Oh Bollox!!

Before you start complaining about the word “Bollox” I must inform you that a court in Nottingham in 1977 actually ruled the word to be neither obscene nor abusive, read this http://www.acc.umu.se/~samhain/summerofhate/courtcase.html. This is of course the famous case against the Sex Pistols. My favourite bit is ……

Prosecutor Ritchie ” Are you an expert on the word bollocks?”

Professor Kingsley. “I am an expert on the English Language and feel that I can speak with authority on the derivation of the word bollocks. (You can just picture the Prosecutor saying to himself “Oh bollocks, there goes plan A”). You see this is a common tactic developed by the legal profession and it can be hugely successful, as in the Kieran Fallon race fixing case.

Defence Barrister. “Are you an expert on English Racing”?

Crown Expert Racing witness. “No”

Defence Barrister (to himself obviously) WOOHOO!

Anyway the reason for my utterance is this Human Rights Bollox. You probably saw during the week that a convicted robber is taking his case to the European Court using our money obviously to get his right to vote. So far it has cost “Tens of Thousands” and is likely to cost a lot more when he wins his case because 900 odd other prisoners will have to be compensated and the costs will be phenomenal.

Human rights is an interesting box of frogs, for instance you have the right not to be sold into slavery…. Good one, I’m all for that! Free speech….. Yes I like that, but I’m not that sure we really have it? Prohibited under the bill are Murder, Rape, Massacre and torture …yes that seems fair enough, but did we not have all that pre 1948 anyway when the Human Rights stuff was written. You would like to think that there wasn’t too much debate over whether to include murder rape and slavery etc, but it did take a while to get the thing up and running. An interesting quote from Wikipedia, so it may or may not be true but it’s worth looking at.

“When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became apparent after the Second World War, the consensus within the world community was that the United Nations Charter did not sufficiently define the rights it referenced.” Please tell me that before 1948 there was NOT some doubt at to whether you were actually allowed to murder 6 million people in gas chambers or not.

The robber vote case is interesting for a few reasons. First, You would imagine that the chap can’t be that clever or he wouldn’t have been caught and now languishing in the nick. So where did he get the idea? Could it be that he was put up to this and for what reason?

Second, why is there not a human right to have common sense applied? I thought that this would be enshrined somewhere in Common Law but the closest I can get is the “Reasonable man” concept which is well documented and used to determine the outcome of certain cases by asking the question “What would a reasonable man do, or have done in the circumstances?” Would any reasonable man have allowed this case to get this far? I don’t think so. All this does is make the judiciary and the government look stupid as they burn our money on this Bollox.

I am compelled to point out to you that in common law the concept of “A reasonable woman” has never been mentioned. I would speculate more on this subject but the Wife might read this.