Mr Clarke - Over Here !

"A man who stabbed a drug dealer to death before cutting his body into 133 pieces and dumping it in a canal, has been jailed for life at the Old Bailey.
Marvin Gentles, of north-west London gave Abdul El-Gharras, 31, some crack to sell, but instead he smoked it.

Mr Gentles, 28, was attacked after tracking El-Gharras down at his flat in Lisson Grove, central London."

"Gharras used a saw to cut up the body, and when he could not clean the blood from his flat he set it on fire, causing an explosion. "

Sounds like a nice chap - just the sort of person our ageing workforce needs.

The BBC report quoted above seems to have missed a couple of pertinent details, picked up by Reuters.

"LONDON (Reuters) - A Moroccan drug dealer was jailed for life on Thursday for killing his boss, chopping the body into 133 pieces and throwing them into a canal before setting his flat on fire in a bid to destroy evidence.

Abdul El-Gharras, 31, was obsessed with decapitation and had downloaded videos of al Qaeda beheadings before murdering Marvin Gentles last June in an argument over crack cocaine, the Old Bailey criminal court heard."

Presumably a foreign national then - and with an unhealthy interest in the more robust manifestations of the Religion of Peace. Can't understand why the BBC should have missed that.

I see no mention of deportation orders by the judge. If Mr El-Gharras isn't booted out when his time is up, something's very wrong. But then we know that already.

In other theyre-good-for-the-economy news, a 13-year old Lithuanian boy is kicked to death in East London - presumably by some other group of doing-the-jobs-we-wont (or the BBC would be telling us all about it). Ah, kids - they don't grow up so soon nowadays.

In other murder news, the barbarians who killed Mary-Ann Leneghan are sentenced.

It emerged after the trial that Thomas, Johnson, Jamaile Morally and Krasniqi, had been serving community sentences at the time of the murder.

In the Guardian, a hilarious and sad piece on the aftermath of the murder.

"Today the six men responsible for her death will learn their fate at a sentencing hearing at Reading crown court. Justice will be served. But what no one in the town seems to want to discuss is how a 16-year-old schoolgirl, who should have been preparing for her GCSEs, fell in with this ruthless and violent drugs gang - and why no one thought to intervene.

Susan Harris, Mary Ann's 54-year-old mother, finds it hard to talk about her daughter or what led her to associate with the likes of Adrian Thomas, the 20-year-old leader of the drug gang. Close family friends have set up a website to appeal for money to support Harris in her grief. Requests for an interview with her are met with the query: "Will there be a fee?"

At Prospect College, the secondary school where Mary Ann was a pupil with an appalling attendance record, senior teachers refuse to discuss the teenager or her recidivist truancy. Louisa John, the school's community relations officer, tells me: "We have moved on."

Meanwhile, Reading borough council, the local education authority, will not comment on whether the education welfare department was alerted to Mary Ann's problems, or even on the drugs problem in the town, citing human rights as the reason for their silence."

Sad, because of the everyday story of underclass folk it reveals, from "eating chips and drinking cherry Lambrini in a friend's car" to "but what can you do ?" (A digression - we saw the bedroom of a friend's 14-year old son - covered in drug posters - dope leaves and E-related. They live in a town with major smack problems - the boy's best mate had an older brother dead of an overdose. "What can you do ? He's fourteen !" said mum.)

Sad, because the responses of the school and council show how caring the caring classes actually are. As long as the Wednesday Guardian is fat with non-job adverts all is well with them. They love mankind - it's people they can't help.

Hilarious, because for the Guardian to ask why society and community seems to have collapsed - well, I think chutzpah is the word, or 'brass neck'.

I imagine the answer will be 'more and earlier sex and drug education'.