Zimbabwe traditional healer burnt by goblins

What a headline. The Sun and Daily Sport can't compete.

A self-styled traditional healer popularly known as tsikamutanda, was on Monday seriously burnt by a suspected goblin, which he was allegedly trying to get rid of during a cleansing ceremony at one of his client’s homestead in Lalapanzi.

Enriching Our Economy

There can be no doubt that mass immigration has reduced costs for employers drastically. Take what the Guardian calls 'sex work'. Foreign entrepreneurs are capable of finding people who will take on the jobs that the Native Brits don't want. In some cases, they'll even find employees who will do jobs against their will.

The girl was resold seven times, repeatedly raped and forced to work in brothels throughout Britain. She escaped only after enlisting the help of three local women at a Sheffield nightclub and ran barefoot, distressed and traumatised, to a local police station.

The flood of new workers has helped keep inflation low, and some prices have actually fallen. For example, last summer a Lithuanian teenager cost as much as £4,000. Within a few months, thanks to businessmen from Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo, the price had dropped to £3,000, then £1,500. Who says it's a difficult climate for businessmen in Brown's Britain ?



Elsewhere people are developing innovative methods to detect crime. How long before mermaid technology comes to Britain ?


A HARARE woman bought FIVE return air tickets to fly mermaids from London after a spirit medium told her they would help her recover her stolen car and money.

Zimbabwean authorities say this was a swindle and have arrested the spirit medium Edna Chizema, who is also a popular musician, charging her with theft by false pretences.

The bizarre details of the case were revealed when Chizema, better known as Ambuya Maduve, went on trial on Wednesday.

Magrate Mapfumo told a Harare magistrate how she turned to Chizema after her car and $150 million cash went missing from her home.

She said when she arrived at the singer’s home, a mystery voice told her that she had to buy air tickets for the mermaids (injuza in Ndebele, or an imaginary sea creature fabled to have a woman’s head and upper body and a fish’s tail) which would track down the thieves who had stolen her car and cash.



(I must say New Zimbabwe has some fantastic stories. From the same page, Witchcraft blamed as stones rain on family , Man grows female genital organ on face , Goblins burn traditional healer )

Daily Mail Watch Watch

As we celebrate the loss of a million manufacturing jobs since 1997, Poll Pot on Britain, honesty and the Daily Mail.

"the Daily Mail's toxic talent for the breathtaking, punch-you-in-the-face untruth."

followed by

"The fabric of the nation is in better nick than for many a long year"

Polly also calls CBI Director-General Digby Jones 'the old fraud'.

Digby Jones is 49.

Polly Toynbee is nine years older, as well as apparently being descended from the 9th Earl of Carlisle.





One other Daily Mail moment - listen to Labour education committee chairman Barry Sheerman accuse the BBC (RealAudio - near the end) of getting a story (that Peter Vardy's excellent Emmanuel College teaches creationism) from the Daily Mail.

"Barry, Barry - it's a Guardian story"

"Oh, is it ?"

The Eighties Are Back

In music at Harry's, and in the Guardian, where Hugh Muir tells us that "gun crime will continue to rise while it remains the most accessible, rational career choice for so many young people ".

This was the new theme of the 1980s, as liberals who had previously denied the existence of rising crime ("Daily Mail ... more people have insurance ... more people have phones, so it's easier to report... people report crimes now which they would have accepted in past times ... the police are inflating the figures to justify demanding increased resources") suddenly accepted its existence and found a cause - that rising crime was due to poverty and injustice.

As I wrote a few years back

Suddenly there was an avalanche of theories designed to explain the rise in crime that had previously been denied. Bad housing, unemployment, the design of estates - all manner of physical, mechanistic explanations for crime. And the greatest of these was poverty. From the Church of England's 'Faith in the City' report in 1986 to the many reports of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Group, the message, put simply, was 'they thieve because they're poor'. And there was great political utility in this view during the Thatcher years. The same people on the 'left' who in the 1970s had characterised paid employment as soulless capitalist wage-slavery, the cause of alienation, suddenly decided that paid employment was a basic human right the ABSENCE of which caused alienation, of which crime was one symptom. Again put simply, the answer to the question 'whose fault was it, then ?' was 'THATCHER !'. So we have the third stage of denial - that yes, there is a lot of crime, but a) it's caused by poverty and our unjust society b) nothing can be done about it without relieving poverty/creating social justice.

