Rehab the place for these villains

12:19pm Monday 17th March 2008

With Britain's prisons full to bursting, the Government of this near-bankrupt country of ours has wheeled out another phase of its cunning plan to ease overcrowding without spending money that it hasn't got on building the new establishments that are desperately needed.

Already there are reportedly 80 prisoners being released early every day to keep the numbers down. Now comes a recommendation, from the Sentencing Guidelines Council, that burglars and thieves who steal to fund an addiction to drink, drugs or gambling could use that in mitigation and be spared jail.

It's already well known that much of the crime that blights the lives of so many victims and is undermining society is caused by the eternal quest by addicts of one sort of another to raise the money to feed their habit. So that means that a great many of the people who come before the courts will be eligible to claim that they were driven to it by "desperation and need" (which is the key phrase in activating this new soft option).

The offences covered by the guidelines include picking pockets and burglary from "non-domestic" buildings such as shops, doctors' surgeries or churches. Although they don't include mugging, they do cover some thefts in which the use of force has led to minor injuries to victims, or there has been intimidation.

So an addict can steam into a shop, terrify a member of staff, even knock them about a bit in a gentle sort of way, and expect to get away with a fine or community service order! That's what passes for Laura Norder in Britain 2008.

I gather that the guidelines state it "may sometimes be appropriate" to impose a drug rehabilitation or alcohol treatment order in place of a jail term. Never mind "sometimes be appropriate"! It should always be obligatory Surely if addicts aren't going to be sent to prison, it should be on condition that they have treatment instead. And if they don't take that treatment seriously, prison should be waiting for them in the wings. That won't happen, of course, because if the money isn't available to keep people in prison, it won't be available to offer them treatment either.

So these sorts of crimes will continue to undermine the general quality of life and the legal system will become even more of a laughing stock than it already is. And it will become even more of a source of frustration for those who have to administer it but can't do what they feel to be the right thing because the rules won't let them.

• For those few who still remain to be convinced that Britain is run by barmpots, try this one for size. Nine Afghan men, illegal immigrants, were found hiding in the back of a lorry near the Cambridgeshire village of Fordham.

Cambridgeshire police, lacking any cell space for them, bought them single tickets and put them on a train for London, unescorted, with verbal directions as to how to get to the Croydon headquarters of the Border and Immigration Agency.

No prizes for accurately guessing that not a single one of them turned up there. A police spokesman claimed this was "accepted practice" and said: "In matters of this nature, the police are led by the UK Immigration Service, which in turn follows the Home Office instruction."

God help us!

Heartland heartache

Last Orders, the film about the problems confronting Wibsey Working Men's Club, was one of the saddest things I've seen on television for a long time, featuring as it did a long-established way of life which is in terminal decline and people who feel themselves to be sidelined and beleaguered.

It was made all the more poignant for me because it came from the Priestley heartland. Wibsey is where the tribe first established itself in Bradford centuries ago. It's where my grandfather was born and grew up, in White Lane. So I suppose in some way Wibsey is in my blood.

If this was a sad film, it was also an honest one. Unlike the middle-classes who have set the agenda for this country, working-class people tend to see life unclouded by political correctness. They say what they think. And what these Wibsey people think of the present state of Britain (and particularly of Bradford) isn't much.

Good for the BBC for allowing them to speak their minds in this fine film by American director Henry Singer. But what a shame that somewhere along the way some press release seems to have got the name of Wibsey wrong.

An American woman previewing television programmes on Fiona Bruce's Radio 2 programme the Sunday before Last Orders was screened referred to the place as "Wibley" (Ms Bruce corrected her). And Nancy Banks-Smith did the same throughout her Guardian TV review the day after it was shown.

It rather added insult to injury.

Words fail me when I hear Leona

Is this a generation-gap thing? While the X Factor winner Leona Lewis is an attractive young woman and her theme song for Sport Relief is melodic and moving, I really do have a lot of trouble understanding what she's singing about. Many of the lyrics of this and other songs she's recorded come out as sounds rather than identifiable words.

Maybe during the year she spent in the US having her act polished, someone should have played her a few Frank Sinatra records and explained to her something that he instinctively knew: that lyrics should be treated with respect and pronounced properly so the listeners are never in any doubt about what the songwriter meant to say.

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