means you need a tv licence for the internet, although AFAIK this is not enforced.

As for Orwellian state, the knife thing is pretty much nothing for the UK now. The new internet laws make those of China look libertarian.

[LeftishBrit]

15. This isnt because there's something illegal in watching telly

or to spy on our watching habits.

It's to detect 'license cheats': people who haven't paid for their TV license.

This license is essentially a tax on TV ownership which funds the BBC. So the TV detectors basically = a form of tax cheat detectors.

I don't particularly like having to pay the license, but I'd rather pay it, and have some publicly-funded non-commercial TV.

[AlCzervik]

20. the 2 times i've been to England i got totally hooked on Sky Sports, it's like short attention span

theater and i swear to gawd the announcers snort up and 8 ball of some choice coke before they hit the airwaves. the other thing i loved was your version of Cops, night patrol or something, you all had the politest criminals and cops and then they'd break away and show clips from America, the juxtaposition of the 2 was mind blowing.

[TheBigotBasher]

30. It is now nothing more than a "fear generator".

When people used CRT tv sets, they were unreliable; now CRT detection is reliable, fewer people have crt tv sets.

[ddeclue]

6. Quit forking around!

:rofl:

[Deja Q]

33. Hey, stop being punny or I'll spork your ass!

[stlsaxman]

38. or how about "I'll cap a pop in your ass!" from The Simpsons episode...

where Bart and Milhouse steal from a school soda machine and it comes to life and says that.

[HughMoran]

3. It has become ridiculous over there

Cameras everywhere. Heathrow is like an animal stampede. We went to an Indian restaurant and the Indians who were serving us were playing 50 questions with our Armenian coworker - like he was some kind of terrorist. It was ridiculous - they acted incredulous when he said he was Scottish (which he is). I'll stay here in the USA thank you very much.

[Alexander]

5. Sadly, the only party that doesn't support this is the Liberal Democrats.

The Labour and Tory parties just can't hesitate to take away people's rights.

Libertarians claim this is happening in the United States. But it's far worse in the United Kingdom already.

[kenny blankenship]

8. It's for your own good, citizen!

[Unsane]

11. Britain doesn't really have a constitution

[catnhatnh]

12. I should think...

one should have a pretty strong one to put up with this....

[Donald Ian Rankin]

13. There's no "really" about it.

All our laws are of equal status, and are made by parliament, not referendum.

[LeftishBrit]

14. No we haven't

There are intrusions on civil liberties here as in the USA (same excuse of fighting terrorism), but it's not a police state.

We do not lock up nearly as many of our citizens for as long as the Americans do; and we abolished the death penalty over 40 years ago.

As regards the knives: there is a significant problem in some cities with knife-crime by young people. Attempts to deal with this have been draconian-sounding but ineffectual, and this will be too (it will probably pick up more people carrying tools for work than actual knife-carriers) and will probably be abandoned.

I am not defending our government, which is indeed disrespectful of civil liberties, but I dislike all the stereotypes. Some of them originate in our own right-wing press, which likes to portray Britain under even the feeblest excuse for a socialist government as a nanny state suppressing the liberties of the people - while conveniently forgetting the 'sus' laws and powers granted to the police under Thatcher.

[WinkyDink]

16. You seem unaware of the knife-murders in Britain.

[anonymous171]

23. All 277 of them? nt

[WinkyDink]

27. Let's broaden it to assaults, shall we?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1035798/Thugs-committing-350-knife-assaults-EVERY-DAY-menace-spreads-rural-areas.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036154/A-knife-attack-4-minutes-130-000-year--ministers-insist-crime-rates-falling.html

I'm no fan of Britain's pell-mell pace to 1984, but I do not pooh-pooh the crime-rate, either.

[BreweryYardRat]

17. Thatcher lives again.

Bleh.

[Occam Bandage]

18. Eh. Look at the incarceration rate in Britain, and the incarceration rate in America,

and then decide which one looks more like a police state.

Britain: 151 per 100,000.
United States: 751 per 100,000.

[AlCzervik]

19. yeah but Heathrow doesn't make you take your shoes off.

no they don't.

[Jackeens]

21. 86 fatal stabbings in London alone in 2007/08, 277 in all of England/Wales. If metal detectors help

how can it be a bad thing? I'm all for an individual's privacy, but not for carrying knives around the streets of their towns and cities.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

24. how many shootings?

[TheBigotBasher]

29. Very very few shootings

Gun crime is not a big issue in the UK. No where near as bad as knife crime and that is still a very low rate crime. 86 killings is high for the UK but tiny even as a proportion) to violent crime in the US.

[anonymous171]

25. Please tell me you are being sarcastic. nt

[Jackeens]

31. No, I struggle to find the humour in 277 knife-killings.

[anonymous171]

22. Sometimes America is just better. nt

[WinkyDink]

28. Nobody is claiming this.

[Deja Q]

34. Even with their modern day television programming, I'm starting to agree.

:cry:

[ClarkUSA]

32. There's been a rash of deadly knifings by drunken vicious "yobs" all over Great Britain.

This is the latest overreaction in the land of Big Brother, however. It's got the highest CCTV (surveillance
cameras on every street corner and along every road) per capita, too.

[backscatter712]

35. Britain does indeed have a chav problem.

Though going Big Brother isn't going to solve it.

[zulchzulu]

36. Sharpened hard plastic knives can do a bloody good job, mate!

No matter what humankind does to try to limit others, there's always a way around it.

[backscatter712]

37. Soon, Britian's stores will look like prison commisaries.

They ban knives, people start stabbing each other with sporks. They ban sporks, so they start sharpening toothbrush handles. Before long, you'll only be able to get those itty-bitty super-short toothbrushes like you see in prisons in the UK.