I know some people view this as a form of Labour propaganda, but personally I look forward to receiving it and think it is a useful paper for keeping the citizens of Tameside informed of developments within the borough. It carries a number of adverts and is probably self financing?
The crime pages are always of interest. Nobody dislikes litter bugs more than me, but some of the sentences passed upon some of the people featured for merely carelessly disregarding a cigarette butt seem truly draconian. If disregarding a cigarette warrants a £175.00 fine, what does the tramp who disposed of the fridge freezer in the River Tame deserve?
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NewLabour see crime the same way they see everything: How much revenue can we get from it? Hence the massive increase in the totally inappropriate use of fines. Multiple offences of thieving - it's sometimes called shoplifting in Newspeak - are 'punished' with a £200 fine. Burglars and robbers are now regularly fined for what was once treated as a serious criminal offence. According to the government's own figures 25% of burglars are now let off with a caution, an insane situation which actually INCENTIVISES crime.
This 'thinking' is based on two things; a government that doesn't believe in the concept of punishment; and the facts that Court proceedings and subsequent imprisonment COST money, fining people and criminals MAKES money.
One look at the state of the nation's finances, the massive public sector pension deficit and the wage bill for NewLabour's 1 million extra employees in their megastate explains this disastrous regime's attitude to revenue; they MUST have it to temporarily prop up the insane, totally unaffordable monolith they have created. It will take a government with integrity and guts to clean up this mess, in other words NOT the lunatic present incumbents.
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