The British government is giving the police the power to apply for an order restricting the freedom of anyone they suspect of being a potential sex offender.
The new powers will allow magistrates to grant the police a sexual risk order to prevent someone from contacting children or vulnerable people, travelling abroad, using the internet, etc. based on nothing but a suspicion of their potential to be a sex offender. The subject of a sexual risk order doesn’t need to be convicted to have the order made against them and the criteria for granting the order are lower than existing sexual harm orders.
Sex offenders obviously need to be tracked down and dealt with but if there isn’t enough evidence to convict someone of sex offences then they shouldn’t have one of these orders made against them. Restricting someone’s freedoms because the police have a suspicion that they have the potential to commit sex offences is something that could have been lifted from Orwell’s 1984.
There are two distinct issues here: First what constitutes reasonable grounds for ‘suspicion’, in connection with any offence that has yet to be committed? There is on YouTube, somewhere, a video of a particularly officious and unintelligent WPC arresting a youth who was doing nothing other than not doing what she told him to do ‘on suspicion of acting suspiciously’. Which brings us to the second consideration: how much ‘power’ should police officers, particularly those as stupid and officious as the WPC cited, have to make what must always be subjective discretionary decisions?
We should all have realised long before now that few police officers are inclined to act reasonably where they are not constrained to do so, or have the intelligence and maturity to make rational and impartial decisions. Police officers should have the absolute minimum of authority – rather than ‘power’ which is always ours, not theirs – to serve us and our interests in the way we wish and pay them to.
Given that according to Tom Watson Labour MP there is a paedophile network operating in the British parliament, this sounds a little strange. Are the police going to be taking action against the British parliament based upon the allegations? MP’s only have freedom of speech and debate when they are lawfully and freely representing their constituents, and all statutes apply to them also. On that basis all MP’s can be restricted of their movements. Are they stupid enough to not realise that if they create “1984”, they are subject to it.
Due process and inocent untill proven guilty are fundamental laws of England which are above the Parliament of “Great Britain”, if you start asking by what authority can the Parliament of Great Britain order the people of England, the answer is that fundamentally they can not. They are de fact, which means they exist, but have no right to exist, only a properly constituted English parliament need be obeyed by the people of England. As yet we do not have a parliament in England which can order the English people, so “1984” is going to be some what bull shit.