United Kingdom has become an Orwellian police state...

http://www.lancashire.police.uk/index.php?id=5640

Now they are placing metal detectors on the city streets to detect if people are carrying knives..

Admittedly knives can kill people but they are hardly the threat that guns are (remembering the old joke about bringing a knife to a gun fight...)

Stopping crime is an admirable goal but there needs to be a limit on the government's right to intrude on an individual's privacy.

Hoepfully we'll never go this far in the U.S.

:eyes:

and perhaps forks?

...bloody stupid if you ask me in this day and age of cable and satellite tv, but that is the only place the Beeb gets it's money from...

by the way I was just in Oxford for two weeks in early November for business.

...

In theory that means you need a tv licence for the internet, although AFAIK this is not enforced.

As for Orwellian state, the knife thing is pretty much nothing for the UK now. The new internet laws make those of China look libertarian.

or to spy on our watching habits.

It's to detect 'license cheats': people who haven't paid for their TV license.

This license is essentially a tax on TV ownership which funds the BBC. So the TV detectors basically = a form of tax cheat detectors.

I don't particularly like having to pay the license, but I'd rather pay it, and have some publicly-funded non-commercial TV.

theater and i swear to gawd the announcers snort up and 8 ball of some choice coke before they hit the airwaves. the other thing i loved was your version of Cops, night patrol or something, you all had the politest criminals and cops and then they'd break away and show clips from America, the juxtaposition of the 2 was mind blowing.

When people used CRT tv sets, they were unreliable; now CRT detection is reliable, fewer people have crt tv sets.

:rofl:

where Bart and Milhouse steal from a school soda machine and it comes to life and says that.

Cameras everywhere. Heathrow is like an animal stampede. We went to an Indian restaurant and the Indians who were serving us were playing 50 questions with our Armenian coworker - like he was some kind of terrorist. It was ridiculous - they acted incredulous when he said he was Scottish (which he is). I'll stay here in the USA thank you very much.

The Labour and Tory parties just can't hesitate to take away people's rights.

Libertarians claim this is happening in the United States. But it's far worse in the United Kingdom already.

one should have a pretty strong one to put up with this....

All our laws are of equal status, and are made by parliament, not referendum.

There are intrusions on civil liberties here as in the USA (same excuse of fighting terrorism), but it's not a police state.

We do not lock up nearly as many of our citizens for as long as the Americans do; and we abolished the death penalty over 40 years ago.

As regards the knives: there is a significant problem in some cities with knife-crime by young people. Attempts to deal with this have been draconian-sounding but ineffectual, and this will be too (it will probably pick up more people carrying tools for work than actual knife-carriers) and will probably be abandoned.

I am not defending our government, which is indeed disrespectful of civil liberties, but I dislike all the stereotypes. Some of them originate in our own right-wing press, which likes to portray Britain under even the feeblest excuse for a socialist government as a nanny state suppressing the liberties of the people - while conveniently forgetting the 'sus' laws and powers granted to the police under Thatcher.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1035798/Thugs-committing-350-knife-assaults-EVERY-DAY-menace-spreads-rural-areas.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036154/A-knife-attack-4-minutes-130-000-year--ministers-insist-crime-rates-falling.html

I'm no fan of Britain's pell-mell pace to 1984, but I do not pooh-pooh the crime-rate, either.

Bleh.

and then decide which one looks more like a police state.

Britain: 151 per 100,000.
United States: 751 per 100,000.

no they don't.

how can it be a bad thing? I'm all for an individual's privacy, but not for carrying knives around the streets of their towns and cities.

Gun crime is not a big issue in the UK. No where near as bad as knife crime and that is still a very low rate crime. 86 killings is high for the UK but tiny even as a proportion) to violent crime in the US.

:cry:

This is the latest overreaction in the land of Big Brother, however. It's got the highest CCTV (surveillance
cameras on every street corner and along every road) per capita, too.

Though going Big Brother isn't going to solve it.

No matter what humankind does to try to limit others, there's always a way around it.

They ban knives, people start stabbing each other with sporks. They ban sporks, so they start sharpening toothbrush handles. Before long, you'll only be able to get those itty-bitty super-short toothbrushes like you see in prisons in the UK.