MAIL COMMENT: Knife crime and the meaning of 'tough'

According to her, it would be 'simplistic' to send all knife-carriers to prison. A 'much tougher' deterrent would be to make them visit stabbing victims in hospital.

Does she take us all for idiots? Leave aside that the last thing most victims would want is to be made to display their wounds to young criminals  -  a proposal condemned by the Royal College of Surgeons as 'distasteful' and 'morally, ethically and legally suspect'.

Knives: A growing menace on our streets

Jacqui Smith: Wants knife-carriers to visit stabbing victims in hospital

Does she seriously expect us to believe that hospital visits would be more effective than jail?

Of course, if Miss Smith were more honest with the public, she would admit there is simply no room in our prisons for the growing numbers who carry knives.

Horrifying new figures show that in England and Wales alone, well over 20,000 knife crimes were committed in the year to March  -  and they include only murders, woundings and muggings.

Add the countless thousands of young people who routinely carry knives, and the figures would go off the scale.

As the Mail has long argued, the real answers to knife crime  -  as to so many other social evils  -  lie in addressing the breakdown of the family and our education system.

Is it any wonder boys and young men seek comradeship in criminal gangs, when so many lack male role models and clear moral leadership?

In the short term, however, the most effective way to stop people carrying knives is to impose the stiffest possible sentences on those caught with them.

Instead, Miss Smith offers nothing but gimmicks, from interviews with victims and their families to experimental curfews for the under-16s.

Meanwhile her new knife crime tsar floats uncosted, pie-in-the-sky schemes for introducing non-military national service for jobless teenagers.

True, the Home Secretary's hands have been tied by her predecessors' disgraceful failure to provide enough prison places. But when she tries to pretend her proposals are 'tougher' than jail, she insults our intelligence.

The abortion habit

For most women who undergo abortions, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is the most agonising they ever have to make. Indeed, many have deep regrets about it for years afterwards.

There is a growing minority, however, who look upon ending their foetuses' lives simply as a morally neutral alternative to contraception.

How else can we explain the astonishing figures, obtained by the Mail, showing that a record 64,230 women who had abortions in England and Wales last year had undergone previous terminations?

Of these, more than 11,000 were having their third abortion, while nearly 1,000 were on their fifth or sixth  -  and a feckless 29 had terminated seven or more previous pregnancies.

Campaigners for easier abortions often claim that no woman would take lightly the decision to abort her baby.

In this age of irresponsibility, these figures expose that claim as false.

Teacher power

It clearly makes sense, as the Government's behaviour tsar recommends, to allow teachers to frisk pupils for drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and stolen goods.

A couple of questions, though. Until trendy educationalists took over our schools, didn't teachers always have the power to make pupils turn out their pockets?

And wasn't it utter madness to remove it from them?