Huguenot

Lucy Finchett-Maddock Now there's a name.

I'll be betting he's celebrating his new found wealth.

I think the Team Prejudice UK cut off their noses to spite their faces. Here in SG we have ten major festivals each year. Of these about half are Christmas-equivalent depending on your religion, entailing universal public holidays, weeks of anticipation, street festivals & decorations, family get togethers and gift giving. Chinese New Year, Vesak Day, Hari Raya Puasa, Deepavali, Hari Raya Haji and of course Christmas are the biggest. Instead of trying to hide each other's celebrations, everyone takes part.

Here's land in Sydenham at ?1,100 per sqm. Here's land in Highgate at ?2,600 per sqm. It make sense that ED would be between the two but somewhere near the bottom end.

Land is panifully expensive in London. One way of calculating it is to try calculating the 'new build' cost of your property and subtracting it from the market value, then dividing it by the land area. For example a 3up 3 down in ED may sell for ?500k on 150 sqm of land. It'd cost ?300k to build a similar house from scratch, so that values the land at ?200k. That would give a land cost of around ?1,300 per sqm - which sounds about right. That would value that 15 sqm of land and about ?20,000, which makes it hardly worth the value if its simply for aesthetics.

"Theres a bloke down the street, been seen outside the school twice - ive got a pic of him - is it OK to plaster the local lamposts with his mugshot and declare him a peadophile?" As with pk, you need to come up with ridiculous hypotheticals to justify your position. This thread is about a shopkeeper suffering from serial shoplifting with the perp caught on camera in the act of stealing. They've discussed this with the police who agreed on a particular course of action. In the delirium of misguided principle you've ignored the facts, diminished the real victim, and elevated the perp to some sort of misrepresented angel. Lost. The. Plot.

peckhamboy, that would only be the logical conclusion if there weren't other things to consider. I'm merely suggesting finding some sort of reasonable compromise between the length of the controlled period, its effectivness, and the cost to local residents. 15 mins is the smallest period, but may not deliver on the other elements. 13 hours may be the most cost efficient, but doesn't deliver on residential requirements. cate, some have bikes, some have cars (remember the threads complaining about their parking skills?). It doesn't detract from the fact that transit time is wasted time, and area work needs to be co-ordinated. Fragmented CPZs and erratic periods just don't help, that's all.

True dat, but on that basis you could half the cost again by making it an hour window. A longer period is always going to be cheaper to cover the same ground. There's other practical elements. Wardens won't take a job for only half an hour a day. So to make the best from them you'd need to rotate them to another CPZ area in-between restricted periods. The more 'moves' you have in a day, the smaller the productive percentage of their day - their service becomes less efficient.

No pk, it's just that you don't think shoplifters should be upbraided, you don't think women who let their kids crap on the street should be criticised, and you don't think that victims of assault should seek out witnesses to their attack. Somewhere you've completely lost the plot. I can't be bothered to discuss this with people who put their hands on their ears and sing 'la la la' because they're frighteneed of having to take social responsibility for the good of our society. I can believe that you think you're being morallly upstanding, but really you're just running away from the problem.

"Tickets would be household, not car specific."? Eh, is their house double parked? When you talk about a parking 'ticket' being sent out, do you actually mean a parking permit? If permits are free, who pays for the creation and the policing of the zone? You can't expect it to come from general taxation, as it's not fair that someone on the breadline in Elephant should be paying so you can park outside your house in ED. I've already explained twice why a 15 min window wouldn't work.

pk, I did that because your questions are deliberately couched in hypothetical terms about an incident that did not occur. How can I possibly address them except in hypothetical terms? The balance of evidence in this case was that this was a serial shoplifter caught on camera in the act of stealing. The law needs to find a balance between protecting the innocent and identifying and punishing the victims of crime. The shopkeeper is entitled to use reasonable means at their disposal to find justice, and putting a picture in the window meets these 'reasonable' criteria. Yes, there might be the odd mentally ill person, just as there are miscarriages in justice all the time. However, I consider your hypothetical scenarios involving penniless blind one-legged black geriatrics with alzhemiers to be completely out of proportion with the reality of shoplifting. In the vast majority of cases, shopkeepers are fine outstanding citizens supporting their community, and shoplifters are scumbags. Let's make decisions based on this simple truth, eh? Quite simply your priorities are wrong. I don't believe that we should shut down the entire legal system because of the Birmingham Six.

