“The international cocaine market is ‘in retreat’ after a year of successful operations around the world, the Serious Organised Crime Agency claims. It says its undercover work has helped send wholesale prices soaring.Prices per kilo have risen from £39,000 in 2008 to over £45,000 (50,000 euros), but street prices have remained stable. Prices per kilo have risen from £39,000 in 2008 to over £45,000 (50,000 euros), but street prices have remained stable”.

I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing or a success at all, really – completely the opposite, in fact.

The cocaine producers and wholesalers (I have visions of dealers piling down to Makro to get their stock in) have seen a 15% increase in turnover, whilst at the same time the retail price on the street has remained the same; this isn’t like O’Neill’s absorbing the cost of the last budget’s duty increase on the price of beer to keep the price at the pump the same, instead the dealers have included even more cutting agent – rat poison, worming powder, cancer-causing phenacetin etc – in with the cocaine itself; recent seizures of street cocaine have seen purity levels as low as 9%, the lowest ever.

So this ’success’ means increased profits for the producers, increased profits for soap powder suppliers, increased demands made on the health service due to the increased amount of insecticide people are snorting up their hooters. And, of course, increases in the statistics for SOCA making them look good at a time when it is under increasing pressure to demonstrate its effectiveness. So that’s alright, then.

“Dramatic footage obtained by the Guardian shows that the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton-wielding police officer in riot gear. Moments after the assault on Ian Tomlinson was captured on video, he suffered a heart attack abdominal haemorrhaging and died”.

Much has been written all over the blogosphere today about the outrage of this assault by a brutal policeman in the cause of ‘maintaining order’ causing the death of an innocent member of the public. Even had Ian Tomlinson been a protester throwing bricks at the police line, his death would have outrageous – we don’t have the death penalty in this country, not even for riot. But the fact that he had had nothing to do with the protests on the day and was simply going home after his day’s work compounds that outrage by orders of magnitude. Apart from anything else, would he have been assaulted by the policeman had he been dressed as a banker?

Nobody who believes in Civilised Society denies the need for police, and indeed nobody with any sense denies the police do a difficult job in difficult circumstances, in which mistakes will inevitably be made – and in many of those difficult circumstances, the police are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. And whatever one’s personal opinion might be of the Jean Charles de Menezes case and its outcome, it does remain the fact that it was a tragic accident caused by a failure of intelligence and poor training, rather than a wilful attempt to kill an individual.

As can be seen in this video, however, the assault on Tomlinson was wilful – he was behaving perfectly compliantly, walking along, not resisting, not rioting, not protesting. There was absolutely no need for the police officer in question to whack him with his riot stick or throw him to the ground. Obviously the police officer in question wasn’t to know – or reasonably predict – that his actions would result in Tomlinson’s death, but were anybody else to hit somebody with a stick and push them to the ground causing a fatal heart attack internal bleeding, a charge of manslaughter would almost certainly ensue. A failure to bring such a criminal charge against this police officer would be nothing short of a travesty of justice.

Ironically, this case also highlights another aspect of our increasing V-for-Vendetta society – strictly speaking, the people videoing and photographing this incident were in breach of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which since 16 February has made it a potentially criminal offence – with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison – for taking a picture of a police officer on active duty.

Never has there been such a clear example of how wrong – and damaging to a free democratic state – that law is. It deserves to be repealed immediately.

The big internet story over the last few days has been how the Internet Watch Foundation has effectively restricted UK access to Wikipedia by putting it on its blacklist of alleged child pornography hosts, which most UK ISPs subscribe to, on account of it showing a 30-year-old album cover which has been available in shops worldwide – and continues to be available – without attracting any legal attention even if it has always been controversial.

As I was busy elsewhere whilst things have been unfolding I was too late to add my own comment, but Andrew Lewin has written about as balanced and informative a piece as possible – link above.

In the olden days, it was an online axiom that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; when an entire country can now be blocked off from certain pages on certain sites, or certain sites as a whole, simply by diktat by a government department or non-governmental organisation, that axiom is clearly no longer true.

Whatever your views about the specific image in question, one paragraph of Andrew’s article bears specific attention:

“The Government probably thinks it can get away with it as long as it doesn’t look as though politicians’ fingerprints are anywhere too close, but the IWF will respond to government edicts about what’s right and proper with alacrity. We’ve already heard Hazel Blears attack political blogs as ‘a dangerous corrosion in our political culture’ so how long before the IWF decrees those to be against the law or corrupting our morals and do a blanket ban of any such blogs? Sounds like a perfectly proper, moral argument being presented to do just that, after all. Which could be any blog disagreeing with the party of the day … Now is it starting to sound just a little bit like China?”

And as Andrew concludes:

“So I ask you: think of the number one thing you would hate to lose online. And now realise, there’s a very good chance that it can and will be taken away because of the situation we’re sleepwalking into.

Want to wait till it happens? Or do something about it now?”

But of course, “it can’t happen here”.

“When the police arrived, the things they saw and the things they took photos of all point (to) the very obvious truth that Cuddles was a brothel” – so said the counsel for the prosecution in the trial of the Mister Big behind the notorious Bearwood ’sauna’.

What astounds me is that it apparently took until September last year for anybody to realise Cuddles was a place where more than one’s back could get rubbed. This place, along with many other similar establishments across the city (including three within half a mile of each other along the Bristol Road in Selly Oak) have been well known by, well just about everybody, for what kinds of services you can receive in them. So, if they’re actually bothered, why has it taken until now for the police to act?

More to the point, having raided Cuddles, are the police going to raid all the other brothels in the city, or was the action prompted by other motives?

Alternatively, isn’t it about time for legislation to accept that two (or three, or four…) consenting adults having sex with each other is no more a truly criminal act if cash is handed over than if it isn’t, and for the law to accept that it is far better for all concerned for it to take place in a clean, hygenic, safe indoor environment than out on the street?