Results tagged “government” from Birmingham Mail - Veron Graham

Where do you stand on the debate over whether athletes should be involved in the Olympics considering the Chinese hosts' human rights record concerning Tibet?

Well they shouldn't go and the very fact that this is an ongoing debate highlights something about society too many of us complain about but still overlook.

For far too long folks have looked at other peoples' situations and decided that it is nothing to do with them. Well as far as I am concerned it has everything to do with every person who takes part in those Games later this year.

The very act of getting involved equates to acceptance of the situation. How can it not? Is the fact that Tibet isn't the most celebrated country in the world that its plight can be overlooked so easily?

Is it that China is the world's leading emerging financial power which offers a major market for business from the 'developed' world why the Games were even given to them in the first place?

If sport and business/ politics were truly to be kept separate as some of the apologists for China have been saying, the country wouldn't have been given the chance to host the Games in the first place.

Will you join me in chanting, 'Hell No They Shouldn't Go ...?'

So the government want schoolchildren to swear ... their allegiance to the Queen as part of radical new shake-up to increase our sense of Britishness, the media reports.

You'll find plenty of swearing in schools across our nation, but I can't quite see this type taking off. Neither can I see this being tremendously popular with us grown folk, including some of the asylum seekers and refugees who've come to the UK without their manners and common decency.

Once again, the ruling classes are flouting their responsibilities to the nation; this time believing that we'll all feel better under a painted-on, pseudo-hippy ideology that we are all one big happy country.

May I suggest that before ex-Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, the man who reportedly put this 'thought' forward, goes any further, perhaps he could suggest an idea which will make Britain a place that folks genuinely want to pledge allegiance to?

Where crime is punished adequately, opportunities for improvement exist for anyone who wants to study and work toward them and consumers are not scammed because they have the audacity to use gas and electricity in their homes and fill their motor vehicles with fuel.

Lord Goldsmith, you get zero out of ten for originality.

I'm sure many of us would pledge allegiance to Bugs Bunny, if he could help make this country a fairer place.

Am I wrong?

That's all folks!

I wonder how many of you were as sickened as I was by convicted murderer Mark Dixie's pathetic defence that he didn't kill model Sally Anne Bowman but that he 'only' had sex with her dead body?

I am so glad that this 'person' has been sent down for 34 years - though it should have been longer. Killing someone in cold blood is bad enough but to sexually violate them afterward is lower than animalistic behaviour, truly evil.

It's cases like this, plus that of Suffolk's prostitute-murdering psycho Steve Wright, which are making me think long and hard about whether the death penalty should be brought back in cases that are as clear-cut as these.

The government has been banging on about being tough on crime for so long and it's high time they backed up the rhetoric with some swift action. Just listen to/ read the comments of Helen Newlove, who has called for the 'frying' of the three thugs who kicked her husband to death last summer.

Recognise this as a by-product of the authorities' wholesale failure to adequately punish lawbreakers - more and more normally rational people, yours truly included, are contemplating the death penalty is the only real solution.

Am I over-reacting or voicing a common view?