You see, those outside Guardianista country are completely unaware of the "polarisation of our society into the haves and have-nots, the connected and the disconnected". It's not a concept we've come across before, having been asleep for twentyfive years, and we need people like Hugh to tell us about it. Apparently there's a "parallel universe of deprived communities, where the concerns and norms of mainstream Britain scarcely register" . I think he's talking about the UK underclass.

The wonderful thing is how the Guardianista worldview has trickled down into even the criminal underclass, providing a moral underpinning, a justification, for the criminal lifestyle. Never mind the fact that their victims are usually as poor and 'deprived' as they are themselves. Ever since the 1980s and the rise of the yuppie we've heard the refrain that "they see all this wealth on the TV which they haven't got - what do you expect ?".

"They see a lot of things happen on TV, famous people, rap stars, gold, big cars, houses; they all want it but everyone ain't got the same means of getting it, so they are going about getting it in other ways."

"Most of the criminals out there, they're not stupid, they're smart people, they just ain't had opportunities ... it's just, they do the easiest, like, the easiest thing that's there. Like me, for example, it was robberies and that. Robberies are easy, easy stuff. I could have done much, I could have maybe been a doctor, I could have been a lawyer, but it's just the way I grew up."

You see, it's all our fault. We don't "support families", whatever that means - I'd have thought we subsidise single parenthood rather successfully. We don't apparently educate the children ("better schools") and we don't provide "access to skills and role models", whatever that means. Perhaps we could bus males into sink schools and say 'this, Kyle, is called a father. He lives with his kids. Take a good look, 'cause you don't see many round here'.

Nowhere does he address the issue that at other times, or other parts of Britain (see my post on the high-crime constituencies), people have been poor yet have avoided crime as a solution to poverty.

Instead we get this.

"We are required to show personal responsibility, but ..."

A Wilted Crocus From The Curate's Garden

Still lagged from the trip to Murrayfield - 700-odd miles in 32 hours !

Highlights - the run from Moffat to Peebles via the Grey Mare's Tail and St Mary's Loch on a beautiful Sunday morning.



The large number of Welshmen in kilts.

The immaculately observed silence in memory of Douglas Elliot.

The haddock at Brattisani's. And the child-friendly waitress, who cheered up a tired seven year old girl.

There was a rugby match too, of which I will say little, in respect to the Scot I watched the game with. Let it suffice that he had his head in his hands after ten minutes, and when he was late back with a drink at half time I was concerned lest I find him cutting his wrists in the toilet ...



Enough. Have a look at this, from Faut De Mieux, checking Blimpish and shoeing Madeleine, whose historical howler this week is that a strong sense of English identity was a 19th century invention. I suppose she could be referring to a certain kind of European nationalism - but the whole glory of English nationalism is that it was never like the nationalisms of Europe, just as England was never like Europe.

Let me quote a great Victorian, writing in the aftermath of the Armada's defeat.

Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them.
Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true

How To Encourage Business

I was talking a year or two back to a chap who has a couple of small engineering businesses in the area, and asked him how the enormous increases in employers liability insurance, fuelled by the compensation culture, were affecting him.

He told me that, in common with perhaps 200,000 other small firms, he was operating without any. When I raised a metaphorical eyebrow at this (it's a legal requirement for any business other than a sole trader), he told me that the cost of cover was so high as to make the business uneconomic - it was a case of either running without cover or closing the company.

I thought of this when a correspondent brought this story to my attention - another classic from Scallyland.

A teenage boy who fell through a roof while he was trespassing on private property has received £567,000 in compensation.

Carl Murphy, now 18, sued the owner of a warehouse after suffering serious head injuries when he plunged 40ft to the floor as a nine-year-old in 1996.

Victims of crime groups yesterday reacted angrily to the payout, which is 50 times more than the family of a murder victim can expect to receive from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

He's receiving the compensation because the head injuries he sustained have caused him to behave an a most uncharacteristic fashion for a young Merseysider from a good home.

Mr Murphy is currently living with his grandmother because his mother Diane and her boyfriend, Kevin Parsons, both 36, are serving three years in prison for setting up a heroin and crack cocaine business from their council house.

He was expelled from his primary school in Bootle within a week of returning after the accident, given a home tutor, but that ended when he threatened her with violence. He missed ten months of school before being enrolled at Nugent House, Billinge, a school for children with behavioural problems, in November 1998, but was expelled 18 months later.

It's obvious that the blame for this behaviour lies with Container Care of Bootle, who failed to provide fencing capable of keeping out a young Liverpudlian.


I saw the local businessman again a month or so ago, and was pleased to hear that he will no longer be operating a UK factory without the mandatory insurance cover. He's moving production to China.

