Setting yourself up for a fall

I accidentally deleted my blog this morning when I was tinkering with the account email settings and deleted the access account by mistake as I never really use it because I already have another gmail account along with 3 hotmail accounts and a yahoo account too. Fortunately the good people at google blogger were able to retrieve my mistake, something I suspect from the speed of response they are used too. As to why I have 5 email accounts? Well, I use them for different things, work, family, play, research (FOI requests, writing email campaigns and to politicians) I'm not alone in this, it's not paranoia as such, though there is an element of caution in it, simply good sense to compartmentalise what I do out here and keep my real name and family out of sight to all but the most determined of snoopers. I'm fairly sure minions of the state know who I am and who I'm linked too, but your average stalker/troll wont and long may it remain that way.
A bit of a rambling intro I know, but it allowed me to show you an example of what happens when you tinker around with something you shouldn't.
Express.

JUDGES and magistrates have been given the go-ahead to jail rioters after a signal from Whitehall, it appeared Yesterday.
The message was to forget normal soft sentencing and get the thugs and looters behind bars.
This was claimed as magistrate Novello Noades jailed a man for six months for hoarding property looted from a music shop.
Mr Noades, chairman of London’s Camberwell Green Magistrates Court, dismissed a request from the man’s solicitor for bail and a pre-sentence report.
Mr Noades replied: “Our directive for anyone in the rioting is a custodial sentence.”
However last night mystery over the supposedly emailed directive deepened when the Judicial Office, which represents judges, denied any instruction had been issued.

Now whilst I'm all in favour of locking away criminals, including looters and rioters, I can see a massive problem looming if this is indeed the case. I can already see the first appeals winging their way through the system if as has been claimed someone has told judges to ignore sentencing guidelines. The guidelines are there to serve a purpose and whilst judges are given a degree of latitude in enforcing those guidelines (they can choose to ignore if the circumstances warrant it) normally they follow them because when they don't an appeal due to the severity of the sentence will follow as sure as night follows day. We do complain often enough when the sentencing is too light, we rarely complain (unless we're involved) that the sentence was too harsh, but we do generally expect the judges to follow some sort of criteria when sentencing, we don't expect the state to step in capriciously and say the guidelines don't apply in this instance.
If the government thinks the sentencing guidelines aren't tough enough, it's up to the government (or the people electing them) to get them changed. What we don't want is the government stepping in and telling judges to just ignore them. That leads to the HRA and compo claims and we already shell out enough in taxes without paying some scumbag millions for banging them up without following the rules.
I want the scumbags put away for a long time, I want the sentence to fit the crime. What I don't want is the government to have the ability to tell judges to ignore the rules, because even if it's only for scumbags this time, at some future stage it might be me (or you) next.