Rostock more like.
Edinburgh has coughed up (after some freedom of informationing) to using RIPA to spy on more than 1200 local residents over the last five years.
Once the cradle of the Scottish Englightenment, Edinburgh now has more in common with two less noble elements of its glorious history; Burke and Hare. It’s not difficult to imagine Edinburgh Council’s ‘covert human intelligence sources’ slithering along dark streets, shuffling over wet paving stones and hiding in ancient alleys to nail the viscious perpetrators of dog fouling and fly tipping outrages. Not difficult at all.
What’s more difficult to imagine is what on earth got into the head of Edinburgh’s Conservative community safety spokesman Jason Rust, who said: “There are obvious concerns about these surveillance powers potentially being misused but in the grand scheme of things, if they are being used to catch out benefit cheats and the like, then I think they will be welcomed.”
No they won’t Mr Rust, and as a Conservative you really ought to know better (or at least pretend you do). Take a leaf out of Brian Binley’s book (see 22nd May) then come back and try again. For the hard of understanding (and obviously that includes some members of our supposedly less authoritarian major political party), laws already exist to deal with benefit cheats “and the like”. They need to be applied correctly not pushed aside in favour of sexy, Bondesque anti-terrorism legislation.
David Hume and John Witherspoon (sigificant contributors in different ways to the concept and reality of freedom) both graduated from Edinburgh. Unfortunately so did Emporer Hirohito and Gordon Brown.
Tags: conservative, edinburgh, jason rust, ripa, Scotland, snooping, uk
