Load Of Bollocks
IT has happened before. A quick look at Anorak’s embossed back issues to Horse And Hound magazine tells us that back in September 2005, Charlotte Denis, 20, a gamekeeper from Gloucestershire, was arrested.
Her crime was to have turned up to a Game Fair wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend “Bollocks To Blair”.
"I asked the officers how they could arrest someone for wearing a T-shirt and they told me it was because it would offend a 70-80-year-old woman," said Charlotte. Of course, it would not. To Britain’s pensioners, a T-shirt is just another way of staying warm and thus keeping fuel bills down, and if it shows a wearer’s dissatisfaction with Blair, then so much the better.
(It should now he said that the Blair is Tony Blair and not Cherie his fragrant wife, who may or may not have enough bollocks of her own. So too Euan, Nikki and Leo. But not Kathryn, obviously.)
Charlotte was released without charge on the condition that she wore a jacket to conceal her offending T-shirt.
That was then. And now we read in the Times that two stallholders at the Royal Norfolk Show have fallen foul of the law for selling the T-shirts.
Both have been issued with fixed penalty notices to the value of £80 each. And both are less than pleased.
Tom Williams, one of the men, claims police told him he could sell the goods so long as the T-shirts were not put on display.
Toby Rhodes, another seller, is outraged. “It’s utterly ridiculous and totally out of proportion. We have been selling the shirts for ages as part of the Countryside Alliance’s argument with the Labour Government over foxhunting,” says he.
In a wordy statement, a police spokesman explains the action taken, talking for the T-shirts’ “offensive language”, citing “Section 5 of the Public Order Act” and language “deemed to cause harassment, distress or alarm”.
Which leaves the sellers with lots of T–shirts they may have trouble shifting. But never mind, they can package them up and send them to impoverished parts of the world – like Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq – where the locals will be only to pleased to sport them…
Posted: 4th, July 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
