Curfew zones ruled illegal by High Court

A story that I am really happy to hear has cropped up in the Times, one of the Tyrant Blairs liberty destorying schemes has been thrown out. This one is his idea that banning all children (the term collective punishment springs to mind) from being out after 9pm was a good idea. Thanks to the peaceful actions of a teenager challenging them in court the high court has disagreed.

In a statement after the ruling, "W" said: "Of course I have no problem with being stopped by the police if I’ve done something wrong. But they shouldn’t be allowed to treat me like a criminal just because I’m under 16."

Exactly, treat criminals like criminals and let the law abiding get on with their business unmolested. Perhaps if they spent a little more time on the criminals, rather than targeting the law abiding because they are easy targets, then they could get these problems under control without resorting to collective punishment of the law abiding.

UPDATE

The BBC is also running this story and says that because of the orders

Robbery was cut by 60%, actual bodily harm by 66% and theft from motor vehicles by 70%.

Which are oddly similar numbers to that decreased by

projects which involve young people in positive activities had led to a 65% cut in arrest rates

, in other words let kids do something positive and they won't be out making a nausence.

But here is a really radical proposal. Get policemen patroling the streets (perhaps we could call this a 'beat'?), we could let them more on people that they think are acting anti-socially (to use the buz word de jour) whilst acting as a visible reminder that the police is out there and will protect the law abiding (actually letting them protect the law abiding would also help). Yes I know that it involves the heritical ideas of letting professionals use their own judgement rather than acting like robots programmed in whitehall, and not erroding liberty. But it just might work. Like it did since the dawn of modern policing before the manderins got there hands on it.

But then again New Labour can't allow liberty to get away unchallenged can they. Tough on liberty, tough on the causes of liberty.