Goody Two Shoes is old hat - meet Goody Three Shoes!

We ranted on yesterday about the borough’s latest survey - this time into hate crime. The survey has the avowed aim of encouraging more people to “report” hate crimes - the effect of which will be to boost Boston's crime figures perhaps in a quite disproportionate way.

The survey has its roots in a bigger document - The Equality and Fairness Strategy 2010-13 - fifteen pages packed with worthy phrases and promises to make the sun shine on Boston and its residents 24 hours a day.
As we said yesterday no one supports people who make others’ lives harder to live through unfairness or inequality.
But the strategy tends to dwell on the bad news at the expense of the good.
The statistics in the report show that reported hate crime in the county in the last year totalled 274 racist hate crimes, 25 homophobic hate crimes, seven disability hate crimes and three transphobic crimes.
That’s a total of 309 crimes in a county with a population of around 700,000 - which represents 0.04%.
Again, as we said yesterday, whilst no-one condones actions against people because of their race or sexuality, we still think that in many instances such actions should not really be called “crimes.”
To do so is to open the door to more and more things that one person does which another person disapproves of being called crimes, which would be very silly.
As part of its plan to improve our lives, Boston Borough Council intends to "increase the number of citizens who feel that people of different backgrounds get along together in their area.”
What good will that do?
And we’d also like to be a fly on the wall when the borough council undertakes its next “major drama-based training programme of equality and diversity awareness for council employees.”
The borough's highest priority by 2013 is “to increase the number of people who say
they receive fair treatment from local services.”
All told, this report runs to about 2,700 words, many of them stating the obvious and making promises that can never be kept. All it will do is take up oodles of time and money to pursue aims and ambitions that will achieve little if anything worthwhile.
As we said yesterday, much of this seems to be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
And - if you’ll excuse the expression - it all seems a little airy-fairy!

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