The Bedford Heist

by Frederick Linden-Wyatt

  1/. Booze in Britain. Having witnessed the damage drinking is doing to our society then the government must close all pubs and clubs by midnight (last drinks sold at 11:30pm) and also start charging drunks £50 for using a Drunk Tank and £100 if an ambulance is called to take the drunk to A & E. It was very noticeable during the COVID-19 lock down that crime rates dropped by a third and not one person was rushed to A&E drunk after a night out. The prison service should also be given extra funding to enable them to offer better detox services for alcoholics. No prisoner should be released until they had been free of their addiction for at least six months.

  2/. How gambling is ruining lives. Gambling ruins thousands of lives every year and at least the betting levy of 20% would help cover the cost of any addict’s treatment. Bet365 boss netted £323 million in a single year. The 2018/2019 year saw Bet365 customers stake £64.49bn on sports over the 12-month period, a 22.7% improvement on the prior year. Any addiction whether it be gambling, drugs, smoking or alcohol should be treated as a medical condition and the NHS should receive a share of any levy to offer better support to addicts.

  3/. Prisons have become dumping grounds for the mentally ill. Many prisoners are a danger to themselves but are no danger whatsoever to the public and therefore shouldn’t be in prison. With the NHS and local governments being under-funded for the last decade, mental health appears to be bottom of the list, yet if the mental health problem could be controlled or fixed, then it would be in everyone's interest to release these sick patients back in the community, where instead of costing the tax payer around £43,000.00 every year to keep them locked up, they could start to contribute to society.

  4/. Drugs in Britain. In the UK we spend billions every year trying to fight drugs with little success. We need to seriously look at the way Portugal treats possession of drugs and class use of small quantities of these drugs as a public health issue, not a criminal one. The drugs were still illegal, of course but now getting caught with them meant a small fine and maybe a referral to a drug treatment program — not jail time and a criminal record. If an addict could legally buy weed for £5 then the drug pushers would go out of business. The quality of the weed would be better than the current illegal type and it can be grown in the UK. At the same time, you would deprive the drug gangs of easy money and could also reduce knife crime and gang wars.

  5/. Austerity & Non-dom status. Austerity could only work if it applied to everyone. Austerity is a political-economic term referring to policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both. Governments needed to raise more in taxes from the people who could afford to pay them most and this was the rich who pay a tax rate of 45% on earnings over £150,000. Anyone earning (if earning is the right word) over a million pounds should pay tax at a rate of 80% for the next five years. The governments HMRC should set up a separate police force to ensure that everyone is paying their correct taxes and a law should be introduced where advisors would also be responsible for their actions. All income should be included, including earnings from overseas, and the Non-Dom system scrapped. Anyone holding a British passport should be taxed at the correct rate and if this were done then austerity could work for the very first time.

  6/. UK Housing Crisis. The housing shortage is a problem that faces young people in every small village and town throughout Great Britain. If no one is getting on the property ladder then nobody is moving up it and, in the end, when people die, there will be nobody able to buy the vacant property and prices will crash leaving millions of home owners with a negative mortgage. The government must build starter homes, even if these are for rent only, as many of the current private sector homeowners started their married life in rented accommodation. When the current government took over from Labour new social homes built in 2010-11 was 39,570 however in 2016-17 it had dropped to just 5,380. If the country is to ever solve the housing crisis then it must build more social housing for rent. Recent figures released from the Institute for Fiscal Studies stated that “the biggest decline in home ownership in the last 20 years has been among middle-income 25 to 34-year-olds. In 1995-96, 65% of this group owned a home, but just 27% did so in 2015-16.

  7/. Get rid of Zero-hour contracts. In the UK there’s an ever-growing number of workers who are having to accept a zero-hour contract which is a type of contract between an employer (or its agency) and a worker, where the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours, while the worker is not obliged to accept any work offered. Many companies, who are household names, offer many of their workers a zero-hour contract. It is alleged that Sports Direct has 90% of its workforce. J D Wetherspoon has 80% of its workforce. McDonald's has 90% of its workforce in the UK on zero-rate contracts which equates to 82,000 staff. Burger King Franchisees and Domino's Pizza operations in the UK extensively use zero-hour contracts. The Spirit Pub Company has 16,000 staff on zero-hour contracts and even Boots UK have 4,000 staff on zero-hour contracts. Amazon’s US founder Jeff Bezos, 53, is the world’s richest man who last year made £1.6million an hour, so perhaps he could afford to pay a decent wage to everyone who is part of the Amazon family.

  8/. From a hero to inmate. After leaving the forces sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should be treated as a mental health issue and not criminal. Nearly 6,000 people sleep rough every night in the UK and many end up in prison which must seem like paradise to them. A warm bed, three meals a day and security may appear to be great for them but it’s costing the taxpayer £43,000 a year to provide them with a room. It would be considerably cheaper to care for these people in the community as the majority are not a danger to society but are a danger only to themselves.

