Who would want to be stared at by a thug?

One further thought on knife crime.

It's all very well suggesting that offenders meet victims to see the impact of their crime, but if I was the victim of a stabbing the very last person I would want to meet would be the thug who stabbed me. Indeed, I find the whole move towards so-called restorative justice (in reality yet another excuse to avoid imprisonment and proper punishment) to be, at best, insulting. The only place I would want to see my assailant would be in prison.

I imagine that most people would have the same reaction.

I have been assaulted twice:  a mugging and a kick in the balls by a complete stranger. And if I saw either of them again, I would - unhesitatingly - seek to give them a dose of their own medicine and kick them where it really hurts.

UPDATE: Heaven help us. There's some chap on FiveLive at the moment who organises meetings betweens offenders and their victims and says how it helps the victims to realise that the offenders can themselves be victims of 'life's circumstances'.

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Mamma Mia - absolute cack indeed

I couldn't disagree more with Melanie Reid, who raves about Mamma Mia:

The result is an uninhibited, fun, cheesy, hugely tongue-in-cheek women's film that has, as few others have done, parted the critics like the Red Sea. The highest-browed men, poor things, entirely missing the irony, have struggled to cope with Streep in a popular role, or to find words hate-filled enough to describe the result: “absolute cack”; “silliness unredeemed by wit or polish”; “super pooper... soulless panto”; “hideous... a crock of hooey”; “Streep meets her Waterloo”. My colleague James Christopher, the Times film critic referred to “Hollywood blancmange” and said that the “sight of a Greek conga of local scrubbers vamping to Dancing Queen on a wobbly wooden pier is a truly terrifying spectacle”.
...Never have the posh male critics been marooned higher or drier. They have missed the joke, you see. Almost everyone

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The UN decision on Zimbabwe is based on neithermorality nor decency (The Times)

I also have a piece in The Times, on the UN. Here's an extract:

There is an old, perhaps apocryphal story of a small girl who, watching the ranting, gesticulating Randolph Churchill, tugged at her mother's skirt and asked: “Mummy, what is that man for?”

The same must now be asked of the United Nations.

...There could be no clearer case for action. No civilised nation can regard Mr Mugabe's behaviour as anything other than obscene. But decisions of the Security Council have never been based on decency or morality. They are based on realpolitik. The UN's very constitution as a body including some of the most brutal dictatorships on the planet necessitates that.

Indeed, the UN is structurally incapable of acting in accordance with the dictates of civilised behaviour. Whether it is its failure to stand up to the Burmese regime or to deal

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So why not just throw them in jail? (Daily Mail)

I have a piece in today's Daily Mail on knife crime and the Home Secretary's plans. Here's an extract:

...Yesterday we learned from the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, that the full power of the government and the criminal justice system will be deployed to...rely on offenders' sense of decency, and assume that when they are made to see the consequences of their actions they will undergo a magical conversion and realise the error of their ways.

If the spate of knife crimes were not so serious you would have to laugh. The official reaction is, in a word, pathetic.

Asking teenagers nicely to stop might be polite, but as any sane person knows by now, it is pointless pleading. Just as it is no good making empty threats.

The missing link in knife crime  -  and across the criminal justice system  -  is the concept

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On its way

Daniel Finkelstein writes about the deliberately engineered shortages of the new iPhone:

First of all, they claim the demand for the device is unprecedented. This is either unremarkable - since it is a new device any demand for it at all would be without precedent - or untrue - if they are arguing that no device in the history of devices has ever experienced such demand then I refuse to believe it.

Second, it is hard to understand why the demand would have taken them by surprise. All iPhone users on the higher tarriffs are being offered the phone free of charge, while being allowed to keep their existing devices.

Wasn't it entirely predictable that all of them would apply immediately for the new phone?

And Apple have been stoking demand, emailing and texting existing users to encourage them to get the

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