OK Come In

Via Lib Dem blogger Liberal England.

"All girls are soppy.

This fact is recognised by all boys and the message is clear but seme to become dimmer as they draw on to man's estate chiz.Eventually it fade altogether and all is lost in a welter of SOP and SLUSH, like you get in the films they dare not show us at Skool.

'How beautiful,' sa your mum to your pater. 'If only you could be noble like that ocasionaly.'

'It is only a world of makebelieve,' he repli. 'You must face up to reality.'

'Reality,' sa molesworth 2, 'is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.'

He take a bullseye and pater lite his pipe. The matter is closed."

St Custard's Online !

Scotsmen ! Welshmen !

The Land O'Cakes and the Land of My Absent Fathers needs you !!

Tickets are still available for Murrayfield on Sunday.

This fact doesn't quite fit with yesterday's Times, by the wonderfully named Owen Slot.

"... the number of supporters following the team to Edinburgh is astonishing. Tourist organisations are estimating a migration of some 40,000, many without tickets. Murrayfield’s struggles to sell out will be solved by vast seas of red."

Scotland had 47,000 for the Italy game, 20,000 short of capacity. Unless the Scottish performance was so dire that they're staying at home, those "40,000 Welshmen, many without tickets" actually consist of 15,000 going to the game and 25,000 (the 'many without tickets') watching at home or in the pub.

From The Curate's Garden

First an apology - I have a number of new blogs linking to me, and I haven't yet reciprocated nor given their blogs a quick one-line review, as is my wont. I'll get there in time. But welcome to the Spinster and Anthony Cox, both back in full effect.

The battle for liberty continues - all those calling for an elected Lords should ponder that without them, we would already be liable to be locked up on the word of a Government minister. Anyone who thinks this would stop with Islamist terror suspects hasn't thought too much about the future.

There is a case for such detention in exceptional circumstances, such as Ulster in the early 70s. We're not in that situation.

The proposal to drop habeas corpus is one of the unintended side-effects of mass immigration. In 1939-45 it was suspended for domestic fascists and UK-domiciled Germans (most of whom were, of course, refugees fleeing Hitler). German Intelligence, throughout the war, had remarkably little information on what was happening in the UK.

The War on Terror is different in lots of ways. One way is that there are far more potential fifth-columnists - in the form of several million Muslims. Note the word is 'potential' - this is not some blanket accusation. But the Guardian and BBC have devoted many column inches and much airtime to the notion that the war is a 'War on Islam'. Were I living in a land where the media daily critised the Government for their 'War on Christians' it might make me think too.

Britain is now an open country, in immigration terms the equivalent of the drunk girl on the sofa as the party ends, being eyed up by a couple of dodgy lads. I can see why the Government are worried about a terrorist strike. But these people are British too. They are entitled to the same liberty as Englishmen have enjoyed for centuries. Better to take the risk than surrender liberty.

Churchill has a neat quote in his History of the English Speaking Peoples. James VI of Scotland has accepted the English throne after Elizabeth's death.

"So ignorant", says Trevelyan, "was James of England and her laws that at Newark, he ordered a cut-purse caught in the act to be hanged without a trial at a word from his royal mouth." The execution did not take place.

Without a trial. Sums it up. Don't let it happen. How ironic that the Patricia Hewitts of this world should be the ones to destroy freedom. What did C.S. Lewis say again ?

The barbarians come, Lewis told us, not over the parapet, not carrying their clubs and wielding their weapons, but they come with polished fingernails and blue pin-striped suits, gathering in well-lighted conference rooms. They are the good people who say that they know how to make life better for all of us.

Mind The Gap, Democratic Deficit

Like many another blogger, I've been asked to give a shout to Mind The Gap and their London blog, which I wilingly do. The gap between politicians and the people is a mile wide, as both left and right recognise, the difference between the responses being that the idiot left's response is 'whatever you did before that didn't work, do more of it'. See Helena Kennedy for details.

The website is a rather snazzy production, with animated graphics, scrolling messages etc. One to watch.

As you can see from this site, I prefer content to form, and so also highly recommend the Democratic Deficit site. No idea who's behind it, but loads of content, and the recommendations are pretty straightforward.

Where To Next: A Democratic Manifesto

Preamble:

People are happiest when they have maximum control over their own lives.

You and your family are the best people to decide how your money should be spent.

Propositions:
1. The public services should (a) be controlled locally, and (b) by direct democracy.

