A NATION OF CRIMINALS

Here’s a little known fact to interest you.  EVERYTHING on St Helena is a Criminal Offence.

Elsewhere there are Crimes (murder, rape, theft, etc.) and Civil Offences -the Americans call them “misdemeanours”, which are less important things like being drunk in public, improper parking and speeding.

But not here.

On St Helena even minor offences gets you a criminal record.  Being caught doing 35 mph in a 30 zone gets you a Criminal record. Being caught peeing in the street gets you a criminal record.  On St Helena Trespassers CAN be prosecuted (elsewhere it’s a civil offence).

These ‘criminal’ offences have to go to court, with all the due process this entails.  Cases have to be made.  Defences have to be constructed.  Lay Advocates and prosecutors have to stand up and say their pieces.  Magistrates have to rule.  Records must be kept.  All of this is a ridiculous waste of time (and money) for the judicial system. 

It also results in people being declared ‘criminals’ for minor offences that no other jurisdiction would care about.  In the UK you get caught speeding: a few points on your licence for a short period and its forgotten.  Here you become a criminal, in the same bracket as a child-molester.

Does anybody benefit from this?  Maybe the police want it because then they can then point to the vast number of ‘criminals’ here to justify the large numbers of police officers they employ?  Maybe the justice system wants it because if they only had to deal with real crimes they would be mostly unemployed?  Whatever the reason, that doesn’t make it any less stupid!

If St Helena has any plans to become a modern society it needs to address this issue.  It needs the same dual-system used in other 21^st Century jurisdictions.  It will require some work, but it will create vast savings in police and judicial system costs that will more than repay the initial outlay.  And it will stop people who are caught relieving themselves in a back alley while on their way home from the pub from being branded as criminals together with rapists, thugs and thieves.

THE UNIFYING THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

Scientists have a problem with their theories. They want one set of laws that explains everything, but big things like planets operate to different physical laws to tiny things like sub-atomic particles.  There isn’t as much matter in the universe as there should be unless you invent “dark matter” which you can’t find. Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead? Heisenberg says we can never know where a sub-atomic particle was before we observed it and therefore moved it.

I have the answer, and it isn’t God. It’s Sod’s Law.

Planets do not behave like sub-atomic particles out of sheer cussedness. That’s also why so much of the matter in the universe is hiding.  If you want Schrödinger’s cat to be alive, it will be dead (and vice-versa). And wherever you want Heisenberg ‘s sub-atomic particle to be, it will be somewhere else.

From buttered toast falling buttered-side down to meeting red traffic lights when you’re in a hurry, Sod’s Law explains absolutely everything in the observable universe.

Watch for my paper at the next international physics symposium. (Which I won’t be able to present because the plane will be delayed.)

HM Prison, Jamestown

The Equality & Human Rights Commission has published the report of its enquiry into conditions in HM Prison, Jamestown.
Go to http://humanrightssthelena.org/news.htm to read more and download the report.
It will make tough reading for those responsible for managing our prison.

I wish to complain....

When I think something is wrong I complain about it, in the hope that if enough people agree with me the problem will be put right. This seems to me to be the best way to proceed. Whoever is doing it wrong may be completely unaware of the problems they're causing and, when it is pointed out, may change, making everybody happy.

It constantly amazes me how many people think I should not complain. They seem to think it's better to suffer in silence. This seems to me to be the most unproductive approach. How can anything be put right if nobody complains? If everybody had suffered in silence instead of protesting we would still have slavery, women would still be merely property, children would still be working in the mines and nobody would have any human rights. This cannot be the way forward.

Maybe the people who complain about my complaining should simply do as they advocate: shut up and suffer in silence! :-)

Those who do not study history are apt to repeat its mistakes

300 years ago white people believed black people were inferior and not worthy of the same rights.

This changed.

100 years ago right-handed people believed left-handed people were inferior, and left-handers were forced to write right-handed (my grandmother was one of them).

This too changed.

Today many heterosexual people believe homosexual people are inferior and should not be allowed the same right, including the right to marry. Some of these people are themselves black and/or left-handed. Can they not see that their prejudices are no more meaningful than the ones to which they themselves would have been subjected, centuries ago?

