Most of the stuff was sold off to the wealthy on the cheap. A little bit was sold off to ordinary people on the cheap.

Selling some to ordinary people made the bulk of the fire sale more palatable.

Because normally the Tories sell it off to themselves or their mates. In this instance, they let council tenants benefit from their practice.

Doing so endears people to them and their behaviour of selling off assets. It thus makes it easier for them to get away with selling more state assets off to their mates.

They're reducing the power of the state by selling off its assets on the cheap.

Perfectly fitting with Burnham's mandate. Isn't democracy great?

would struggle with the complexity of Arabic numerals

This is an imaginary problem.

I was thinking on this when I wrote my comment above, and I'm not quite sure.

Either there's a muddying of terms, where you have ANPR as a technology (which anyone could implement), and the police have their own, separate network of ANPR cameras. Then the police can obtain footage from private cameras as needed through warrants.
Or private entities submit their data to an ANPR database that the police maintain.

Regardless, there's not one big private network of ANPR cameras that the government have permitted to be installed on public land, and the police still have checks and balances in place to prevent abuse.

Law enforcement in the US extensively use the private sector to bypass the courts and get around having to get a warrant.

More specifically, Flock is a private company. Because it's private and commercial, police can just purchase access and don't need a warrant.

ANPR in the UK is run by police. Using it falls under the same rules as any other police investigation.

And because US law enforcement have been using the private sector to bypass the need for a warrant.

The difference is ANPR is that Flock is a private business, collecting data and stalking people across the US for commercial purposes, which sold this data to law enforcement - meanwhile law enforcement were using the private sector to bypass the checks and balances of court warrants.

In the UK, ANPR is an official tool, not private. Police need to get authorisation to use it, and it is not used for commercial purposes.

It's still wank, but it's not quite as wank.

In the UK our main fireworks night is 5 Nov - tonight.

It's Guy Fawkes night, or bonfire night, celebrating the time when a guy tried to blow up the House of Parliament centuries ago.

So it's not really anything like new years.

Yeah that's fair enough, but I'm very happy with 1.7Gbps :) and I love seeing huge speeds when downloading, it never gets old.