2. Recall, on the Californian model should be introduced.

3. There should be an audit of this country's membership of the European Union, with special reference to its inbuilt democratic deficits. The new constitution - a politically correct manifesto of gigantic proportions - does at least have the merit of allowing countries to withdraw from membership.

Couldn't agree more. For example, there should be a direct connection between council voting and council tax - no central funding of any kind should be allowed.

If central government wants something doing, it should either

a) fund and manage it itself OR
b) make it a legal obligation on the local authority, and allow council taxes to rise accordingly

That way you can see what you're paying for. It would also have the effect of either causing massive council tax levels in certain authorities, stopping the huge underclass subsidies currently administered by said authorities, or causing central government to come out from behind the skirts of the authorities and administer/spend directly. The Guardian would be apoplectic, but that's a fringe benefit.

Can't understand why the Tories don't suggest something like this.

Extreme Tracking ...

Really is a little flaky around the edges. The service seems to go up and down like a navvy's pick.

A small example.

Last week my usual weekday traffic of around 280-odd lost souls (you know who you are) took a drop on Wednesday to 200 (link only valid for a week or so).

It took another hit on Saturday night and Sunday. Sunday eve I'd only had 90 visitors - and thirty of those had been in the previous hour.

Maybe I was posting rubbish those days.

But the funny thing is that (allowing for his marginally larger readership) exactly the same thing happened to Andrew Sullivan.

Trevor Phillips and Education

What Trev had to say about segregation wasn't really so important, though it's entertaining to see the Guardian supporting 'separate development'. Isn't there an Afrikaans word that means the same thing ?

As I blogged a while back, there are five main strands of opinion on the reasons for the dreadful academic performance of black boys in the UK.

They are :

Racist teachers

Institutional Racism

Black Street Culture

Black Pupils need Black Teachers (the Apartheid Approach)

Don't Ask Me, Mate

The first two boil down to 'it's Whitey's fault', and are still the main approach of white liberals - for reasons which will become clear.

The third is favoured by people like the great Tony Sewell, John McWhorter, and Joseph Harker of the Guardian. Any white person expressing such ideas is obviously a buttoned up racist, ill at ease with the realities of multicultural Britain and its vibrant black youth culture.

The fourth is seemingly now the view of Trevor Phillips, the Guardian and the BNP.

Trevor has moved from the 'Dunno, mate' school, of which he was still a member in July 2004, at the conference on 'London Schools and the Black Child'.

We could offer more support to schools with large numbers of African and Afro-Caribbean pupils," he says. "But why should we discriminate against Indian pupils who may be just as economically disadvantaged, but somehow have overcome that disadvantage, or white boys, increasingly among the lowest achievers and often among the poorest?"

Why indeed ?

But a closer reading of Trev's words moves him nearer to the Tony Sewell camp.

"Mr Phillips also called for tougher action on black fathers who do not take parenting responsibilities seriously"

"In order to tackle the lack of sufficient black male role models, he also suggested that the Government pay incentives to encourage more black men to join the teaching profession"

We're slowly moving somewhere. Trevor Phillips is right about the shortage of black male role models. He hasn't quite grasped that the missing role model is called a father.

As Joseph Harker said "At the top of the list must surely be the breakdown of the black family: 50% of Caribbean mothers under 35 have never been married - five times the white figure - and the number is increasing."

I remember a couple of years back a friend of Stephen Lawrence's describing how Stephen was different - in that both his mother and his father would turn up to parents evening.

It's difficult for a white liberal, who believes that the family is mum, the kids, and whoever she's currently shacked up with, to look at the community with the highest number of fatherless children, the highest level of criminal behaviour, and the lowest level of educational attainment, and put two and two together. It would mean a re-evaluation of some of their most cherished beliefs about the oppressive nature of the traditional, patriarchal family. Certainly for boys there is only one thing worse than being in a traditional family, and that's not being in one.

Nah - raises too many questions. Let's just stick to white racism, shall we ?

The other day I quoted Robert Whelan on the underclass :

We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest.

This is not only the view of a detatched commentator - it's how some black people see themselves (and of course it's not confined to the black community - there are just fewer guns in Shildon or the Rhondda). And let's face it, it's cooler to be a latter-day Beowulf than a burger-flipper. In the short term.