peckhamboy, I posted a comment on why it can't be a very short space of time earlier - there needs to be a realistic chance of the offender being caught, and the shorter the time limit the more expensive this is.

pk you're basing your argument on a fallacious premise. The shoplifter wasn't targeting the mentally ill, nobody was refusing them their rights, and you don't know what it said on the poster so you've made up the worst thing possible to support your argument. It's not sensible to base social policies around the possible occurence of unlikely scenarios. You still get out of bed in spite of the fact the sky could fall on your head, and cross rail will still be built despite the fact that it could expose a Quatermass style alien that slaughtered half the capital. Thieves in the UK are thriving in anonymity, and thumbing their nose at the community as they steal the wallets. Extending prison sentences is neither practical nor effective. Historically public exposure and social humiliation have proven effective deterrents. Nothing wrong with giving them a go, and it's certainly not illegal if the publicity is accurate.

Religious affairs and Ed Miliband.

Loz, the results to the survey were posted in .xls format as an attachment on the forum. You can see the survey close here. I've lost the original as I've moved house, country and PC since then. It may be that Admin has a practical way of searching the server for an xls attachment. It may be that I saved the xls on some portable hard drive and put it somewhere clever. However, as I said, they were posted on the forum. The survey end date was mid-March 2008. I'm happy to run one again.

Ten minutes walk is around 500 yards.

The length of time is probably as much to do with practical implementation as principle: in order for it to work drivers would have to have a reasonable expectation of being caught. For example, if it took 20 wardens to police all the roads in a 30 minute window, it would only take 5 wardens to police all the roads in a two hour window. If you then decided that the cut-off point for motorists was a 50:50 chance of getting caught you'd only need to do half the roads on alternate days, cutting the requirement to 2. Since the wardens are part funded by the residents permit fee, the larger the time window, the cheaper the permit.

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This isn't the first time there's been a thread about a cpz, and traders have commented on other ones. I didn't say they were dishonest, I said it raises questions about it. They've never responded on this and doubt fills a vacuum. Neither was I calling them liars. Honesty can also refer to open-heartedness, and dishonesty can mean being disingenuous. These were the meanings that I was looking to explore. It clearly is possible to interpret it any way they want, and people looking for offence can always find it.

There were two people posting under one name in different styles. You may be surprised but there's plenty of people posting under this forum who have hidden agendas. I simply sought clarification. The police activity seemed peculiar, charging the victims of crime for the recovery of goods - I was going to advise that if they had the crime number wouldn't this be able to prove to the guys in the impound lot that this is a stolen car, not a parking violation. If they'd seen Victim Support then as an independent body they might be able to speak to the police on their behalf about getting this 'fine' removed. Sadly though, one of tibby's friends decided to start sh*t-stirring, tibby her/himself decided to be 'furious' instead of asking me about it, and itatm saw the opportunity to get a mate who would back her up in a vendetta against me on a three month old separate subject. Just sad, that's all.

I'll be back in the UK in Feb, so assuming nobody sets a hired killer on me (which is entirely possible), I shall stop by to taste them!

All sounds very sensible masterclass - I'd refine it somewhat, to whether people have a problem parking outside their house, whether they think a CPZ would fix it, and how much that solution would be worth to them. The Herne Hill solution seems very sensible too. I don't understand why local traders don't just get the answer to some of these questions. It would take absolutely NO effort to ask their customers when they pay how they got to the shops that day. If they say by car, they can ask them where they parked, and whether they wouldn't have gone shopping if they'd had to pay and display. If they make a note of both that and the sum spent you could very quickly and easily put a cash value against the possible impact of a CPZ on trade. It's because local traders refuse to do this that I question their honesty.

What itatm, missing the point that you just made a personal attack on me because of a disagreement we had months ago? :)) It's really quite sad that you're using tibby's grief as a vehicle to pursue a personal vendetta. I feel for tibby, and can understand how distressing it was. I still carry facial scars from a mugging twenty years ago. I was just confused and now have been enlightened.

Brtish dumplings are one of the finest things in the universe. Savoury ones, not sweets. A good stew with dumplings. I don't really understand why they haven't caught on. The Italians have got gnocchi that are broadly similar, but their reach extends far beyond their grasp.

No need to be furious tibby (whichever one you are), if you've got two people posting under the same name it's bound to sow confusion.