Dominic Fisher of the Prague Tory is spitting feathers yet again over a scandal he thinks he’s uncovered. Horror of horrors, Cherie Booth is a Howard League Ambassador for Penal Reform, which implies to Dominic (although I suspect Ms Booth would happily plead guilty on this count) that she believes we should use prison less.

While there is little doubt that prison works on a limited and temporary basis (i.e. offenders can only victimise each other once inside) more than half of offenders commit more crime on release, having failed to learn their lesson.

A criminal justice system should punish in proportion to the crime, but remember that no punishment can undo a crime. Meanwhile, to put your faith in punishment as a deterrent is to put your faith in the rationality of drug users and the mentally unstable and to forget that those healthy criminals almost certainly committed their crime in the expectation of getting away with it.

But the biggest barrier to prison working is that a crime has to be committed before it can be invoked; a criminal justice policy with prison at its heart assumes law enforcement and crime prevention are doomed to fail.

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With the rather ugly building that was home to the Dutch Pancake House on the corner of St. Peter’s Square cleared for redevelopment, a Manchester institution has bitten the dust. But few will miss it.

The Dutch Pancake House was almost a great success. Huge plates of savory pancakes followed by huge plates of sweet pancakes. As cheap and simple as pizza.

But the decor seemed unchanged since the 1970s. The menu unimaginative. The giant plates were chipped. The service poor as could be.

Some places survive best in affectionate memory.

This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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Blink and you miss it. The ad after Popworld features a young girl with near perfect skin exclaiming that she has a spot.

Thanks to TiVo we can pause and rewind to the moment horror strikes… and guess what… there is no spot for Clean & Clear to work its four hour magic on.

What’s that all about? Let’s see how Clean & Clear copes with a proper pizza face.

This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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Ryan Florence might not be the sharpest tool in the box and he may not have known who David Cameron was, but his mock shooting gave the Sun all it needed to ensure the Tory leader’s much derided ‘hug a hoodie’ campaign (he actually said they should be shown ‘a lot more love’) is holed below the waterline. It’s a classic front page.

Yet there is a bigger tragedy here. Mocking Cameron is the easy option and while it does good by undermining his leadership of the Conservative Party, it also makes it difficult to sensibly address the social problems of places like Wythenshawe, where the incident took place. Kids like Ryan Florence are very much products of a sub-culture that has done nothing to encourage them to think beyond where they find themselves today.

Cameron was right to try to move the debate towards understanding this and how the kids’ worldview might be undermined in the long term and replaced with something positive. But he forgot that understanding is all too often confused with excusing and that we’re right to refuse to excuse crime. There is nothing in calling for hoodies to be shown ‘a lot more love’ that makes us think the Tories would create real opportunities for kids to change.

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‘Whether you want to sue someone, retrieve money that is due to you, or defend yourself against a claim, you need a skilled solicitor who can help you through the maze of dispute resolution.’
– George Davies Solicitors

Probably. But given the experience of the poor soul whose recent defamation claim against me was guided by Mark Lewis, I won’t be running any reader offers to promote George Davies Solicitors. Chambers may have found him ‘intellectually powerful’, but when I crossed swords with Mark Lewis, he was in full willie-waving^* mode. And as with all willie-wavers, the weaker his client’s position the more furiously Mark Lewis waved his willie and the sillier he looked while doing so.

Coming soon: George Davies Solicitors’ Mark Lewis: willie-waving master class#2
Should bloggers beware libel-chasing lawyers in search of victims? … … ‘I’ve just had … on the phone to me who I can only describe as distraught,’ John Leech MP (Manchester, Withington)

I’m sure that many bloggers would be intimidated by a series of letters from a solicitor who boasts of being a member of the Law Society’s Defamation Reference Group, collector of veteran and vintage cars and keeper of Koi. (As a Henry Enfield character liked to say: ‘I’ve got considerably more money than yo.’)

Most pay nothing to blog and so the prospect of a defamation action that may relieve them of their life savings, and possibly much more, will easily intimidate many into grovelling apologies. Who could blame someone who hit the ‘delete blog’ button rather than face the stress of a libel trial and the financial ruin failure might bring? Expect to pay around £500 (plus VAT) just to respond to a first letter of claim.

So when Mark Lewis waived his willie at Pipex, the UK’s second largest web host, it was first round to the complainant.

In threatening Pipex, Mark Lewis broke no rules and did nothing his peers would regard as sharp practice. But it was a particularly low tactic, akin to suing WHSmith for stocking Private Eye; something Mark Lewis says he’d be happy to do. And you can see why. Newsagents and web hosts are soft targets, more likely to run than mount a defence. No host is going to employ a solicitor to check the validity of a claim – they only charge a couple of quid a month – so Pipex folded. And that must have given the claimant a good feeling (it looked like a third party had taken their side). However, it meant nothing. If a blogger accused me of being bald and I paid a solicitor to say that’s defamatory the blog would get pulled, even though I lost my hair in my early 20s.

I simply moved my blogs to a country where English solicitors aren’t taken so seriously.

