Philippa and the judge – your feedback

Update 1:   Petition to free Philippa

My last post, published yesterday was written the previous day, and was about the jailing of a depressed woman called Philippa.

In response to the jailing of Philippa on Wednesday, Andy Harley raised a petition. I signed this yesterday and am asking my readers to sign and share it as widely as possible within Peterborough please. 

You can copy paste this into your browser to get to the petition: https://www.change.org/p/rt-hon-amber-rudd-pc-mp-release-philippa-fallowfield-from-prison-her-only-crime-is-struggling-with-depression

Update 2:   The two men who died between Yaxley and Farcet

My blog was partly about the alienating effect of cars and our road infrastructure and understanding why car parks and bridges over roads are chosen by suicidal (women, most often). As I wrote another story was breaking: the one about the car which killed two men walking along a local road. You know as a story breaks when it will be big, especially when there is briefcase involved, with a huge amount of cash in it and the next thing it was all over our television screens. But let’s ignore the big police blokes chasing big naughty blokes story and look at the underlying story. The one about the road. Because this location caused actual cries of pain on social media.

Turns out there is an old story, from two years ago, in fact. It involves another death on exactly the same stretch of road. I’m sure you will want to read it.

I received one comment (not on my blog, unfortunately): “Until the Highways Authority and their Highways Engineers face prosecution for corporate manslaughter for failing to address the obvious risk of death in circumstances such as these, nothing will change. Presently, they can, [and do], pretend to the fiction there is no risk until someone gets killed. As it is, the chances of anyone in the highways department accepting any personal or corporate responsibility are about the same as those that you will be bitten by a daffodil.”

He was just addressing the deaths of the two men, possibly not even having read the two year old story about another death. But he would presumably argue that there would have been an equally good case for prosecution then: two years ago. If he is right, then what is the strength of that case now that two more deaths have occurred? Surely, overwhelming.

The Peterborough judiciary has managed to jail Philippa. Think about it.

Which begs the question of who could be prosecuted.

Another friend blamed Peterborough City Council. I’d assumed when I wrote my last post that this patch of road was outside the city council boundary, and I was just about to correct him. But I thought I’d check my facts first. And this is what I found. The white patch is Peterborough Unitary Authority’s area. The orange bit is in Huntingdonshire and it looks as if the accident happened on the patch of road which runs along the boundary. Both orange and white patches sit within the constituency of North West Cambridgeshire.

I will of course (somewhat unusually!) be sharing this particular post with the police.

Meanwhile, the only person in a position to bang the appropriate heads together, it seems to me, is Shaliesh Vara MP. He does not make himself available to me via social media (for me that means that he doesn’t do twitter) and I’m not in his constituency, so I’m not entitled to talk to him. So I won’t be sharing this post with him: I can’t. You might like to do that.