This is the story of a warrior and now you know It
True warriors go ahead make some noise
It aint healthy to be makin n****s paranoid
Hit your corner wit my weapon I dont need my boys
Im doin 120 in the fast lane
Kick back just relax let me do my thing
Dont give a f***k about you suckas gotta maintain
Money power and respect in this rap game

I can give you n****s somethin you can talk about
I can turn your smile upside down
You aint no G u a f****n clown
I can take your girl and t-t-turn her out
dont hold it in let it all out
I can give you f*****s something
to be mad about
invite her in send her back out
With my DNA all in her mouth

Popular romantic lyrics seem to have changed a bit. I'd love to hear Nate Dogg's version of the Victorian smash 'Come into The Garden Maud'.

The baby-father is only one aspect of the prevailing black culture, defined as the villain by McWhorter, Sewell and Harker. But the liberals sure don't help.

In McWhorter's words "it’s time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as “understandable” the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it. The person one pities is a person one may like but does not truly respect"

Apologies ...

For light posting - especially when there's so much to post about - from Trevor Phillips (read John McWhorter for background), an English Parliament (Third Avenue has a good post - link in sidebar), astrakhan furs and abortion, Kosovo. Plus new links. When I get home.

As the older generation (the racist, sexist, homophobic churchgoing generation) pass away, and the sixties acid-head or the seventies speed-freak hit pensionable age, look out for the geriatric prison, full of people like this.


One more - I just have time to link to this fabulous post - The Pooter of Geek on the little known country of Fiskistan.

Underclass - You Get What You Pay For

From birth :

"She was last seen by officials four days before she died of severe blood poisoning caused by a dirty nappy in March 2003.

A friend of Pickering said: 'She's still on smack. She's using two tenner bags a day.

'When she told me she was expecting twins I couldn't believe it.

'I knew her baby had died but she didn't say anything about neglect.'

Two of 27-year-old Pickering's other children are looked after by her parents while another was adopted."

Once again social workers have done a great job.

"Social workers and health officials visited Alex 28 times in 11 weeks.

The baby was on the child protection register from birth."

"South Lanarkshire Council social work chiefs and health officials say they have already conducted an internal review which clears them of blame over Alex's death."

Mary Pickering obviously don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall.

Pickering lives with her latest partner at a council flat in Rutherglen, near Glasgow. Pickering was living in Larkhall with her then partner at the time of Alex's death.

Till (someone else's) death.

"A burglar who beat up a terminally ill pensioner has been jailed for life.
Cancer sufferer Mary Richardson, 81, died without ever leaving hospital after being battered by Barry Alderson in her home in North Tyneside.

The 24-year-old heroin addict admitted causing grievous bodily harm with intent and burglary last July.

A post-mortem examination showed how his victim died of pneumonia three months after the break-in.

The court also heard how the pensioner who was only 4ft 11in and weighed just six stone, suffered severe head injuries including a fractured skull and broken nose in the attack."

Don't worry though - the courts will protect you. Look at that life sentence.

Alderson, of Felton Close, Shiremoor, will serve at least three years and nine months before he can apply for parole, Newcastle Crown Court heard.

Three years and nine months. He'll be 27 or 28. That'll teach him.

Half-Term Treats

We don't watch daytime TV in our Victorian-themed household, so I missed the BBC's four day spectacular Streets of Vice, so well timed to catch the half term crowd.

Andrew Bowman has the details at Biased BBC.

Redlegs

What happened to the Scots sold into slavery in Barbados ?

Listen to the documentary on Radio Scotland.

Happy Lone Mothers Day

I know of no single instance in anthropological literature of a community where illegitimate children, that is children of unmarried girls, would enjoy the same social treatment and have the same social status as legitimate ones. The universal postulate of legitimacy has a great sociological significance ... It means that in all human societies moral tradition and the law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a socially complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here ... it declares that the human family must consist of a male as well as a female.


Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 1927.



The only real family is the mother and her baby. Everyone else is peripheral.

Claire Rayner, The Jewish Chronicle, 17 June 1994.



We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest.

Robert Whelan in the foreword to "Farewell to the Family - Public Policy and Family Breakdown in Britain and the USA" by Patricia Morgan, IEA Health and Welfare Unit 1999.

What A Country II - Evil and Stupidity

What's the connection between my sons and a 27-year old underclass adolescent ?

They all enjoy using their air rifles.

The boys are taught never to point, never to leave loaded. Never have anyone in front of the gun. Targets are concentric paper circles, tin cans, or (a favourite competition shoot with friends) small balloons tied to tree branches on long lengths of string - quite tricky on a windy day at 50 yards.

The other, a lowlife from the notorious Easterhouse estate in Glasgow, likes to take pot-shots at passing firemen and two year olds. He killed the toddler.

