Criminals given restoration order

With all the Home Office shenanigans over the foreign criminals stampeding our streets and dodgy immigration staff, the Daily Mail is keen to give the knife a further – if slightly comical – twist with the shock “revelation” that criminals given “tough” community sentences are being taught costume-making and antique restoration “instead of going to jail.

” This, the paper concludes, contradicts shamefaced former Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s pledge to make community sentences “frightening.” What does the Mail have in mind as an alternative to making fancy dresses and painting old chairs? Subjecting cons to endless lashings of Richard Littlejohn?