Climate Camp Policing - Shocking!

Ok Im going up on the soap box here.

I just saw the news on the climate camp for Kingsnorth Power Station and was shocked at the number of police sent to keep the peace on the site. Now I respect that we pay for the services they provide and they do serve and protect our communities. And I do actually think they do a reasonable job given the constraints they have to work within.

What does grate me about this is that our local carnival was cancelled because the police wanted a whole load of money to send officers to police it. Now is this not their job? Why do they patrol the above free and not the carnival.

Rant over, I step down from thy soap box.

If you told the police that rather than the innocent fun you were planning you were planning instead to have a stash of illegal weapons, illegal drugs, and that there was a real danger of a breach of the police, affray, and riot, they'd have been happy to oblige

Originally Posted by Ed

breach of the police

Sounds nasty.

Sounds like fun to me

If you're holding an event, you have to pay to have it policed (numbers specified when you get a licence from the council), they don't just come willy nilly, so to speak. I don't know if (presumably) private contractors have to pay to protect their building sites?

I'm assuming that you live in the Medway area/Hoo peninsula then? The only "carnivals" I know of in that area usually consist of illegal drugs, affray and weapons anyway so it is a bit strange that the police refused to police it for free
Anyway, regarding the CCC...a of mine is down there as part of the police contingent and I know he doesn't really want to because his "patch" is now understaffed but from what I gather from him and in the papers/tv/radio etc. the planned action for saturday(trying to gain access to the power station and switch off the power to the grid) could happen before then and switch a large part part of the county into darkness. How would you like your power disrupted because of some weed smoking grass-eating hippies?

Originally Posted by arenalife

If you're holding an event, you have to pay to have it policed (numbers specified when you get a licence from the council), they don't just come willy nilly, so to speak. I don't know if (presumably) private contractors have to pay to protect their building sites?

Naahhh...we pay private security companies who employ illegal immigrants and when the scoundrels break-in and nick all our gear then we call the police.

HTH

[timwilky]

Firstly this country is severly in need of new generating capacity. Yes new stations were built in the 80s dash for gas, but they have insufficient capacity to replace the time expired plant, plus the problems of efficiency and pollution from this old plant.


Gas is now an increasingly expensive and rare commodity, so any new plant needs to be either nuclear or coal. What will the protesters make of any new nuclear plants?

Kingsnorth will be one of the cleanest and most efficient coal plants in the world. Boiler technology has moved on since the last coal plants were built here. The design will permit for carbon capture as the technology evolves and the site provides convienient carbon storage capability.

Certainly protest, but that will fall on deaf ears. The decisions have already been made. The truth is we need more power in this country, plant has to be built somewhere. The right to protest, does not give you the right to commit criminal acts. Any police at the site are rightly there to prevent criminal activity and if anything should be funded by the very protesters who seek to disrupt this project.

The government are welcome to build a dirty great nuclear plant in my back garden. I'd rather have a clean power source to start with instead of building something inherently dirty and then bolting on a huge amount of extra complexity to clean it up.

It's about time the 'weed-smoking grass-eating hippies' (lol) stubbed out their reefers and stopped peddling all the old bollox about windfarms etc etc.

Windfarms. All the windfarms in the world are useless when it's not windy enough. Currently I believe the average full-output generation time for existing wind energy sites is under 40%. What takes over for the rest of the time? Coal, gas and nuke.

Tidal, solar, etc are all fine ideas but are basically untested and unproven in large enough installations to be viable.

The answer right here, right now is nuclear energy. I accept the whole 'what do we do with the waste' point of view, but I shall answer that:

What we need to do is build a plant which can take waste radioactive material and reprocess it so that much of it can be used again, then we should turn the small amounts of remaining waste into blocks using a vitrification plant.

Oh, wait. We did that, then we barely used it and closed it down. It was called Sellafield.

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