It is time to end ALL forms of discrimination.

Trains and banks

Both Stockholm and London had the same problem – too many people driving into the city to work, clogging up the road network for a few hours each day and tying up acres of space for car parks.  They both wanted people to switch to commuting by train, but how to achieve that?

In Sweden they improved the train service so that it was quick, cheap and reliable. As a result nobody in Stockholm drives in unless they really really need their car during the day.  Almost everybody else takes the train.

In London they did not improve the shockingly unreliable and expensive train service; they made driving in harder. Congestion Charging; Red Routes; Clamping and armies of Traffic Wardens to catch those trying to avoid the astronomically high car parking charges. And it didn’t work!  People still pay the ridiculous charges to travel into London in their car rather than squeezing onto an overcrowded train that is unlikely to reach its destination anywhere near the specified time; if it turns up at all.

I was reminded of this by the Bank of St Helena’s recent announcement that it may no longer process account transfers on the day they are presented.

Bank of St Helena has recently introduced features that could bring St Helena banking into the 21^st Century.  You can now bank online, and a trial is underway for a debit card scheme making cashless payment possible in shops and restaurants.  Which is fine, except that both of these new services are expensive and will be out of the reach of ordinary Saints trying to make ends meet with St Helena’s notoriously low wages and high prices.

Unable to afford the new services, most Saints will continue to queue up at the bank to draw out their salary in cash, and will continue to use account transfers in shops when the cash runs out or the queue at the bank is too long to contemplate.

The bank’s response to this sadly follows London’s, not Stockholm’s.  They have not made Internet and debit card usage cheaper, they have introduced new ‘rules’ to make using account transfers harder.  Firstly they will no longer promise to process them on the day they are presented, leading to confusion about when the funds will be debited from the account.  And secondly they have said that in some cases they will not issue a receipt for the transaction until the next day or later, and that they will expect the customer to come back to the bank to collect their receipt!  I’ve used banks the world over since 1976 and I have never heard of one where you had to go back the following day for your receipt!

Will this work?  Will this force ordinary Saints to use Internet banking and debit cards?  I predict it will not.  If people have so little money they are forced to compare prices in up to half a dozen shops to save 20p on a tin of beans, they do not have the option to pay for 21^st Century banking at the prices Bank of St Helena is charging.  So they will have to continue using cash and account transfers, however inconvenient the bank makes it.

The net effect of this new measure, I am sure, will not be more Internet banking and debit card customers – it will just be a lot more unhappy people!  And they can’t move their business to another bank because - as is so often the case in St Helena – there isn’t one.

I was the managing director of Bank of St Helena from 2005 to 2008.  I can honestly say that such a thing would never have happened in my day!

Why I fell out with Saint FM

Periodically (even as recently as today) someone or other on Facebook makes reference to the fact that I used to be a supporter of Saint FM but am no longer so.  Usually their remarks make some sort of obscure insinuation that my change of mind is due to something negative on my part.  I have never previously set out why I fell out with Saint FM.  I will now do so.  This is what actually caused the break.

Catherine and I did Rattling Cages on 20th August 2016.  Over a week later the partner of a TC Post holder contacted Saint FM claiming we had said things that defamed ex-pats (which, in fact, we had not - the person had mis-heard what we actually said).

Saint FM then did three serious things wrong:

1) they failed to contact us to hear our side of the story (to date they still have never done so);

2) they printed in the Independent an apology for the remarks that we never actually made, making us seem guilty even though we were not; and

3) they failed to make a recording of the programme (as they were required to do by the Media Standards Regulations), thus depriving us of the opportunity to disprove the allegations.

At no point have we ever received any form of apology from Saint FM for these errors on their part.  A station should support its voluntary presenters, not hang them out to dry simply because it is terrified of a Media Standards complaint that was not even valid.  After eleven years of active support for Saint FM we were appalled to be treated so callously.

Until the management of Saint FM changes the station will not get any support from me.

Now you have the facts. Ask yourself - if treated so, how would you have reacted?