When Nanny-Statism Kills

This is totally outrageous. Heads need to roll over this kind of sickness:

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.

By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.

Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.

“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety.

“There were four or five police officers. They were here before the fire brigade. We heard the sirens and we came across to help but they wouldn’t let us.

“I thought the police were there to protect lives. At one time they would have have gone inside themselves to try and rescue them.

“When a family is burning to death in front of your eyes, rules should go out of the window – especially with kids. Everybody wanted to try and help.”

Sick. Disgusting. Those police who stood there and watched that family burn to death are pathetic cowards and should be so ashamed of themselves that they should fear showing their faces in public again. I hope the family of the victims sue the British government because it’s the government that issues these insane rules.

Update: Mark Steyn at The Corner has much to say that is important for all Americans to read because with the direction the liberals are taking us we may very well find ourselves facing a British style nanny-state (emphasis mine):

Well, there weren’t any “deceased bodies” at the time Her Majesty’s constabulary showed up. And there might not have been any had they not shown up at all. The incident has strange echoes of that fire at a school in Saudi Arabia not long after 9/11, where the fleeing schoolgirls escaped the blazing building but, because they were unveiled, were beaten back by the stick-wielding religious police to die in the flames. In both cases, the emergency responders who are supposed to save you (or at least make an attempt) instead wind up killing you – because a rote prostration before rule enforcement trumps their basic humanity. In recent years, the British police have evolved from being merely useless (at least when it comes to traditional activities such as solving crime) into what John O’Sullivan calls “the paramilitary wing of The Guardian” – the blundering enforcers of the nanny state.

Still, you begin to see why so many lazy government officials are wedded to that “there’s no right to shout fire in a theatre” rubbish. Even when the building’s burning down, you’ve no rights. New Hampshire’s great motto, “Live free or die”, is not just a bit of bloodcurdling stemwinding but a real choice that Britons, Canadians and, alas, Americans ought to ponder: You can live as free men, with all the rights and responsibilities and vicissitudes of fate that that entails. Or you can watch your society decay and die before your eyes – as England, once the crucible of freedom, dies a little with every day.

Indeed. Americans, pay attention. This is where we are headed if we don’t stop this insane, collectivist, nanny-state slide.

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Enough.