TWENTY YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE.
It's such a tiny amount, eleven grand. It's a small fortune, of course, to many people but it's not enough to risk going to jail for. A hundred grand or a million would seem more like it but eleven grand in dribs and drabs is neither here nor there. He would have received these monies in six separate amounts, about eighteen hundred quid a time, not even amounting to a salary, in lieu of which he claimed it to be. And what did he do, anyway; I watch these things as much as the next anarcho-plumber and I don't recall Mr Taylor being prominent in Lords' proceedings. Probably, like most of them, he will have used the premises to eat and drink like a lord and to host personal business meetings - troughing, pimping and hustling, the real business of their Lordships' House. The idea that eleven thousands pounds over a couple of years was an informal salary is, by any appraisal, preposterous, that a QC would run it as a defence is utterly bizarre.
As a lawyer, Mr Taylor must have visited clients in jail, must have smelled the piss and cabbage and despair, clocked the screws, smugly sadistic peak-capped morons, posing about, tattooed and smirking, nasty, brutish and of course coldly, efficiently racist.
It seems inevitable that he will go away, the trial judge, Mr Justice Slag and he were learned friends, once over, back in Birmingham, and it'll be Failing In My Duty To The Public, BreachOfTrust, DemandsA Custodial Sentence, all that stuff that nobody ever says to the bankers, the permanent seckatries, the chief constables. Arriving at a sentence - my guess, between 18 & 30 months - Hizzoner will have to consider Taylor's previous good character - Christian, public servant, legislator, petty thief and now clown.
Leaving aside the sense of entitlement, the institutional criminality of the Great and the Good, which Taylor, in his feeble, simpering way illustrates, this case underlines how utterly stupid these people are - lawyers, MPs and peers. Is ut any wonder we're fucked and ruined, people like Taylor at it in the legislature?
Disowned by hostile releatives, mocked by white supremacy, derided by his fellow peers, foolish and ridiculous, one is tempted to say that John Taylor is punished enough; an unabashed right-winger, himself, though, I guess he will nevertheless now properly learn the meaning of the bitter jailyard jibe - If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Amen.
13 comments:
In a world where Tony McNulty is scampering about scott free then £11k demands a penalty but this must be a case where His Lordship can do some gardening and wear a hi-viz jacket for a week or two (at most).
For comparison this week in the Uxbridge Gazette:
A PRACTISING solicitor who fraudulently claimed more than £9000 in benefits will spend time in custody.
Huzaifa Jariwalla, of Dunsmore Close, Hayes, was jailed for 12 weeks after admitting to claiming Council Tax benefit and housing benefits to cover rent, and providing the local authority with a false tenancy agreement to back up his application.
Yay! Another one soon to be in the jug, please. Excellent!
It is the sense of entitlement that pisses me off. The rodent bastards. Horrible, horrible fuckers. That his defence was risible and stupid, Mrs WOAR, does nudge it, I must admit, a bit more towards the I-end of the Idiot-to-Villain scale. That one of the muppet jurors fell for it is unbe-fucking-lievable. Mind, they do say that for every Einstein walking the planet there is somewhere a knuckle-dragging Epsilon-Minus moron. Let us just be thankful and raise a glass to one more thieving bastard brought to book. And let us not go soft on the buggers.
As for the pettiness of the 11k, Mr Ishmael, there is a line in "A Man for All Seasons" when Richard Rich perjures himself to get More convicted. More spots that he has a chain of office, Lord Lieutenant, or some such, of Wales, and More says "It profits a man not to give his soul for the whole world, Richard... but for Wales?"
"It profits a man not to give his soul for the whole world, Richard... but for Wales?"
Indeed. Trust, honesty, integrity, honour, they are all kind of 100% things, aren't they? You can't be mostly honest, only occasionally dishonest.
If they conduct themselves as they do, pontificating from on high about I-know-best and public-service-is-my-life, while stealing the petty cash or the silver, then they should fall hard and deep. They have no mitigation - no bailiffs' threats, no starving kids crying at home, no HP agreements or CCJs, no redundancy notices or thuggish drug dealers knocking their doors at night demanding money with menaces (well, okay, maybe that one). Ignorance, as we well know, is no defence. And neither is stupidity, even if it should be.
For comparison, a nasty fraud which targetted an old man and preyed on his trust, emptying meagre savings:
Salisbury and Haynes both admitted theft and fraud, in total amounting to £3,300, and were both jailed for six months.
