Even the Independent newspaper seemed incredulous over this one.

Police in Kent, England seized a board game from protestors on the grounds it could be used to further terrorism.

But believe it or not, the satirical War on Terror: The Boardgame wasn’t singled out because you could use the box to bash someone on the head, or stab someone using the spinner, but because the game box included a balaclava for the “terrorist” in the game to wear. It even said “Evil” on it, just so there was no mistake.

The cops decided that the balaclava “could be used to conceal someone’s identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act”.

As one of the game’s designers said, “That’s absurd. A beard can conceal someone’s identity. Are the police going to start banning beards?”

That’s probably next, actually, considering the number of British Muslims who wear beards.

(N.B. I wear a beard myself, but I’m not worried because after this blog, I doubt I’d get a visa for England anyway, assuming I was crazy enough to want to visit such a nutty country).

Update: here’s a link to the War on Terror game publishers’ blog post of the incident, and a story giving even more detail on how seriously disturbed the police in England get over protests.

Once again, those wild and crazy English “leaders” are stepping up to the plate and doing something idiotic.

This time it’s in Kent, where there’s a three-year building project going on at West Kent College, with a full complement of laborers present on campus. So college officials felt forced to issue a warning against making any sexual comments or wolf whistles to preserve the proper campus atmosphere.

The kicker is that the warning is to the students, not the laborers! Apparently some female students have been allegedly harassing the laborers. And that might make this the only construction site in the world where (male) workers are whistled at by females and complain about it. Male construction workers, of course, have been whistling at women for probably a hundred years or so, and nobody, to my knowledge, has managed to stop them. But turn the tables once and all of a sudden someone’s panties are in a bunch over it.

But wait, there’s more. And unfortunately, it’s more serious. Apparently this kind of behavior may be considered on a par with serious crimes of violence in the near future.

Here I must quote from the Daily Telegraph article verbatim:

The Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill will create a new offence of “communicating indecently”, punishable by up to 10 years in jail. The legislation is intended to punish sexual harassment by text, emails and letters, but ministers also aim to include sexually explicit comments to strangers. It is expected that the law would only apply to persistent offenders.

In recent years, Britain has basically banned virtually all firearms, with the predictable result: serious crime of all sorts has gone up across the board. So now they’ve invented a new bogeyman, “knife crime”, so that ordinary people have now become criminals for carrying ordinary pocket knives for ordinary reasons. If they manage to ban knives next, then criminals will go back to bashing people on the head, and Englishmen will no longer be able to carry umbrellas (or bumbershoots, or whatever they call them over there) because they will now be considered potential weapons.

So watch what happens with this law, and see if it indeed gets limited to “persistent offenders”, or whether the police and ruling oligarchy in England use its Draconian penalties against their political enemies.

The police state in England is evolving so rapidly now that ordinary pub patrons in Yorkshire are being treated like criminals.

According to the Telegraph, police officials there have told pub owners they are to ban their customers from wearing hats — even the traditional Yorkshire “flat cap” — because otherwise their CCTV surveillance cameras might not be able to identify them if they commit crimes.

So not only are the customers all considered potential criminals but the police can give extra-legal orders to business owners, all to make their own jobs easier.

And the English are apparently following orders like…good English sheepdogs. Because a CNN article reveals that England now has one CCTV camera for every 14 people.

But perhaps the tide is turning, just a little. That same article also covers the resignation of a senior British M.P. over this very issue. David Davis quit to make a public statement over Britain’s new terror laws and the continuing erosion of civil liberties there.

The Beatles once said there were 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. They must have been referring to the arseholes on the police force there, judging by this story in the Daily Mail Online.

It seems that a 36-year-old man, Christopher Cocker, was watching a weekly comedy show in his apartment when he literally rolled off his chair laughing onto the floor. While this is not generally, even in England, a serious offence or even indicative of a serious injury, Cocker’s downstairs neighbor called police because of the noise. She said she “was worried in case he was having an epileptic fit. There was a lot of noise and I didn’t know what to do so I called the police.”

She didn’t know what to do, so she called the police. Funny reaction, that. When I don’t know what to do, I think about what to do, and then I take appropriate action. If I heard a weird noise from an upstairs neighbor, the last thing I would do would be contacting the police. The first thing I would do would be knocking on their door to see if they were all right, at least if I were worried about them.

When the police came, they apparently determined he was OK and alone, and then asked his name for their report. But Cocker didn’t want to get involved with any police report, so apparently he simply thought he’d shut the door. The police were having none of this, however, and the man who had been simply enjoying an evening’s television entertainment was at this time sprayed in the eyes with pepper spray, struck by the police, handcuffed, arrested, thrown into a police van, taken to the police station, charged with assaulting a police officer, stripped naked, and thrown into a cell.

And he’s not even black.

The best part of the article is at the end:

A police spokesman said Cocker became ‘aggressive’ towards the officers who feared for their own safety.

The spokesman said: ‘Parva (sic) spray was used to stop any confrontation and was necessary to protect the officers and any members of the public who were around at the time.

‘Within the circumstances, we feel we used reasonable force.’

OK, let’s just visualize the situation here. The guy’s trying to close his door and end the conversation (as well as any alleged confrontation). He’s behind the door and now the officers are fearful for their safety, so they hurry up and spray him through the door before it closes. There were no members of the public around at the time; they had already determined that. Yeah, reasonable force…because the guy was a smartass (definition: someone who doesn’t bend over and kiss the nice policeman’s butt).

I suppose it’s a good thing that English police don’t carry guns as a regular thing, or this guy could have been shot dead like that poor guy they killed awhile back in the subway over there because he was running for a train.