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Criminal records
Wednesday 27 January 2010
THEY say a criminal always returns to the scene of his crime, which explains the number of Australians living in London. During Australia’s 80-year history as a penal colony, it took eight months to transport a shipload of Australians to Botany Bay. Now it takes less than a day to fly them back.
While it was not necessarily one of shipping’s finest hours, transporting criminals to the Australian continent during the 18th and 19th centuries did increase the population of the desert country.
Now some of the original documentation of that great enforced migration can be traced thanks to an initiative by ancestry.co.uk, timed to coincide with Australia Day on January 26. For seven days from January 24, the records of 55,000 convicts will be available free online. They include those of convicts who were subsequently pardoned or served out their sentences.
Last Word plans to investigate the backgrounds of the some of its correspondents’ suspiciously Australian roots.
On yer bike, pirates
ANYONE who remembers British politics in the 1980s will recall Norman Tebbit, one of the most stridently rightwing figures of the Thatcher era.
The man they nicknamed the Chingford Skinhead is still in circulation in the Upper Chamber and has recently taken to tabling parliamentary questions on Somali piracy. Readers of the Daily Telegraph website have recently been treated to a blog post outlining his discoveries, and we are pleased to offer a few edited highlights. A curious entity Lord Tebbit refers to as “NuLab” is accused of refusing to arrest pirates lest they apply for political asylum.
“I began to feel that the government was not best pleased that the Royal Navy had interpreted a brief to put down piracy as a brief to put down piracy, rather than as a brief to look as if they were putting down piracy, subject to the overwhelming need to avoid bringing pirates to justice here in Britain,” Tebbit muses.
“A friendly Foreign Office minister half-heartedly defended the policy with the question, ‘What else could we do?’ I suggested that they could be put into the care of Haringey social services, but we both agreed that might constitute a cruel and unnatural punishment.”
Croatia’s dilemma
IF YOU wanted to put a spoke in the wheel of Croatia’s bid to join the European Union (which we do not), all you would have to do is insist Zagreb privatise its shipyards.
Privatisation is already one of the pre-conditions of the negotiations on membership, but can it ever be fulfilled?
Some argue that you would have to be a madman to buy into any European facility today. Without state support (an unlikely eventuality) the EU shipbuilding industry is set to lose half of its capacity over the next two years.
Poor Croatia therefore will have to strong-arm someone into coming up with a bid. Perhaps the yards can be transformed into waterfront property developments?
Or more realistically, the EU’s pre- condition needs to be dropped.
