FLASH: The police have handed the Cash-for-Honours Prosecution File to the CPS. Didn’t see that coming today!

On a morning when polls show that Labour are at a record low with the electorate, Mr Blair took the opportunity to attack the Tories, calling them ‘confused’.

Every time they are called on to make a big judgement call on policy, they misfire. New Labour made the Tories lose their bearings and this new Tory leadership has not found them. From law and order, to NHS reform, to taxes on the environment, they just get it wrong.

Politics is cyclical. New Labour, with the help of Mr Blair, introduced a breath of simplicity to the system. He brought us back to black-and-white, good-and-bad, right-and-wrong politics, which fitted with a popularism for that kind of thinking in the country at large.

Mr Cameron has reintroduced the era of nuanced politics. The era of greys, where some parts of something can be right, while other parts are wrong. An era where decisions are difficult and finely balanced between benefit and risk. And, once again, we’re starting to see a popularism with that sort of thing in the country at large.

Mr Blair rubbishing all of Mr Cameron’s ideas as without merit belongs to an earlier political era, and makes him look silly – especially when Mr Cameron is capable of working with the government on parts of plans he believes are right.

It’s startling to see a Grand Master of the political game suddenly unable to keep up with a new young upstart.

In sjhoward.co.uk’s first ever Guest Post, regular commenter Mort Karman provides an American perspective on the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus.

At latest count 33 people, human beings, are dead, shot to death by some crazy gunman we have not been told anything about except that he also killed himself.

Virginia Tech is a fine engineering university located in a peaceful area of rolling hills in the Virginia countryside.

It is the kind of campus parents like to send their children to because it is supposed to be located in a safe place.

Today, that place was not safe.

In two individual, but apparently related incidents, what appears to be a lone gunman armed with two assault rifles entered the open campus of the school and proceeded to murder people.

At a press briefing police and university officials offered little real information about what happened.

They just gave the figures: 33 dead including the shooter, and about 17 wounded or otherwise injured.

The university president and the local police chief sounded like the Keystone cops when they tried to explain why it took two hours to warn the students and faculty and why they did not lock down the entire campus. Super Cop said they thought the shooter of the first two people had hightailed it out of Dodge, so why bother to do any more.

I am sure there will be investigations up the yazoo and perhaps the university president and the police chief will get new jobs working as animal control officers, but that doesn’t bring back the dead people.

I don’t have answers.

We can’t turn our schools and universities into high security prisons with gates and a moat and machine gun toting guards. But we can’t keep loosing our young people and the folks who teach them.

Pictures from The Guardian

Have you ever stayed in a cheap hotel and thought that the sheets didn’t seem quite as fresh and clean as you might hope? Well, under the great leadership of Mad Pat, you might get the same feeling in hospital.

The Times reports today that cleaners at Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham have been ordered to top-and-tail used sheets instead of using clean ones, to save 0.275p per sheet. Infection control clearly isn’t at the top of the agenda.

The NHS is crumbling. Florence Nightingale provided clean bedding for every patient over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. Yet, in the 21st century, the NHS can’t afford it. Patients are being put at unacceptable risks to fund NHS managers and bureaucracy, yet news programmes are more interested in the love life of a 24 year old socialite.

“Give me your channels!” / “No, you’re not having them!” / “I’m telling mum!”

For those of you who’ve been living on the moon for the last few months, Sky’s channels have been removed from the Virgin Media platform recently because the two companies have been unable to agree terms under which the channels should be carried. Virgin says that Sky’s requested price is too high, and is refusing to pay it. It also says that Sky ‘forced’ them to accept a low offer for carriage of it’s channels on Sky’s platform.

Now, Virgin is taking Sky to court over the dispute.

My solution? The judge should get Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch in the court, slap their legs, make them apologise, and sort out their differences.

This is the most ridiculous argument we’ve heard in a long time. This sort of dispute just wouldn’t happen in any other business sphere? Can you imagine Tesco refusing to stock Heinz beans because they were making too many demands about product placement in the store? No. Heinz beans, like Sky channels, are popular, so not selling them would damage Tesco. Equally, Tesco is an important retailer, as Virgin is an important platform, and not having their beans on sale there would damage Heinz. In psychology terms, it’s a simple choice between a vicious circle or a virtuous circle – and Virgin and Sky appear to be choosing the former.

This has not worked well for either of them. Virgin Media is unable to offer it’s customers the best service, and people have cancelled as a result. Sky’s channels are getting far fewer viewers – in fact, they’ve fallen out of the multichannel top five – damaging their advertising income. Both of them are being in terms of PR, and a court case will also be damaging to both of them – why on Earth would either of them want an investigation into a highly uncompetitive industry?

