Crime Madness

So, in The Sunday Telegraph this week, there was an interview with Otis Ferry, the son of Brian and ardent hunt campaigner. Read it here. His is a pretty silly story of the jockeying between pro-hunt and anti-hunt campaigners. He was charged with various fairly stupid stuff, then remanded in prison for four months and then the CPS and the police offered no evidence in court. Says the article:

"It is not just Ferry and his supporters who think he was hard done by. Even the judge who had presided over his case after Ferry was accused of perverting the course of justice could not hide his anger at the defendant's treatment when the charge was dropped."

In the normal course of events, none of this would trouble me. But then today this, an article in today's Metro covering the Home Affairs Select Committee report on knife crime. It included this choice line:

"...just one in five of those caught with a knife was jailed in the last three months of last year, the report revealed."

WTF? Did I read this right? The taxpayer has paid for some dumb assed Hooray Henry to get banged up for four months for a whole load of utterly irrelevant and trivial crap and where it turned out there was not enough evidence to prosecute him in any case, but 80% of those who get caught walking around toting a potential murder weapon just get a caution or a non-custodial sentence. Fucking hellski. What the fucking fuck is going on around here?

Oh, but it gets even madder when you read on. Keith Vaz, the Home Affairs Select Committee chairman and well known utter wanking tosspot, said this:

"'We are seeing a spiralling of the arms race as far as knife crime is concerned,. Young people carry knives because they fear that others are carrying knives. We are clearly failing them."

No we're fucking not you moronic asshole, you are failing us by not making sure that (a) they are educated and (b) they are locked up when they commit a crime. Fuckwit.

And his solution? He goes on to call for a Downing Street summit on the issue. OMG. How NuLab's love calling for summits. I have covered summitry before (here) but let's just remind ourselves of what they are about. If there is one certain rule in life, it is this: when politicians announce a 'summit' you know that:

a. they're in the shit
b. that means that we poor proles are in the shitter with them
c. they have absolutely no idea how to get out of the shit, and
d. they are desperate to be seen to do something to deflect attention from c above

The article ends with a classic NuLab quote from another total thieving tosspot:

"But Home Secretary Jacqui Smith insisted: 'Through tougher sentencing we are carrying out a clear message."

Yup. Tougher sentencing. 80% chance of no prison sentence for wandering the streets with a potential murder weapon. NuLab spin is alive and well.