Bloggers must take responsibility for what they write and accept that they’re subject to the same laws as everybody else. But my host was threatened, despite my having agreed a timetable for response with the claimant, because it’s an easy way to gag a website, especially when you have no case. To threaten a host is a tactic that should only be employed where the blogger refuses to engage (hiding behind anonymity, for example) or where the libel is criminal (i.e. risks a breech of the peace).

The alternative and current situation effectively hands every solicitor the power to gag UK hosted websites at will.

^*For those unfamiliar with the vernacular, ‘willie-waving’ (or ‘willy-waving’) is slang for aggressive (usually male) behaviour often based upon bluff. The willie-waver (in this case Mark Lewis) is likely to be rather pompous and may expect others to be awed by his presence and simply fall into line. It is in this context that I refer to Mark Lewis as a ‘willie-waver’. While this article clearly extends the willie metaphor (the phrase may have its origins in a school boy game that involves urinating up a wall; the winner being the boy who urinates the highest) it is not my intention to state or imply that Mark Lewis has a small (or large, or average) penis. I have no information on which to base such a claim.

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‘…we believe that gaming should be fun and entertaining. It should be rewarding whether you win or lose. We hope that Virgin Poker isn’t about losing the shirt off your back.’
– Virgin Poker

Virgin Poker is on a mission. Not only are they predicted to become a major force in the online poker market, Virgin Poker’s out to prove poker, unlike some casino games, is a game of skill.

Last month Virgin invited anyone who has never played poker before and believes it to be a game of chance to explain themselves. Soon they will select someone to play a series of five heads-up (one versus one) matches against a Virgin Poker professional player. The first player to win three or more games will be declared the winner and Virgin Poker will donate $1,000 to a charity of their choice.

While I suspect there is a lot of luck involved, you can’t say fairer than that. And with Virgin Poker you earn V Points for all cash play, which can be exchanged for lots of stuff from Virgin Poker’s sister companies: there are Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles and Virgin Vouchers to spend on all sorts from mobile top-ups to digital downloads.

Virgin Poker promise to provide the best gaming experience for their customers. Virgin Poker will only accept customers who are over the age of 18 and live in the UK or in territories where it is legal to gamble online.

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‘…that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.’
– Theodore Roosevelt

Tory web TV channel, 18 Doughty Street, is running a very silly advertisement on the theme of a world without America.

I’ve had some great American clients, taken some great holidays stateside and would welcome much more of the same. And I happily consume enormous amounts of American culture (their TV comedy and drama is so, so much better than ours). So I’m glad a world without America is just a figment of some fevered right-wing imagination. And I’m reminded of what I think was George Bernard Shaw’s riposte to ‘my country right or wrong’ nonsense; that you may as well say ‘my mother-in-law right or wrong’.

But what irritates most about 18 Doughty Street’s silliness is the assertion that without America, Saddam Hussein would now lead a nuclear Iraq. Methinks they forget that without America (and Britain) Saddam would almost certainly not have survived the Iran-Iraq war: that the US loaned him $75 billion, supplied arms and more is not in dispute. Indeed, British and American propping up of Saddam made us partly responsible for his regime and is one of the reasons we had a duty to remove him.

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Pub brik-a-brak is a strange phenomenon. It often seems to hark back to the fashions of former times. Tin plates on walls, hunting scenes, rubbish water colours perhaps. Some go for piles of classic books — Moby Dick — that might suggest a quiet place of contemplation, but are never touched. If you’re lucky there may be some reference to an interesting local history.

But what was in the mind of the Jackson’s Boat landlord who thought a hangman’s noose might make a pleasant decoration?

This posted via mobile via Flickr. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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Like Hotel Rwanda before it, Blood Diamond enables the viewer to despair at inhumanity while being thoroughly entertained by a genuinely gripping action movie. By never being worthy it gets its message over so much more clearly. Add diamonds to your list of things you’ll never buy.
Losing one for the slightly cheesy happy ending, it’s 9 out of 10!
Director: Edward Zwick……Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio……Jennifer Connelly……Djimon Hounsou
Babel……The Misfits

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That Jack Straw’s innovative voting system for Lords reform has been rejected, is almost certainly a good thing. It would have removed Parliament’s right to reject the legislation outright and, while Lords reform should be a major priority, the current proposals should be rejected.

The circle that nobody seems able to square is that however the Lords is reformed it mustn’t usurp the Commons. And the Commons claim to greater legitimacy is derived from its being the democratic chamber. Consequently, the House of Lords must be reformed in such a way that its claim to democratic legitimacy is weak-ish.

So while the life and hereditary peerages who contribute most to making a nonsense of democracy are to go, those who are elected will not be brought to account again for fifteen years. Given that a week is a long time in politics, fifteen years is an epoch. And given that elected Lords can’t stand for a second term, they’ve nothing to fear from the electorate and can do as they please once in place.

Despite the inevitability of appointees creating a whiff of corruption, still the chamber will be at least partially appointed and bishops will stay by virtue of their superstitions.

Let’s hope this initiative fails, because if it succeeds we’ll be stuck with a rubbish chamber for generations to come. We’ve been waiting since 1911 for this process to reach a conclusion. What’s a few more years?

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