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 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.

StableSound have made two songs about the complete mess Patricia Hewitt has created in MMC, which has left thousands of doctors without an appropriate job. Perhaps this reflects a small slice of the general feeling about the problem amongst the medical profession.

MMC Song:
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/mmc.mp3]

Study for Nothing:
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/mmc2.mp3]

There are many, many more great songs from StableStound on other topics here, and I’ll be revisiting this very popular post soon for more musical discussion.

And there’s more on MMC coming your way tomorrow, right here. Can’t wait.

It strikes me as interesting today that BBC News 24 is referring to Iran’s detention of 15 Royal Navy personnel as a “kidnapping”, which seems to me to be extremely loaded language.

Iran contests that the boats involved in the incident were in Iranian waters, while the UK and US state that they were within Iraqi territory, so it appears one word against another. If the Iranians are right (and it is very hard to tell in such disputed territory with complex divisions), then they are well within their legal rights to detain the Royal Navy personnel, so to describe them as “kidnapped” in this rather less-than-clear situation seems unfortunate at best.

Most other news organisations – including their own website – are using diplomatic terms like “seized” or “detained” which, in themselves, do not imply that either side is right. So why is BBC News 24 deliberately choosing to do differently? I hope, not least for the renowned journalistic standards of the Beeb, that this wasn’t a decision taken because “kidnapped” fits better on a headline graphic.

Some of their presentation decisions are already irritating and somewhat questionable, but if presentation is the reason for this decision, then standards really have reached a new – very depressing – low.

Image courtesy of dragonhhjh at TV Forum

Not the world’s most pleasant video… I know it’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it most certainly is Gordon Brown picking his nose and eating it at PMQs yesterday. In what I assume must be a Prime Ministerial way, of course, given that he’s after the top job. Mr Brown’s future rival Mr Cameron may be accused of not yet having a grip on the issues, but at least he’s discovered tissues.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/brown2.flv” title=”nologo” /]

Gordon Brown today announced the detail of his tenth, and final, budget. It has an environmentally green donation to African rainforests, a Labour-red increase in spending on schools and hospitals, a Tory-blue tax cut, and probably something Lib Dem-yellow in there too. Frankly, I got too bored wading through it to notice.

It’s the all-things-to-all-men budget. It sticks up for the little guy by cutting income tax, then screws them over to reward big business by increasing tax rates on small companies while cutting corporation tax. It tries to be green by increasing tax on the biggest gas guzzling cars, but then restricts itself to only the biggest gas guzzling cars. It claims to simplify the tax system by cutting the 10% rate on income tax – but confuses everybody by keeping it for savings income.

Perhaps the main message from the budget comes from all of the ensuing media coverage – nobody quite knows whether they’ll be better off or not, because this Chancellor has created a tax system so complex that it’s impossible for any human to get to grips with the changes right away. Yet he still gets his headline tax cuts, despite the fact that it’s likely many people will be worse off. So everyone loves him while also being screwed over by him.

It’s headline-driven sound-bite government. And they said Gordon Brown was different…

I note that on this morning’s Today programme, Hazel Blears announced that the fact 95 MPs refuse to do Blair’s bidding means that he’s gained authority (or, at least, he’s done the opposite of losing it). What world does this woman live in?

Labour have long wanted to reform the Mental Health Act, and made their first attempt with the Mental Health Bill 2002, which failed rather spectacularly. Several further attempts have also proved fruitless. But now they’re having an all-new attempt at reforming the Act.

Firstly, in true modern NHS style, it now means that the range of people empowered to do things is vastly extended. Where the power to detain people and force treatment upon them was previously restricted to a select few with the necessary skill and experience, the Government now wants to extend this power to a great many more people – in fact, pretty much anyone who claims to work with the Mental Health sector who’s been on a short course. And it will be the Social Service – not medics – who decide if someone can be deemed to be an Approved Mental Health Professional.

This is nurse-prescribing gone mad. Of course, Mental Health nurses have long been highly trained in the detention of individuals for short periods, and they play a very important role in this arena. But now the government wants to open this up to any Mental Health professional. Dodgy counsellors will no medical training will soon be able to sign up for a course, then will be able to detain people. That sounds unhelpful.

Just to make it even easier for these poorly trained individuals to know who they can round up, the Government would like to change the definition of a Mental Disorder. Instead of detailed definitions of each kind of disorder, the Government now wants us to accept “any disorder or disability of the mind” as a definition. This is beyond stupidity. Now, anyone who has epilepsy or has suffered a stroke or has any number of conditions suddenly falls under the provisions of the Mental Health Act, and the mountains of bureaucracy that entails. I’m sure that’ll come as a particular delight to overworked GPs, general physicians, and mental health workers nationwide.

And, ho-hum, they feel a need to better regulate these powers. So they’re introducing much greater use of Mental Health Tribunals. Anyone who’s ever tried to organise a Tribunal for a patient will know that it’s damn-near impossible, so to use more of them seems – well, not a great idea.

Yet this stinking piece of terrible legislation is getting very little media coverage because of public embarrassment about Mental Health.

There is one glimmer of hope – It’s hard to deny that most of the Cabinet have “disorders of the mind”, so we can wait till they pass the new legislation, then lock the lot of ’em up. If Yates of the Yard doesn’t get there first…