I interviewed a convicted paedophile in prison and he said the key was like-minded people

I interviewed a convicted paedophile in prison and he said the key was like-minded people.”He told me, `If I walk into a room I know within three minutes the people who think like me’. “Earlier this year The Independent campaigned to improve conditions in children’s homes, introduce better training programmes for staff and for tighter controls on the activities of convicted paedophiles, some of whom had found it easy to move around the homes.The Government subsequently ordered a national inquiry into the systematic sexual and physical abuse suffered by hundreds if not thousands of young people.It also announced plans for a national register of convicted sex offenders, including an index of paedophiles.While the largest police inquiries have centred on the North-west, there have been scandals involving homes in Leicestershire, Islington, north London, and other cases have emerged in Norfolk, Hereford and Worcester, Essex and Berkshire.Leading article, page 13. The affluent tourists who pay pounds 190 a night for a single room at the Ritz are classified as the fourth most deprived group of residents in England, it emerged last night. Labour revealed that the Government is paying pounds 24m a year in deprivation allowances to the Conservative-run borough of Westminster, which is home to both Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament.
And the money is not just paid on behalf of such well-heeled sight-seers. It also covers commuters who work in the area but who live elsewhere, including MPs and members of the House of Lords.The extra grants are meant in part to cover the possibility that these needy groups of people might need to claim housing benefit.

It also pays for their use of parks and leisure facilities and for the demands they make on the street-cleaning and refuse-collection services.Ministers decided last month to continue the practice despite considering a plan which would have given councils a flat-rate sum to help them provide services to commuters and tourists.Opposition spokesmen have long complained that whileWestminster is classified as the fourth most deprived borough in Britain for grant purposes, Labour Barnsley is still 326th after 18 pit closures. The revelation that these extra grants are paid on behalf of about 800,000 visitors as well as 190,000 residents will cause further outrage.Frank Dobson, Labour’s environment spokesman, called the revelation a “fiddle”. Because 12 per cent of Westminster residents lived in overcrowded accommodation, 12 per cent of Ritz visitors earned overcrowding allowances for the borough, he said. “The Government says Westminster is the fourth most deprived place, whereas Barnsley is 326th.

But there’s no Belgravia in Barnsley.”And when these self-same visitors visit Brighton, the Government assumes they are the 32nd most deprived people. It’s the same story all over the country.”Councillor Nick Markham, deputy leader of Westminster council, said the attack was simply an attempt by Labour to smear the borough because it was efficient and its council taxes, which stood at pounds 295 per head, were less than half the national average of pounds 600.”I could get into a `lies, damn lies and statistics’ debate and say that for every rich tourist there is a poor asylum-seeker. We have far more of those than we have visitors to the Ritz.”. Yesterday Virginia Bottomley, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, launched a four-point package to crack down on explicit violence on television. This should please those who have been salivating over “the dark and brutal side of television” for some time, although with its emphasis on violence rather than sex this is doubtful.
Also doubtful is whether this ineffectual package will persuade us that the Government, spurred on by the demands for a “moral revival” in the wake of the London headmaster Philip Lawrence’s murder and the Dunblane tragedy, is trying to reduce the general level of violence in society.It is fairly easy, after all, to find a consensus around the on-screen representation of violence. Most parents are far more concerned about scenes of violence than on-screen sex, although the two are always linked as if they were equally objectionable.Right-wingers have been calling for a crackdown on “the degrading diet of sex, drugs and violence” that we feed our children.Note that violence comes in only at third place, after sex and drugs.

This degrading “diet of sex, drugs and violence” is found, apparently, in the most popular of the pre-watershed programming – EastEnders, The Bill and Brookside are singled out for particular condemnation. As always, one has to wonder whether those who feel that our nation’s youth is being corrupted by soap operas actually watch any of these programmes. Certainly children, unlike those who would save us from ourselves and from our televisions, appear to grasp that they are watching drama rather than documentary. The soaps are also, in their own way, intensely moralistic – promoting as they do the value notions of neighbourliness, and community and family life.