  9/. Children need to know whose boss. The Government needs to retake control of family life as by taking the PC route we are ending up with far too many unruly young adults. Parents should be taught how to control children as many are just being left to run wild. Most of these little porkers will develop diabetes and be on prescription drugs the rest of their lives. Far too many youngsters are playing war games on their x-box well into the night and this is not only affecting their schooling but turning many into dangerous young adults.

  10/. Professional prisoners. The current system in use does little to help rehabilitate professional prisoners who are quite happy to be prison. They know they will get housed, clothed, and fed and their addiction treated, so why struggle as a ‘free’ man where they will struggle to find a job and to live off the minimum benefit money provided. Better use of the “Open prisons” in the UK could help the serious reoffenders as they would be trained in subjects such as in the construction industry which needs more electrician mates, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, chippy’s and a host of other trades. Farming is another sector that is crying out for horticulturist and a wide range of farming skills such as Agricultural Engineers, Poultry / Broiler management skills, Herdsman. The UK must find a better way to deal with problems facing the prison service as the current system just isn’t working.

  Until these problems are dealt with my team will continue to bring towns to their knees and in the end the government will have to take matters seriously.

  Chapter 67. Ask your MP

  I have mentioned a few (but not all) of the problems that UK citizens face daily. If you wish to help put the Great back in Britain then you could send an email to your Member of Parliament (MP) or any Minister. If every reader took a few minutes of their time to send an email then we may see a solution to these continuing problems.

  You can find your MP’s contact details at https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-your-mp/

  Chapter 5. Prisons overhaul.

  Email your MP and ask if they could introduce a Private Members’ Bill to look at prison reforms like those mention by the former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016? You could copy the text from this chapter to explain to your MP what David Cameron was proposing to due before he resigned due to the Brexit vote.<
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  Chapter 8. Drugs in British prisons.

  Email your MP and ask if they could introduce a Private Members’ Bill to pass a new law on sentencing of criminals that are addicted to drugs or drink. The addicted criminal should be given a set term sentence but the sentence could be extended indefinitely, if they fail to eradicate their addiction before being released?

  Chapter 9. Bullying

  If you believe that bullying is a problem in schools within your area then please email your MP and ask him/her to introduce a Private Members’ Bill to pass a new law on bullying in schools. The new law should be called Julie-Anne’s Law to tackle this problem that is ruining many children’s lives. You will need to copy the paragraph relating to Julie-Anne’s Law or they won’t know what you’re going on about.

  Chapter 10. Prison and IPP

  As of November 2019, seven years after IPPs were abolished there were 2,223 people serving IPP sentences who have yet to be released and a further 1,206 serving an IPP sentence who are back in prison having been recalled while on licence. With over 3,000 IPP prisoners still behind bars it not only makes our prisons overcrowded but cost the state over £1.35 billion every year to keep them locked up. If you believe that these IPP inmates deserve a better deal, then please ask your MP to push the Home Secretary to find a solution to end this injustice.

  Chapter 11. Muslim inmates & Halal meat

  If you are concerned about how halal meat is slaughtered then please email your MP and ask him/her to introduce a Private Members’ Bill to pass a new law to make this form of cruel slaughter illegal explaining that apparently, most animals are slaughtered humanly in the UK by stunning (electric shock to the brain) the animal first before killing the animal. Halal slaughter means no stunning and the animal throat is slit whilst it is still conscious. According to a butcher without stunning all the muscles (which is the meat we eat) tighten up due to the shock and you end up with very tough meat. The animal could still be blessed by a priest before being humanely slaughtered. If the government didn’t want to ban this cruel method then an alternative would be to introduce a law that once an animal is slaughtered using the cruel Halal method than the carcass should be stamped ‘Halal’ on all sections of the carcass such as on the legs, shoulders, loins, etc and any packaging used in the supermarket or butchers shop should clearly state that the meat is halal. This would prevent the vast majority of UK shoppers unknowingly buying something that had been cruelly slaughtered.

  Afterword’s: Chapter 12. UK Housing Crisis

  If you are concerned about the housing crisis facing young people in this country please email your MP the words regarding this matter stating that “Recent figures released from the Institute for Fiscal Studies stated that “the biggest decline in home ownership in the last 20 years has been among middle-income 25 to 34-year-olds. In 2017, 35% of 25- to 34-year-olds were homeowners, down from 55% in 1997. If nobody is moving up the property ladder there will be no buyers in a few years’ time to buy the homes vacated by people who have died. Ask your MP to urge the Minister of State for Housing and Planning to provide local councils with funds to build starter homes at a reasonable rent so that the younger generation can pay an affordable rent and still have money left over to start saving for a deposit on their first mortgaged home.