They need their heads banding together.

I no longer care whose fault this is. Just grow up and sort it out!

Okay, slight exaggeration… but why did no-one realise that this looked stupid? And whatever happened to authoritatively delivered news from behind a desk?

On a more serious note, today is a day to be thinking about a true news giant. Alan Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent, has been missing for a month now. It seems so meaningless and useless in the situation, but I send all my best to Alan and his family, and I urge you, my readers, to support the BBC’s campaign for his release.

In a perverse way, the ongoing coverage of teenage knife crime amuses me. Tabloids will insist that all teenagers are delinquents, and yet come August, they all have 25 A-Levels as a result of dumbing down. In reality, only a minority of teenagers sit A-Levels (let alone pass them), and far fewer still are ‘bad kids’ (no matter how they might look).

And let me bust one more myth. We are not in the middle of a knife-crime explosion. Here’s a graph. Not a particularly pretty graph, but a graph nonetheless.

Knife crime has been at reasonably consistent levels over the last ten years. It’s reasonable to hypothesise that the teenagers of 1996 were involved in just as many knife crimes as the teenagers of 2006. There have been around five fatal stabbings per week for the last ten years. There has been no dramatic increase. But suddenly, every one of those five has become headline news. It’s being noticed more, but it isn’t happening more. Sorry to burst the dead-tree media bubble.

But that doesn’t answer the crucial question: Why is there teenage knife crime on our streets?

It’s nothing to do with a lack of activities for teenagers. If you apply that theory to any other section of society, its flaws are clear. Did Ian Huntley commit the Soham Murders because he didn’t have a social worker to take him bowling every week? Did Harold Shipman bump off old people because he didn’t have a club of like-minded individuals to socialise with in a controlled setting? Was Hitler a community volunteering project away from sticking with painting and decorating? I think not.

And it’s nothing to do with the prevalence of knives on the streets, either. Sixty years ago, knives were much more common amongst teenagers, and teenagers were also much more adept with the use of guns thanks to National Service. Weapons don’t kill people: People kill people.

Also sixty years ago, there was a very clear, defined enemy. The Germans. Teenagers would probably have had little hesitation in taking out their frustration on any Germans they happened upon, but fortunately that didn’t happen very often. They were rebels with a very defined cause, and a cause which society supported and viewed as ‘healthy’.

So what’s the ’cause’ today? Who are our enemies?

In the absence of a clear enemy, society as a whole has started to attack within its own group. Football rivalries become as embittered as those between warring nations, and so violence ensues. Rivalries between middle-class parents to get their children into the schools at the top of artificial league-tables get out of hand. Minor road incidents turn into violent road rage. And rivalries between gangs of friends escalate to stabbings. It’s not rocket science.

As a nation, we have nothing to unite against and fight. Yet we have a human need for rivalry and fighting, so in the absence of a defined enemy, we fight each other. It’s happening throughout all age groups and in many walks of life, but because the media has an obsession with demonising the youth, it’s this that gets highlighted.

This is not the end of society as we know it. We do not have a generation of evil teenagers. It’s a natural development, which will probably subside as the nation becomes united again behind some visionary cause.

So please, just for me, can we stop harassing these poor teenagers? Life’s tough enough for them without criminalising them with silly ASBOs, slapping discriminatory policies all over them, and constantly criticising them.

Fix the behaviour of your own generation before criticising theirs.

Overheard in the pub yesterday: “…That’s all very well, but countries can’t go round banging people up for questionable reasons based on questionable evidence against the view of pretty much every other country in the world, whether they’re planning poxy show trials or not!”

The conversation had nothing to do with the Iran Crisis. They were talking about Guantanamo Bay.

Welcome to the “Do as we say, not as we do” school of foreign policy.

For those who are still struggling to work it out, yesterday’s post about the exciting new aPhone was an April Fools’ Joke.

AQA, however, is no joke. You can text literally any question to 63336, and get an answer usually within minutes. Click here to ask a free question, and get a free answer to your mobile.

Today, AQA 63336 (my part-time employers) are launching a brand new concept in mobile phones, with the aPhone (click here for the Press release).

This incredible device, costing only £1 and compatible with all mobile networks, can answer any question posed. In tests, it correctly answered over 5 million questions, and is being compared to the ‘Guide’ in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. Customers can test the mobile’s answering capabilities through this page on the AQA website.

This represents a huge leap forward in mobile technology, and at an RRP of just £1, it’s likely to take the mobile world by storm. So make sure you get down to your local mobile phone retailer today, because this amazing new phone is sure to sell out fast.