For those of you that don’t know who Phillip Laing is, or just need a memory jogger, he’s the 19 year old student that urinated on a War Memorial at the end of October, while participating in the Carnage pub crawl event for Sheffield University students.
The offending photograph
Please bear in mind that I’m not condoning Mr Laings action in any way, it was disgusting behaviour and he should be absolutely ashamed of himself. In my opinion, imprisonment is too harsh and a bit OTT, but again that’s just my opinion.
As more and more news stations have commented on this, it appears the blame is not only being put on Phillip Laing, where it solely lies, but also on the event organisers of the Carnage event, Varsity Leisure Group.
It seems completely unjustifed that news sites such as the Daily Mail are calling for a ban of the Carnage UK event, as if they were in some way responsible for the teenagers actions.
Bar crawls are extremely common in University cities, such as Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester, usually organised by groups of friends. If this incident had taken place on one of those occasions, instead of Carnage UK, should his friends be taking the blame as well as him?
The incident could have also have happened at any place and any time, never-mind a bar crawl. I’m sure every single one of you has experienced a night out in one of the big cities, and seen fights, urination against walls etc.
If you saw this behaviour, would you hold the bar or club they had spent the night in responsible for their actions?
I would just like to stress that I do not condone Mr Phillip Laings behaviour at all. I do think that he was very unlucky to get photographed, and he deserves a kick up the backside, but the truth is it could have happened in any British city on any given night.
I completely fail to see how Varsity Leisure Group ltd are to blame.