There are two things you can do here.

You can try and do something about a culture that produces physically, if not socially, grown men who think sniping at strangers is a reasonable way to spend a Wednesday evening. You can try and do something about a culture, and a benefits system, that produces places like Easterhouse, visted in 1989 by Charles Murray before he wrote 'The Emerging British Underclass'.

Or you can just ban airguns. Take them away from law-abiding people. After all, it worked with handguns, didn't it ?

It's a great thing, the welfare state. The law-abiding pay taxes to house and feed the underclass (their drugs are usually bought with the proceeds of burglary). Then when a member of said underclass acts as you might expect, the law-abiding get one of their pleasures taken away. Because it's far, far easier to hassle the law-abiding than to do anything about the underclass.


NOTE - Easterhouse has probably had more written about its problems than anywhere in the UK, partly because of the presence there until recently of the holy fool Professor Bob Holman, who gave up a well-paid academic career to work with residents groups, work which produced an idiotic book and an idea - the idea being that large sums of taxpayers money should be given to residents groups. Perhaps until their leading lights are paid as much as a Professor of Social Work ?

(The idiocy consists of a complete refusal to judge the poor the way he would judge others. I find that patronising and disrespectful, treating the poor as children who don't know any better. But he is a saint - albeit an idiotic one. Talk about going the second mile.

One Sunday afternoon, I settled down to watch Rangers v Celtic on TV. The buzzer to our flat went and for once I told the boy to go away. A few minutes later, it went again. A neighbour shouted, "Mrs Brown is having her contractions, can you take her to maternity?" Reluctantly, I heaved the woman into the minibus. What annoyed me was that her husband refused to accompany her as he preferred to watch the game.

Words fail me.)


CONTEMPT OF COURT WATCH - of course the 27-year old underclass adolescent may be entirely innocent. The toddler might have been shot by a different underclass adolescent.

What A Country

The theory :

Home Office minister Hazel Blears on anti-social behaviour :

"we are seeing much more cooperation from the courts in making sure decent people who are prepared to stand up and challenge this behaviour are properly protected."

The practice :

An unemployed kickboxer who killed a pensioner with a single punch was jailed yesterday for just 2 1/2 years.

Brutal Craig Swann hit out at 67-year-old William Bird who had asked him to stop cycling on a footbridge. Swann, 21, then cycled off, leaving Mr Bird seriously injured, and boasted later to his mates that he had "beaten the c*** out of an old duffer".

The grandfather-of-five died five days later in hospital. The attack in the Somerset seaside town of Bridgwater sparked outrage at the time and feelings were running high yesterday.

Deputy Mayor Bill Monteith said: "It's an absolute scandal that this happened in the first place. It's hardly a sentence at all. With good behaviour, he'll be out in 14 or 15 months."

More on the story here.

Distraught wife Jane broke down when the sentence was read out and was too upset to comment after the case.

Naturally the Tories have condemned Judge Thomas Crowther's (who described the killing as ‘unnecessarily violent’ – how much violence did he consider necessary ?) derisory sentence on the 'unemployed father-of-one who has previous convictions for battery'. Not.

Bridgwater MP Ian Liddell-Grainger said: "There is no excusing what he did, but he has pleaded guilty and it must be left to the judge to decide on the sentence."

The Home Office are putting lots of resource into tackling anti-social behaviour. Faced with three yobs riding their bikes towards you on a pedestrian bridge, they recommend Mr Bird should go here. What a pity his Blackberry wasn't working that day.


Meanwhile, just up the A38 in Bristol. This hardly bears thinking about. That poor child. England, 2005 :

A boy aged three spent three days alone weeping over the body of his father, who had been battered to death at their home in an apparently motiveless attack.
Abraham Marshall is thought to have survived on a few biscuits and had been sleeping huddled next to the corpse. He was finally rescued when relatives called at the flat in Bristol.

And in High Wycombe the girls are proving that when it comes to killing your schoolmates, equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, is the name of the game. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

A girl aged 12 has been questioned over the “sudden and unexplained” death of an 11-year-old girl, police said yesterday. The suspect, who has not been named, was arrested on suspicion of assault after Alisa Haywood died from acute swelling of the brain.

"As long as you can't see any cameras, hit 'em"

Following the uncovering of abuse at the privately-run Oakington detention centre, immigration officials have found a sure-fire method of preventing further occurrences.


(and new reality TV star Jason Martin looks a perfect candidate for the Big Brother house. When he gets out, that is.)