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There's a dangerous misconception about the law enforcement agencies. They are increasingly being perceived as being on the streets to serve the State. They are not. They are there for us. To protect us. To look after us. And Tomlinson, however unedifying the lifestyle he chose, whether he was a bum or a broker, was one of us. Scruffy, potless or a season ticket holder at the New Den, he was the sort of person the police are meant to safeguard: an ordinary guy going about his day. Instead, I would suggest they pretty much killed him.
Children are not born evil. They can be made evil by what happens to them. Last week, widespread shock has been in evidence again at the news that two boys, aged 10 and 11, have tried to kill two other boys, aged nine and 11. Many have argued that this episode is further evidence of feral children and of young lives out of control. The lesson widely drawn has been that the standard of behaviour of young people has deteriorated steadily, and that we now have a "crisis of youth". Indeed, a whole range of grisly episodes, starting with the James Bulger episode in 1993, when two 10-year-olds murdered a two-year-old child, have followed in swift succession and have led many to wonder what has gone wrong. My own experience as a schoolteacher is that nothing has gone wrong and that children are in many ways better behaved and more sensitive than they were a generation ago. My colleague Andy Schofield, principal-elect of The Wellington Academy, Wiltshire, agreed. "It's utter rubbish to say that children are getting worse," he said. "They are more tolerant, less prejudiced, harder working and more conscious of the environment than children 25 years ago."
What this episode shows quite clearly is that Labour is all at sea...and has yet to adapt to the transformation of the political landscape by the internet revolution. With some notable exceptions...the party has completely failed to grasp the anarchic power of blogging, the capacity of peer-to-peer contact to undermine conventional authority and the potential of the web as a tool of libertarian dissidence. If your approach to politics is coercive and centralising - which Labour's is - today's web must be completely alien terrain. The age of McBride has passed. He was fit for purpose in an era when the media was configured in a certain way: the time of spin doctors, the carrot-and-stick to the media of access to ministers, the conflation of strategy and communications, the control of the ministerial court. All that will continue, of course, but it will no longer be enough...The web cannot be tamed. It cannot even be managed. It will subject this Government and its successors to scrutiny on a scale never seen before.
The NHS is today castigated for providing "inadequate" psychiatric help to vulnerable mental health patients, as new figures reveal an average of four deaths a day among those in its care. Data collected by the National Patient Safety Agency shows that 1,282 people in England died in what it calls "patient safety incidents in mental health settings" in the period 2007-08. Another 913 patients - more than two a day - suffered what is termed severe harm, or permanent injuries, in such incidents. The figures include patients who died as a result of self-harming behaviour, including suicide, disruptive or aggressive behaviour, medication safety errors and accidents, although it is not specified how many deaths fell into each category. Campaigners claimed last night that the high death rates showed that many of the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people who seek help each year receive a second-class service.
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Collection of interesting essay, articles and long blogposts about anything and everything. Emphasis on longevity of interest so not much strictly news/ topical content
Updated on 2009-04-12
Created on 2008-11-24
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