Anti-Social Britain

We're still in the the Brown stuff

Anyone who thought the sight of Tony Blair scuttling out of Downing Street would stop the rot in the Labour ranks might have found last week's conference a bit of a shocker.

Because it became clear that Blair's exit has done nothing to dispel the ugly truth - that this Government is run by a bunch of inept fools. Never more obvious than when the Party's Three Stooges - Straw, Jowell and Smith - gave performances that confirmed Britain is still in a whole heap of trouble.

First, we had Britain's luckiest politician Tessa Jowell (lucky because, even though she's soppy, ineffectual and messes up on a daily basis, she's a woman and Labour are short on women) who reckons members of London's street gangs - those same yobs who shoot small boys and knife you in the guts if you so much as look at them the wrong way - are actually entrepreneurial geniuses who should be given jobs that would harness their leadership skills.

What? So Mrs Jowell thinks that just because a druggie uses a syringe to inject his heroin he's capable of running hospitals? And that a yob who shoots and knifes people should be heading up a team at Scotland Yard because he understands the criminal mind? The naivete (not to mention the stupidity) of the woman is stupefying. She's had a decade in Government, yet still she talks like some idealistic, wet-behind-theears university student who's had no experience of the real world. Jowell, who obviously hasn't looked at her own Government's crime figures, reckons that only a very small percentage of young people are involved in violent crime. Tell that to Rhys Jones's parents. Tell that to the parents of those 17 other kids who met their deaths this year at the hands of teenage gangs.

Then we had Jack Straw announcing that people who defend themselves, their homes or other people against criminals will no longer face prosecution.

Well, whoop de doo - give the man a coconut for finally showing some common sense. The real crime here, of course, is that decent law-abiding citizens were ever prosecuted in the first place. And the fact this Government has finally come around to the idea that it's the perpetrators of crime who should be punished, not the victims, shows what a bunch of blithering idiots they really are.

Straw had every opportunity to enforce this new law when he was Home Secretary, but he didn't, presumably because Tony said No and Straw didn't have the stomach for a fight. But mainly, I suspect, because ordinary people are far easier to pin down and prosecute than criminals and Mr Straw needed to get his crime detection figures up.

And lastly there was Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of whom we all had such high hopes, but who first blotted her copy book a few weeks ago when she announced the answer to Britain's spiralling yob culture (that Tessa Jowell apparently knows nothing about) was to give offenders Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, which aren't a punishment, simply a piece of paper they have to sign where they promise to be good little lads and lasses.

Then last week she compounded the cock-up by slating TV shows which glorify binge drinking. "Why celebrate drunken behaviour on our TV screens," she droned, "when alcohol misuse can cause real damage."

Yes and who bloody facilitated alcohol misuse in the first place? This Government, that's who, when they gave the nod to 24-hour drinking. Time and again they were warned what would happen - and now it has. Violence around pubs and clubs has risen 130 per cent in the year since licensing laws were relaxed. Violent attacks by drunks are happening at the rate of 3,000 a day and the numbers of people being hospitalised with drink related injuries has doubled.

So Ms Smith shouldn't be terribly surprised that TV is mirroring what's happening on our streets.

So if Gordon Brown is at home this weekend patting himself on the back after what he thinks was a good conference, he needs to pour himself a large one and get back to the drawing board.

http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/sunday/2007/09/30/we-re-still-in-the-the-brown-stuff-98487-19870694/