And can we have the next idea right along here please?

What a rag-bag of back-of-a-fag-packet, knee-jerk ideas the Government has come up with to tackle knife crime. Mind you I suppose that we should be grateful this lot have avoided their usual response to anything from global warming to dying which is to slap a tax on it - we could have been looking at sliding scale knife tax paying by the inch.

Government policy driven by dubious dogma has devalued the family and community to the point where society is breaking down. Exams and syllabi are about targets and tables rather than education these days. I suppose you spotted youngsters could soon get an English qualification by reading nothing more taxing than a travel brochure - and this from a nation which gave us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dylan Thomas and now . . . Thompson Holidays.

Kids are given endless rights with no responsibilities, indeed they are protected from having to be responsible, while at the same time youth facilities and playing fields are sold off and youth organisations are decried while any attempt at school or social discipline usually results in arrests or suspensions with the child ending up as some perverted version of a victim.

So the solution to knife crime is to arrest kids under 16 out after 9pm which strikes me as yet another liberty floating down the Swannee. Curfews used to be something you saw in black and white war films involving the Gestapo not something which could be used to target law abiding kids on their way home from the cinema, theatre, rehearsal, footy or netball training, seeing grannie or a friend or even after a night at a youth club if such a thing is still allowed to exist.

There is also a call for parents to grass on their kids but as the last parent to do that saw his son jailed for three years for having a gun there might just be a bit of work needed on the PR front for that one.

And as for giving the public a say in how knife wielding criminals should be punished? Sign away our national heritage to the unelected and faceless shadows lurking in the corridors of Brussels, despite pledges to the people there would be a referendum, and our views are too much of a threat to even contemplate.

But with a sniff of a few populist votes in the offing about something of little real consequence and our views are important again. Sadly the public's record when they get involved in crime and punishment votes is not that good - remember Barabbas.

And as for taking those carrying knives to see stab victims? As you lie in A&E doing a fair impression of a pin cushion I suspect a social worker with some snotty nosed, pimply youth in tow, pointing out the consequences of carrying a drum and fife will go down really well with the paracetamol.