“Childhood criminal records to be wiped by David Lammy”, reports the Telegraph.

Childhood criminal records for thousands of people will be wiped under plans being considered by David Lammy.

The Justice Secretary is to review the current system in order to prevent people’s childhood convictions from blighting their future job prospects.

Mr Lammy is considering “simplifying” the system to ensure that checks are “proportionate” to their crime after evidence that people in their 50s, 60s and even 70s found that childhood offences such as stealing a bicycle or fighting in the street were still being disclosed to potential employers.

However, Mr Lammy’s plans have faced criticism over how far any changes would wipe potentially more serious offences, such as drug dealing or harassment, from childhood criminal records.

My first thought was the same as that of David Fairey, the writer of the top comment to the Telegraph story:

Ah! So this from a government that wants Farage to explain a comment he allegedly made aged 13?

Taking the breathtaking hypocrisy of the “liberal” establishment as a given, is this a good idea?

Penelope Gibbs, the director of Transform Justice and part of the FairChecks campaign, said: “Our criminal records system is unfair and holds people back from getting work. Childhood offences committed decades ago are disclosed on DBS checks even if the person has led a crime-free life for years.

“David Lammy is a long-standing supporter of the FairChecks campaign for reform, and has now committed to implementing positive change.”

There have been changes since Mr Lammy’s review in 2017, but campaigners said they fell short of his original proposal to wipe the slate clean for childhood offences except for the most serious.

He highlighted then how 22,000 black, Asian and ethnic minority children had their names added to the police national database, including for minor offences such as a police reprimand. Any police record can be taken into account in DBS checks if a constabulary decides it is relevant to a standard or enhanced job.

I would have to see what Mr Lammy’s exact words in 2017 were to see whether I was going to be as irritated by his “highlighting” the black and ethnic minority children in particular as the Telegraph writer wants me to be.

Mr Lammy said: “The result in adulthood is that their names could show up on criminal record checks for careers ranging from accountancy and financial services to plumbing, window cleaning and driving a taxi.

“I believe that once childhood cautions and convictions have become spent, they should very quickly become non-disclosable, even on standard and enhanced DBS checks. In my view, the system should provide for all childhood offending (with the exception of the most serious offences) to become non-disclosable after a period of time.”

If someone other than Lammy said it, would you agree?

To my surprise, Rachel de Souza, holder of the quintessentially Blairite office of Children’s Commissioner for England, is quoted in the Telegraph article and elsewhere as saying that children involved in the Southport riots should have their criminal records wiped.

The EU is anti-populist to its core. Despite all the posturing of EU leaders as the valiant defenders of Ukraine, it’s clear they are opposed to national sovereignty. Instead of viewing patriotism as the sign of a healthy and cohesive society, the EU sees it as a threat to be snuffed out.

The consequences of the EU’s war on the nation state are plain for all to see. According to a recent poll, two-thirds of Germans ‘would probably not defend their country from invaders’. In Italy, a recent survey indicated that only 16 per cent of those of fighting age would take up arms if their country was under attack. Recently, the head of France’s armed forces, Fabien Mandon, said his country needs ‘the spirit that accepts that we will have to suffer to protect what we are’. But French public opinion is not having any of it.

– Frank Furedi

In retrospect, it was predictable—what climate hysterics would do as the years rolled on with more and more of their predictions being refuted by direct observation.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was made 20 years ago; the first IPCC report of the UN was  35 years ago;  Congress held hearings on global warming 37 years ago; Ayn Rand commented on a Newsweek article that mentioned scientists speculating on climate change 55 years ago (“The Anti-Industrial Revolution” in Return of the Primitive).

And none of the predicted disasters have come to pass. All the warnings and the alarms about “the death of the planet” were wrong. None of the IPCC models were right in their predictions of what global temperatures were going to be.

More than that: climate has not changed in 100 years.

There’s no obvious difference from 1925 in the weather of Paris, Albuquerque, Sydney, New York City, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, London, Tel Aviv . . . you name it.

Some people are beginning to notice. Even some climate scientists. So what is the new line?

“See what we saved you from?!”

The discrepancy between how planet Earth is and what they claimed it would be is being sold as a victory for recycling, better smokestacks, and the Paris Accords. I kid you not.

Here’s my parallel.

A man comes up to you on the sidewalk and says that he has discovered that your gravity is decreasing and that in a year, your attraction to the earth will be so lessened that you will float off into the stratosphere where you will both freeze and asphyxiate. But there is a solution. If you pay him $10,000, and stand on your head for 5 minutes each day, this will keep your gravity intact.

You pay him. And try to stand on your head most days. A year later, you run into him again. You know the punchline. He says: “See, it worked!”

Returning to reality, scientists and even some regular people know that it can’t be that anything the alarmists pushed worked. For one thing, the burning of fossil fuels has not gone down over the last few decades. Here’s a graph prepared by Claude, an AI agent:

Enough said?

No doubt the principle that one should speak nothing except good of the recently dead is a decent and civilized one, even if it is not given to 99.99 percent of humanity to be perfectly good. The whole truth may be desirable in court, but not at funerals. One does not enumerate the faults of […]