[BITList] Philip Pullman refuses to undergo 'insulting' childsafety check - Telegraph

[HUGH]

Mike,

Spoiled for me by the wee bit at the end where the Home Office were allowed their say.  There is no possible justification for this sort of %$£&%$& idiocy, so what can these greasy Home Office dimwits have to say that would be remotely relevant to anything?  The only saving grace I can see is that most children are too sensible to to be taken in by this crap.  The human race wouldn't have survived had children not had a built in tendency to learn the difference between bullshit and commonsense. The fools who drew up these rules are the same ones who drew up no rules at all to halt the swine flu in its tracks in the UK by imposing quarantine at airports, etc.  I can still see in my mind a chap coming through Heathrow wearing a Mexican suntan, greeting all and sundry with a spray of viruses - direct from Mexico at the start of the outbreak.  A neighbour of our daughter came home from Mexico a couple of months back - no quarantine at all.  Welcome to the UK, pull up a chair, have a sneeze.

As an addendum to the above, not that long ago a chap who belongs to a UK church was asked to fill in for the usual organist, and he would have been delighted to do that, except that to leave his pew and occupy the organ seat would have entailed submitting to a check by the usual suspects as above.  I kid you not.

Hugh.
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