Source: Uxbridge Gazette.
I'm assuming the admission was treated as mitigation, reducing the sentence.
He should have availed himself of a decent lawyer, who surely would have advised against the defence of they were all at it, so why should'nt I?
Ruination does provide some amusement even in the pit of despair.
I would normally be against the use of imprisonment in a case such as this and maybe the judge will be, too, although I doubt it. But since Taylor is not a notable prison reformer and his party believes, in the main, that Prison Works - a phrase coined, incidentally, by CallHimDave, when he was spinning for the repulsive Michael Howard - there will be a dark poetic justice if Taylor is banged-up. Poetry and vengeance aside, however, there is no merit in his incarceration and the Community ChainGang is the most sensible option.
From start to finish Taylor's defence has been almost offensively absurd, although I am sure he is as much sinned against as sinning; self-righteous, lying pricks like Toiletman Paul now Lord Tyler crawling, now, from the oaken woodwork in the palace of thieves, rebuking Taylor for his niggerness. Don't need his sort in here, not among us decent sorts who woild never , ever do anything wrong.
TO SCOT FREE OR NOT TO SCOTT FREE.
I have always been uncertain and Mrs WOAR'S deployment of scott free, prompted a search and the result below:
Scot free
Meaning
Without incurring payment; or escaping without punishment.
Origin
Scot free
Dred Scott was a black slave born in Virginia, USA in 1799. In several celebrated court cases, right up to the USA Supreme Court in 1857, he attempted to gain his freedom. These cases all failed but Scott was later made a free man by his 'owners', the Blow family. Knowing this, we might feel that we don't need to look further for the origin of 'scott free'. Many people, especially in the USA, are convinced that the phrase originated with the story of Dred Scott.
The etymology of this phrase shows the danger of trying to prove a case on circumstantial evidence alone. In fact, the phrase isn't 'scott free', it is 'scot free' and it has nothing at all to do with Dred Scott.
Given the reputation of Scotsmen as being careful with their money we might look to Scotland for the origin of 'scot free'. Wrong again, but at least we are in the right part of the world now. 'Scot' is a Scandinavian word for tax or payment. It came to the UK as a form of redistributive taxation which was levied as early the 13th century as a form of municipal poor relief. The term is a contraction of 'scot and lot'. Scot was the tax and lot, or allotment, was the share given to the poor.
Scot as a term for tax has been used since then to mean many different types of tax. Whatever the tax, the phrase 'scot free' just refers to not paying one's taxes.
No one likes paying tax and people have been getting off scot free since at least the 11th century.
The first collected edition of Anglo-Saxon charters was John Mitchell Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus, published in the 13th century. In that he re-published the Charter of 1066, which included:
"Scotfre and gauelfre, on schire and on hundrede."
[This is easily translatable into modern English on knowing that a gavel was a tax or tribute and a hundred was a subdivision of a county or shire.]
An early use of the figurative version of the phrase, i.e. one where no actual scot tax was paid but in which someone escapes custody, is found John Mapley's Green Forest, 1567:
"Daniell scaped scotchfree by Gods prouidence."
An example of the current commonly used form, i.e. 'scot free', comes a few years later, in Robert Greene's Pandosto: or, The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia, 1588:
These and the like considerations something daunted Pandosto his courage, so that hee was content rather to put up a manifest injurie with peace, then hunt after revenge, dishonor and losse; determining since Egistus had escaped scot-free, that Bellaria should pay for all at an unreasonable price
Mr PtB "They have no mitigation - no bailiffs' threats, no starving kids crying at home, no HP agreements or CCJs, no redundancy notices..."
And that is it. No guilty plea, no sensible defence, no poverty, no tyranny of circumstance. There never was, however stupid, a person who got to be a barrister and didn't know that doing this, it was pissing in our faces.
Thta's what being a lawyer is all about, though, mr m, pissing in our faces - First thing we do, is kill all the lawyers.
Except for Mrs WOAR. Attorney General? And Agatha as Deputy.
Except for those.
Mrs Raft for Attorney General and Agatha for Deputy. There's a campaign that'd be worth supporting without reservation.
Pathetic, cloutless, friendless fools like Taylor are the dross hurled from the sledge to keep the ravening wolves at bay while the real succulent meat escapes.
As Mrs Lillith said in an earlier post re former Home Secretaries: they dont go after the likes of them.
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