Put out that light!
Big cop is watching YOU.
But it was essential.
Wales Online has more details:
South Wales Police has told off Aberavon MP Stephen Kinnock for celebrating his former Labour leader dad Neil Kinnock’s birthday as “non-essential” travel in the coronavirus crisis.
Remember Neil Kinnock? He wrote the speech that Joe Biden plagiarized that time.
Mr Kinnock posted a picture of himself with his parents two metres apart as they marked the occasion with his wife, former Prime Minister of Denmark Helen Thorning-Schmidt.
No doubt that’s why the cops scolded them. A former UK PM leader of the opposition, a former Danish PM, and an MP, all in one go – who could resist?!
I don’t think Kinnock was ever UK PM.
Oh duh, you’re right.
I fault both sides. The one guy should have just visited his dad without posting about it on social media, and the cops should have just ignored it when he did.
The people in the field was different because the cops went looking for them with their stupid little drone, and they found people doing nothing wrong at all and made a big deal of it.
Maybe the crime-rate is really, really down.
Should? Why? He did nothing wrong.
While no harm was arguably done in this case, this kind of oppressive, bullying security theatre should concern us greatly. Panopticon-based policing is always open to abuses of the worst kind and to institutionalised inhumanity.
We tread a fine line with surveillance, particularly when it’s technologically-enabled. Having CCTV cameras everywhere is one thing when they are only used to forensically examine crime scenes (even when they radically expand the notion and boundaries of crime scenes) but CCTV linked to face-recognition software and used for pre-emptive police action is quite another. But the latter inevitably flows from the former unless we’re really, really careful and history shows that we’re not. Hell, that tweet shows that we’re not.
Surveillance inevitably becomes mass surveillance because it’s really useful to governments and because we can achieve it in small, easily defended steps. But it’s on a ratchet, of course, and once we’ve taken such a step, it’s almost impossible to step back again.
Just in case you don’t already think I’m being overly dramatic, here’s the obligatory Orwell reference:
Ah, the skeletor out of his closet again playing the both sides game. Why the devil shouldn’t the man visit his father and post about it in the way he did? He was doing nothing wrong at all in either of the things he did.
Kinnock was one of the best leaders of the Labour Party, and faced down the supposedly ‘radical’, and highly corrupt into the bargain, wing of the party (something that needs to be done again) – you can see him doing it at a Labour Party conference on YouTube. It was a great pity he lost the election, but Labour is always at a disadvantage in elections.
Yeah, I mean, pick your battles, SWP. All someone has to say is “I live 5 minutes walk from my parents, I took them some bread and milk and then sat at the opposite end of the garden for a minute” and you look like total pricks. People aren’t going to cooperate with that sort of nonsense for long.
Which means the police could actually contribute to a lack of security. People get sick of draconian, authoritarian overshoot, and decide they aren’t going to listen to the distancing guidelines because they begin to believe it is just something more to get them under the government’s very large thumb. They start to defy, the police won’t be able to manage all the defiance, and COVID wins (not that it’s trying to; COVID doesn’t care if it kills anyone or not, in fact, would probably rather not kill its host, if it had the capacity to think about it).
[…] a comment by latsot on Put out that […]
Iknklast, Catwhisperer:
We’re currently being told that the police must uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the rules. A problem is that the police seem to have a different understanding of what that spirit is to everyone else. The spirit – surely – is about preventing the spread of COVID-19. The police are acting as though the spirit is for everyone to do as they say.
As you both say, this isn’t going to sit well for long.