It's not my fault.

For quite some time now I've been reading the Coppers Blog which, in case you're not aware, is written by a serving British police constable under the nom de plume of PC David Copperfield. I can't remember where I found out about it (probably The Register or something like that) but it struck a chord instantly. Maybe it was the fact that at last there was some evidence that there was still some common sense left at the front line of policing as opposed to the vacuous political posturing that oozes from the upper echelons of the police force, or maybe it was that I share many of views on crime and punishment, chief amongst which is the belief that prison should be a punishment and therefore a discouragement to recidivate. Whatever, I have always found him to be an excellent writer and I now follow his blog closely and I am reading the collected works of the blog in his book, Wasting Police Time.

One recurring theme, however, is the tendency towards a victim culture in the UK and today has probably seen the best set of examples that I can remember in the news. The base stories cover health issues, violence and yobbish behaviour, premium rate telephone 'scams' and I'm sure there was one other but I think three is enough for now.

Let start with the health story that a woman who weighs 42 stone (yes, thats 42 stone or 588lbs or 267.3kg if you prefer - more than a quarter of a metric tonne). She and her family had a moral duty to do something about this problem much, much earlier than now and yet they did not. Now she and they are trying to devolve all responsibility onto the health care system with an "It's not my faultW attitude. How is it not your fault? You don't get to be 42 stone by magic, it takes time and you're quite likely to notice that you can no longer walk. Which also means that her family are just as guilty because if she can't move then where is the supply of food coming from? Hmmm...let me think. Not only that, but the best part of £60,000 of public money was spent on an attempt to help her lose weight by attending the Priory clinic for three months, and indeed she did, but afterwards, she claims she received no support. Somehow I doubt that. I used to smoke. It's an addiction and pretty serious one at that, but it was no ones fault but my own that I had it and I did not expect everyone else to do the leg work in getting me off the fags. I had to do it myself because it was my personal responsibility to do so, but this kind of reasoning seems to have passed these people by.

But to cap it all, and what rankles most, is that a quick Google search shows that this woman has engaged the services of a publicist by the name of Jonathan Hartley. Why the hell does she need a publicist? My take would be that she's eaten herself into a corner, doesn't want to die (naturally enough) but frankly can't be bothered to accept the help available, believing instead that there is some sort of magic wand the NHS could wave if they so chose but that they are withholding it and that by hiring a publicist it will shame the NHS into using it. Absolutely absurd. And that's without mentioning the rather crass opportunism by the publicist who claims to have 'worked tirelessly', which I doubt very much indeed.

So, that's number one. Let's look at the next case study. It's the case of one Toni Comer, 20, of Sheffield. Here is someone who is gets utterly legless, ejected from a club for being aggressive and then resists arrest after she vandalises a doorman's car in revenge. Sorry, but if you're violent and aggressive and try to resist arrest vigorously like this then you have to expect the police to get a bit physical in order to subdue you (and she was apparently trying to turn the copper into a eunuch. Personally, I'd have done the same in his shoes and made damn sure she was cuffed ASAP by whatever method was necessary).

Somehow, she feels she is the innocent party in all this and was subject to police brutality. Not my fault guv, oh no. So it wasn't you who got steaming drunk, was violent and maliciously damaged a car then? Must have been someone else the magistrate found guilty, clearly. Worse still is that because the girl has mixed race parentage, a local race relations campaigner has stepped up claiming that this was an example of racism in the police. To be quite honest, when I saw the girl interviewed I would have said she looked a bit Mediterranean if anything but in a dark alley like the one this took place in, I doubt she looked much different from the next pissed up 20 year old townie trog. However, this simpleton race relations manager proceeded to liken the incident to the shameful Rodney King episode in LA in 1991. Quite apart from the very real possibility that this man had just slandered the officer on national television, it was an unhelpful and baseless accusation as he has no evidence for this whatsoever. If she had white parents would this fuss be here now? What if the officer was female? What if the officer was black? I doubt we would have half as much fuss about it.

And lastly we have something which relates to the story that all the British terrestrial channels have now suspended premium rate phone-ins after complaints and criticisms at the way they have been organised and run. BBC Radio One's evening news show, Newsbeat, featured a brief interview with a man whose phone bill ran to over £9,000. He seemed shocked that he was expected to pay this, claiming that the phone company should have cut him off rather than let him rack up a bill this size. I'm sorry, since when did it become your phone company's responsibility to stop you being a gullible moron and dialling premium rate numbers? Why should they be held responsible for your inability to think that you might not be able to afford to make thousands of calls to numbers which charge anything up to 60 or 70 pence each time you call? I have a vision of the man in my head and I'm guessing he doesn't work and watches daytime TV and is so monumentally thick that I'm surprised he hasn't forgotten how to breathe. Although I could be wrong. You'd have to be pretty bone headed not to see and hear the warnings about how much these phone-ins cost and that they charge you regardless of whether or not you get through.

Come on people. In all these cases YOU WERE AT FAULT. You cannot shift the blame elsewhere and claim it was all someone else's fault, you must accept responsibility for your actions, you spineless creatures. When will this country stop encouraging a cult of the victim by pandering to these idiotic liberal ideals that suggest that there's always some other reason for peoples actions and we shouldn't judge them? Yes we bloody well should! Just because health care is free it doesn't mean we can abuse it by not caring about our health until the last minute then accusing the NHS of not sorting out our problems for us. Our streets are crawling with plebs who know full well that if they want to commit some sort of crime then they are more or less free to dos o. the police are drowning in bureaucracy, the courts will let them off and in no time they'll be aback on the streets again free to do as they please.

Punishment should be there to discourage. Hard labour is something that would discourage. Being banged up with no home comforts would discourage. Being allowed to smoke where you want, when you want, have porn brought to you, watch TV and play pool is not a punishment, it's just something that tides over the boredom until you get out, and until prison is a suitable punishment and whilst we have these 'bleeding heart' liberals and social worker lefties insisting that they're all really nice people underneath (instead of the malignant sociopaths most of the rest of us know them to be) we will not have an effective criminal justice system. And, until we manage to instill a sense of social conscience back into people,we will also have more and more people complaining that the world has done them wrong and none of it is their fault and that everyone else should have done something about it. Well, sorry but you have no sympathy from me and I suspect the same goes for a pretty sizable amount of the general public. Grow up, take responsibility for yourself and stop wingeing. Then we might just take you seriously. After all, remember the boy who cried wolf? One day it really might not be your fault or a rogue copper really might go to town on you and who will believe you then?