This letter was submitted to Melanie Phillips through her website on 2nd November. Re-posted and open for comments at New Statesman online. Dear Ms Phillips, In a piece published on 21 October (“Jimmy Savile and how the liberal left encouraged the sexualisation of our children”)  you bring to the public’s attention the shameful...

Alan White: Would you say that the latest news on the net gain in playing fields has increased significance in the light of London’s successful Olympics bid & the Green Paper “Youth Matters”, or would you say that these are entirely separate issues? Richard Caborn: They are all tied together; absolutely no doubt at all. This is...

This afternoon Michael Fallon and Ed Balls were on Radio 5, discussing the local election results. After a bit of Punch and Judy stuff, Balls was asked about the underwhelming demand for elected mayors. His response was, in tribal terms, a bit of a blinder: “David Cameron said it would mean Borises up and down the country – the country...

‘“It’s all a joke. All I do with the parole officers is pretend to look like I care.” I remember how surprising I found Nathan’s words, five years ago now. I met him after he’d been released from Rochester – the first man I’d ever met in that situation. He’d been left with a £53 warrant, a license with a list of...

Few people realise that the first riot in Tottenham didn’t happen in August 2011. It happened in the April of that year, in Northumberland Park, when a few police officers were attacked by a group of thirty or so men, after they saw a man being stopped by them. It got a couple of lines in the local press: it just wasn’t anything out of the...

We all love the idea of local solutions when it comes to dealing with crime. The left love it: only this weekend the increasingly admirable Stella Creasy’s Mayoral Youth Crime Pledge got an excited response from community leaders. The right love it: this morning Nick Herbert performed a volte-face of relatively shocking proportions – or...

One day, when I was a teen, I started to cut myself, making thin little slits on my ankles and arms with a penknife. I stopped sleeping. I started to hear strange noises and voices in my head at night. Then I started to fall out with everyone at school; I found myself dipping into a weird sense of ecstasy: watching myself saying and doing...