Verbal

But have you got the angle from the grassy knoll?

Again, such is the state of the prison service that, best intentions aside, that is exactly what happens already! Most inmates spend 23 hours staring at the wall. Functioning rehab is all but non-existent.

The reason it conceivably looks like it hits the stantion from the main camera angle is because of motion-blur. Freeze-frame the action and the ball is two or three ghost images. It's just an optical illusion created by recording at 50 fields per sec at 1/100th. High-speed (slo-mo) cameras would have shown it hitting the bar.

I think you've missed um's point - that it already IS designedly a deterrent, but the rates of recidivism are higher for custodial sentences than for non-custodial ones.

Depressingly true. Fortunately, I don't think the majority of Saints fans are quite the swivel-eyed right-wing loons we have on 'here'.

Well I agree with you that they were 'p1sspoor rabble trousers', and even on appeal, the sentence is likely to be custodial. But four years is, by quite common consent, simply absurd.

Would you be the same plaint-facts-denying, train-commuting trousers who nonetheless somehow denies that train fares have gone up by substantially more than the rate of inflation every single year since at least 1998? Your stock is going the same way as the FTSE.

Past offences and prison terms ARE taken into account when sentencing. As for people being 'afraid', I think that's too broad. Hardened criminals are by definition recidivists. Looters on the streets of Britain's cities were clearly a mix though - some were burglars and violent thugs too tempted by the opportunity the 'hide' in the crowd and do what they'd normally do; and civically-challenged first-timers who went with the crowd and thought it was all a flash mob. Wouldn't you agree that those are two categories of offender, likely to respond quite differently to the penalties handed down?

Fixed minimum sentences are considered a bad idea for a good reason. Crime does not happen in a vacuum, and it is a crucial part of a court's function - and of the justice system as a whole - to administer justice in a balanced way. Hearing the evidence - including that for the defence - and taking it all into account is what defines justice in a just society. This will mean that from time to time courts will get it wrong - or sometimes are perceived to have done by people who haven't sat in on the court case. Minimum and fixed sentencing are not compatible with a healthy, democratic state - it's much more likely to be found in (and a crucial part of) military dictatorships. However diminished we are a country, we are not that banal - but banal enough, evidently, for some judges to pay too much attention to craven politicians.

Luckily no one in their right mind would let you anywhere near devising an actual sentencing policy. Deterrence is one thing;proportionality another, Without the latter, the legal system loses some of its legitimacy, and that's damaging for all of us. This is going to appeal. My prediction is eighteen months max. At the moment, we have a situation where actual, and quite violent looters are getting lighter sentences than these two wannabes.

He deserves a smack?

But the sentencing, in some cases, is nonsensical. Consider the four-year sentences for the Facebook 'riots' that never happened. A gang of three convicted of kidnapping, stripping and threatening to rape got four years at Kingston Crown Court. Two brothers, who left their friend to die when he was electrocuted as they all stole copper from a substation, got four years. A nurse caught with some of the worse child-porn images ever seen by police experts got four years and five months. A knife-wielding intruder who beat up and robbed a household of students in Dundee got four years and eight months. And so on and so on. As Gilbert and Sullivan famously said (or sang): let the punishment fit the crime.

The wild inconsistency of sentencing will clog up the courts for months and years to come, as appeals are launched en masse. All of which is a lucrative opportunity for lawyers, and it'll cost taxpayers an absolute fortune in legal aid fees.

This whole thread makes me nervous. It's like waving a little flag saying 'over here, over here'.

And we can destroy several times over. It doesn't mean we should. And no, as much as Thatcher desperately wanted to take out the Super-Etendard/exocet bases, she couldn't. She thought about it - and there was an abortive SAS recon mission that ended without a shot being fired and a helicopter crash in Chile. But not single British shell casing fell on the Argentine mainland. The Americans, Brazilians and the Chileans were all dead against, so it couldn't happen.

You didn't - it was a discussion with delldays that you commented on.

The idea that you can take military decisions in the complete absence of a political framework is a fantasy. just look at the tiptoe-ing around in Libya that the UK and France in particular are forced to do. Wars are politics with deadly weapons. I can't think of a single example ever where the military have just been told - do what can be done and hang the consequences. Even Thatch didn't attack the Argentine mainland, for example.

War isn't regardless of politics, so it doesn't make sense.

You're in the military. You're not a politician. And you are so plainly wrong.

In this case, not even close to being true. If you think sending tomahawks into the urban heartlands of a western democracy is going to help Britain gain influence and win a stand-off, you are so very wrong.

On certain issues, certainly Brazil would have more influence. To take VFTT's example of the Falklands Part Two, if Brazil were not to support any UK military action this tie around, it would make things especially difficult. On matters to do with the Americas, obviously Brazil has greater influence, despite the fact, for example, that the UK is a larger investor in the US than Brazil In any case, influence and power are rarely the same thing. Japan has FAR more economic power than Britain, but its influence is limited in many ways. To make any sense of this, you'd have to argue case by case. Often it comes down to a kind of moral influence, which goes up and down. Norway had greater influence at one point than Britain in the Middle East settlement attempts because it was seen as an 'honest broker'. Britain's influence in the middle east generally has waned as a result of Blair's adventure in Iraq. but Britain's influence in parts of West Africa is high, after Blair's very effective rescuing of Sierra Leone from murderous anarchy. So, at the risk of sounding all LibDem-y, it depends...

Yes, because what the world needs is for all phones to be a paler shade of puce.

This argument tends to descend into the 'how long is a piece of string' variety, because influence can be measured in so many different ways. Britain has influence that may have nothing to do with power (for example, its greater influence in some ex-colonial countries like Pakistan), and it can lack influence despite its relative power (on many European matters, as well as in China for example) As for Brazil, they are now one place behind us in virtually all economic rankings, and are set to overtake us, on conservative estimates, within the next five years.

And cheese-rolling apparently.

Exactly...and listening to dune.