Foreign Perspectives

Unusually it was a privately owned surveillance system that caught Mary dumping a cat into a wheelie bin but now her moment of madness is visible throughout the internet and she’s under police protection.

Whilst her actions can’t be condoned, I’m not so sure that it’s quite right for the cat owner to effectively create an instant mob by way of Facebook either. As he says in the interview in the Mail, he feels that it should be handled by the proper authorities although given the reactions of some people to her actions I’d say that he wishes that he’d left it to them in the first place.

It’s right that appropriate action should be taken against her, of course, but is it right that an instant mob was created by publishing the video on the net?

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Stories like the 30k couple with 11 kids are appearing with increasing regularity in the press these days and, as usual, it’s collected the expected collection of comments expressing various degrees of indignation that these people feel that the state (ie us) should pay them to look after their kids full-time.

But, why would they bother to look for work if they were getting 30k coming in for doing nothing? Actually, it’s somewhat more than that as there’s the 15k to add on for the house and together that’s equivalent to a pre-tax salary of at least £60,000. Even with the best will in the world to find work, they’d need great qualifications to find a job paying anything like that level anywhere in the country. Thus, they can quite validly say to the benefits office that they are unable to find suitable work.

As most of these people say, it’s not their fault that they’re entitled to so much. Despite the comments that such cases always attract, they are quite correct once they’ve reached the situation of having double digit numbers of children. That’s not to say that it’s right that they should be entitled to so much though because it just isn’t. Where the benefits system falls down with people like this is that it’s designed for reasonable people who are expected to have the intention to behave in a reasonable way in regards to their family, looking for work, etc. Reasonable people don’t expect other people to pay for enormous families but there is no limitation in the rules that says “five is enough” or anything similar. Thus, in principle, you could have a family with, say, 20 kids pocketing over £100,000 and perhaps there is such a family out there.

How many would be “enough” children though? Would it be, say, three because that’s just over the average for the country? That seems a reasonable point to start reducing benefits for numbers above that. However, what do you do with someone like Miss Shepherd (the case mentioned above) who has had the children to three different fathers? You might think that would be difficult to deal with but it’s not really if you allocate the “reasonable number” of kids to each parent ie not “three per family” but “1 1/2 per parent” so you could quite easily allocate the allowances.

Whatever way such changes come in, as they surely must do, there are going to be screams from those benefiting from all that money now. It’s never going to be easy to get such people to change their attitudes because they’ve built up over such a long period but the “someone else can pay” attitude needs to get stamped out and soon.

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The sleepy village of Rothbury has largely been cut off from the outside world for the last few days and now finds itself knee deep in TV crews this evening thanks to Raoul Moat being finally cornered in the village.

As you might expect the relief is clear within the village and behind the camera crews there seems to be very much a carnival atmosphere with the end game of this chase taking place just a few hundred yards beyond. That might seem unseemly to some but these people have essentially been confined to their houses and in fear of their lives for several days now so it’s very much a relief to be close to returning to the normality of their sleepy village once more.

The police negotiating team are hard at work. Some might ask why bother but it’s just natural for the police to try to avoid further bloodshed whenever they can. Thus the negotiator will be attempting to build up a sense of trust between them and Raoul through agreeing to simple things like providing him with something to eat and drink. What they’re building to is to get him to hand over his weapon of course but that will take time in what seems sure to be a tense situation so don’t expect major developments anytime soon.

What does seem a bit over the top is the sheer number of police officers and vehicles although that should be set against the growing numbers of press and bystanders rather than the lone gunman.

As we move towards the hours of darkness they’ll be keen to move all those bystanders a little further back. You might think that floodlighting the area would be the way to go but that’s likely to increase tension still further and is therefore something to be avoided.

In that it’s a lone gunman, the final stages shouldn’t be too many hours more. After all, he’s going to have to sleep at some stage. However, that very tiredness will make the negotiations that little bit more difficult especially as we’re dealing with someone who seemed set on suicide earlier.

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