A new slant on what for this blog is perhaps getting to be a very repetitious argument, from Eamonn Butler:

In 2001, UK police recorded 870,000 violent crimes, far more than the next worst, France, at 279,000, and nearly five times Germany's 188,000. Burglaries, at 470,000, were again well ahead of France (210,000) and Germany (133,000).

You can probably suggest reasons why things have got so bad. I can think of several possibilities – and they start with a state-monopoly school system that is no longer prepared to instil in kids that some ways of living are simply wrong, because - as we are now discovering to our cost – they are socially pathological. Insist on parental responsibility and, through parental choice and competitive supply, put parents back in charge of education: that, I think, would have more long-term effect on crime than any number of razzmatazz government "initiatives".

So there.