  Chapter 15. Coronavirus

  If you are concerned about the way the government handled the pandemic then please email your MP stating so. There are several sections to this sorry saga, so you may wish to state them all in one email or send individual emails (this way usually gets a better response).

  Chapter 15. GIG community or those on Zero Hour Contracts

  There are nearly a million people working in the Gig community, many on zero-hour contracts and this sector suffered severe financial difficulties as they didn’t qualify for any of the job retention schemes. As Covid-19 could peak again (or we are hit again by another virus from China) could you please urge Matthew Taylor, Director of Labour Market Enforcement, to inform his Labour Market Enforcement Strategy for 2020 to 2021 of this problem, so that every worker in the UK has a ‘proper job’ with all the associated benefits and that every worker should be paid via the PAYE system.

  Chapter 15. Politicians singing the praises of our nurses and doctors

  You may wish to email ministers mentioned in this paragraph individually asking them if they are now sorry that they denied NHS workers being paid a fair wage by lifting the cap on public sector wages including nurses, teachers, firefighters and police officers in June 2017.

  Chapter 15. Couldn’t Care Less About Care Homes

  If you are concerned about the way the consecutive government have handled the care home crisis then do email your MP and ask him/her if they would like to apologise for the way the government have dealt with care homes in the past. Does he/she agree that the misinformation given out about the Covid-19 infection of care home residents was “unlikely”, which was issued up until mid-March was a serious mistake and that the government should publically apologise to the nation for their misinformation which lead to the death of thousands of people in care homes.

  Will he/she push the government to take a serious look at the valuable service that the care home sector provides and come up with a viable solution to protect this sector and place it on a suitable financial footing, so that it can carry on helping the aged and disabled citizens of this country.

  Would he/she also push for a minimum annual salary of £25,000 for all care workers, so that overseas care workers can qualify for a visa as without these overseas workers the care home sector could not function.

  Would he/she also push for the lifting of parking charges for all NHS staff who currently must pay to park their car in hospital car parks.

  Immigration and Covid-19

  If you are concerned about the way the government has ignored the illegal immigration problem then do email your MP and ask him/her if they would push the Home Secretary Priti Patel to honour the governments pledge in the December 2019 general election where it promised to sort out this ever growing problem, once and for all. You may wish to copy this part from Chapter 15.

  Should China be made to pay?

  If you are concerned about the way the Chinese Communist Party have handled the pandemic then do email your MP and ask him/her if they would push parliament to make China pay for not making the world aware of the huge problem that they had in Wuhan. You may wish to mention what you have read in The Bedford Heist novel which is copied below.

  I believe that the six week delay by China not making the western world aware of the pandemic they should be made to pay for their mistakes and when they refuse the western world via the United Nations should ban all flights to and from China until they pay up. The UK should also follow the USA and put an import tax of 30% on any item made in China that is imported to the UK. I do hope that you will push ministers to take China on and make them pay for their delay. It would also be helpful if the UK government insisted on the Chinese flag being clearly shown on all imports from China and any listing on websites such as Amazon or other media must also make it clear to customers that they will be supporting the Chinese Communist Party. You owe it to the tens of thousands whose life had been cut short to make China pay.

  Chapter 26. Internet taking 1,000’s of jobs

  If you are concerned about this form of modern-day slavery then please email your MP and ask him/her to introduce a Private Members’ Bill to pass a new laws to make this form of cheap labour illegal. State in your email that you have just finished reading a crime and fiction novel entitled The Bedford Heist where in chapter 26 it states how the internet is killing our high streets. IMO what needs to be done is for the government to introduce an online delivery tax of £2 per order and the monies raised to permanently cut business rates, make parking for shoppers free for 4 hours and to give the local councils funds to compulsory purchase empty shops and rent them out at a more manageable rent. The council could also modernise
the accommodation above the shops and rent these out to needy locals including rough sleepers.

  Chapter 27. From hero to rough sleeper to inmate

  If you are concerned about the way those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) then please email your MP and ask him/her to introduce a Private Members’ Bill to pass a new laws to make it law that ex-military and rough sleepers along with all addictions be treated as a health problem, as placing these sufferers in prison doesn’t work and never will. It cost around £43,000 a year to keep PTSD sufferers in prison and as most prisons don’t have the medical expertise to cure the problem, then they will keep on being a problem for years to come. After the Covid-19 pandemic many health workers will also end up suffering from PTSD and as the government have praised our doctors and nurses every day at the Covid-19 briefing, I do hope that all sufferers of PTSD will receive the medical treatment they rightly deserve.