A Place to Stand

This letter is in the Scotsman today:

The imprisonment of a man for letting a child smoke is a perversion of the law. The legal charge was of "exposing a child in a manner likely to cause suffering or injury to health." Nobody disputes that smoking 40 a day for 40 years produces as strong possibility, though not more than that, of killing. Even then the risk drops dramatically if the smoking stops.

I challenge anybody involved in the case to produce any evidence that the kid, who was clearly perfectly happy since she was asking for more, has suffered measurable "suffering or injury to health." I also challenge them to explain why they don't believe locking him up won't cause emotional harm to the girl. If they can't then perhaps we should hear why any prosecution witness who said it would hasn't committed perjury.

Demonisation (or "denormalisation" as the PC brigade call it) of any group in society is not something governments in free societies exist to do. Perverting the existing law to make an example of one person to frighten everybody is disgusting. Anybody who believes in individual freedom must oppose this.

There was no editing at all to the letter. I did send it to other papers & while there is no report of it elsewhere via Google not all papers have letters there.

I have also forwarded this letter to the Home office "I have highlighted the specific legal question which you might like to answer to myself & indeed to the paper. I have asked the same on my blog where you might want to answer."

Labels: British politics, Fear, letters