"A few little unknowns"

Listen to 5Live's Breakfast show interview this morning with the mother of seven who has challenged Jeremy Clarke to see how she lived. Two thoughts struck me during this interview, first that neither Nicky Campbell or Shelagh Fogarty asked Leeanne Allot why she had carried on having children once she and her partner were both unemployed and therefore unable to support them without state aid. The second was her use of the phrase "a few little unknowns" when Nicky Campbell asked if her 25 year old husband was the father of all seven children.

Britain has a problem.

Radio 5 stumble on the truth about "falling crime"

An interesting article on PC Copperfield's blog about Sheila Fogarty's report on a trip to Liverpool "to find out whether Jacqui Smith was right not to want to walk around Hackney after midnight (answer: Yes, and you don't need a TV crew to find out), she went up to Liverpool, her home town, and started asking people.
She explained how after she approached a group ('I won't say gang') of six or seven youths to ask permission to film them, the street was suddenly blocked off at both ends by two more 'groups' of 20 or so youths. They proceeded to bottle them. 'The thing that astonished me,' said Sheila (I'm paraphrasing), 'was that there were ordinary people there... mums in pushchairs and so on and there's all this glass everywhere.'
They got the hell out of there immediately.
Shortly afterwards, they plotted up in another street and tried to ask another group of kids if they could interview them. As they stood there, a car cruised slowly past, the window came out and a man pointed a pistol at them. 'There was a police CCTV van only 15 metres away,' said Sheila, a note of incredulity in her voice. 'It was so brazen. And this is five minutes from where I went to school.'
This tells the uninitiated (of whom Sheila was obviously one) several things:
1. CCTV cameras don't really work as a deterrent.
2. Criminal gangs in Liverpool are not all that frightened of the police (or what will happen to them if they're caught).
3. Yobs who throw bottles at TV crews don't care if they blind, or even kill, young children.
4. Whatever successive governments say, things are getting much worse (hence Sheila's incredulity that this could happen 'five minutes from where I went to school').
5. Kids who went to Sheila's school are perhaps less likely to follow her into the national media , or any decent job, than they were a few years ago.
6. Sheila and her TV crew were able to get the hell out of there and now have some nice war stories to tell in the bars of Notting Hill (or wherever). But the mums who dodged those flying bottles are there today, and they'll be there tomorrow and for the next six months, and six years."