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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‘…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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‘You can see why people move to an organic, more open type of farming… You can imagine working in that kind of environment on a long-term basis. It must be really quite awful.’
– Solicitor Simon Nicholls defending poultry workers, Daniel Palmer & Neil Allan

When Norfolk poultry workers Daniel Palmer and Neil Allan were filmed playing baseball with live turkeys, it got few headlines and the pair were let off lightly as the court appeared to agree that working for Bernard Matthews was punishment enough. Palmer and Allan had felt considerable peer pressure and were influenced by the culture of the plant.

The pairs’ defence should not be lightly dismissed. Poultry farms will typically pack in twenty birds per square metre (not that they can move around anyway; accelerated growth means many can’t carry their own weight and are reduced to crawling) so batting them from end of Bernard Matthews’ factory to the other probably is the most efficient way to get them where you want them to be… but hey! This is getting a little grisly and I don’t want to put anybody off their Twizzlers.

The good news is that Bernard Matthews is resuming its international trade after the recent Bird Flu scare. And what a scare; it’s estimated that 50,000 Britons could die should the virus trigger the feared pandemic. We need not fear that packing the birds in so tightly and feeding them their own faeces and bits of fallen comrade might have helped spread disease.

That the plant’s bio-security is not as tight as one might expect and authorities have long suspected Hungarian imports the most likely cause (well it is the only other place this strain of the virus has been found) has proved no barrier to a resumption of trade.

Yet the poultry industry’s insistence that a wild bird, who had recently visited Hungary, must have taken a shit on the factory roof or that a factory worker stepped in something is one of those things people believe because they want to. That bird flu tends to occur where intensive poultry farms are common has been dismissed by Bernard Matthews and the like for far too long and it’s high time we recognised that intensive farming is simply wrong.

Check out WSPA’s Farmwatch if you have the stomach.

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