Saturday, January 27, 2007

Branscombe beach looting: We need more laws allegedly

A lot of people have been understandably horrified at the looting or salvage of cargo that has happened as a result of the beaching of the MSC Napoli of Sidmouth.

It appears that the police were unable to stop this happening.

As a result people like George Pascoe-Watson, editor of the Sun have suggested we need new laws to cover this.

When I hear things like this it horrifies me. As it happens the police now appear to have found that they had the powers they needed and have taken action to stop the looting. Passing another law to allow them to do the same "with nobs on" really is not going to help. The more complex the law is the harder it is to find the needle in that haystack of a power that it is you need. We need a smaller haystack, not a bigger one.

This government has passed so many more new laws it must be very hard to keep up. The police service knows well the laws it deals with every day. That which turns only very rarely is going to be difficult to figure out. There may be a case for a small central agency of some sort which can look up and research the more esoteric situations, but one thing we do not need is yet more laws.

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