Lines and Sentences

In the midst of everything else yesterday, the Durham Day Rover ticket went up to five pounds, an increase of 25 per cent. It is now no cheaper than a return, although of course it is far more versatile provided that you were not leaving County Durham. After all, why would anyone? But the return fare would have been six pounds if Jamie Driscoll had not run Kim McGuinness so close for Mayor and was not clearly planning to stand again. Bring him on. Then there might even be buses at all.

Also yesterday, the new guidelines relating to pre-sentence reports did come into effect in practice. Judges do not like being told what to do by politicians. It would take primary legislation to override something that arose out of a consultative process entirely while Kemi Badenoch was in government, and for most of which so was Robert Jenrick. Everyone convicted of an offence that carried a potential custodial sentence ought to be given a pre-sentence report, and not only those of us who happened to be mixed-race, disabled, chronically sick and mentally ill members of minority religions (which, according to the most recent census, were all religions), against whom there was therefore no public interest in bringing a prosecution for anything that was not violent, sexual, drug-related, or somehow treasonable or seditious, since there was otherwise no realistic hope of sending us to prison.

And while it is no discredit to Badenoch that she has not seen Adolescence, that was all the more reason not to pander to the "race-swapping" rubbish. It is not based on any real case. That is a much more useful line of attack against its transformation into a basis for public policy. That, and the fact that it was partly publicly funded. The whole thing is coming to resemble the cult of Captain Tom, and how did that work out? Still, it does illustrate the continuing power of television, and especially of television drama.

About the Post Office scandal, there had been any number of documentaries and news reports, never mind blogposts and social media posts, but it took Mr Bates vs The Post Office to make the delivery. And there had been any number of documentaries and news reports, never mind blogposts and social media posts, about incels, Andrew Tate, and all that, but nothing with remotely the impact of Adolescence. In the case of the Post Office, it was not even a streaming service. It was good old ITV, with everyone watching at the same time, as if in the twentieth century. It took the BBC to make Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and it was when the networks, as Americans would call them, did as they do by taking up the hysteria of the newspapers that Jeremy Corbyn was brought down. Think on.