It's been hoodie week at Westminster, where Chris Grayling has been leading an orchestra of the concerned and caring in a prolonged wail about why it is that British youngsters can't get jobs.

All this talk about hire a hoodie, and nobody thought to ask the hoodies themselves.

No matter, the hoodies have joined the debate without an invitation, and given the answer in their own special way. Many of our less socialised young people have limited communications skills, but the new crime figures speak with great clarity.

I could be getting this badly wrong, and falling into the trap of hoodiephobia which Mr Grayling, the Employment Minister, and David Cameron are anxious for us all to avoid.

For sure, some of those making a living in the thriving pickpocket industry are migrants from selected Eastern European countries. But I don't think many grannies have turned to handbag snatching to compensate for their growing tax burden.

Without calling in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to spend half a million on qualitative research, or getting five academics from the Department of Entitlement at the University of Knowsley to examine the available evidence, I would say we are on safe ground here. The street thieving community is likely to share a lot of characteristics with the hoodie demographic.

Including the hoods, which are as essential to the mugging trade as bodybuilding supplements to Olympic athletes.

There are ways to achieve a permanent drop in street crime, but they take political determination. The education system, as business leaders keep pointing out, has to be compelled to do a little more educating. We can only, once more, wish success to Michael Gove.

Something might also be done to try to provide certainty and purpose in the lives of youngsters who wind up as street criminals.

It doesn't take long looking at research on young criminals to work out that the majority come from homes where there is no father. A little tweaking of the benefits system to try to encourage couples to stay together could help, long term. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who is nominally in charge, is well aware of that, as he is about the stabilising effects of marriage.

Why do the DM find accounts and maths so difficult to grasp?? If the BBC film everything - then they own all the footage! All over the world, for the next fifty years tv companies will PAY the BBC for using the said footage, thus making a very good profit! I know the DM is a dead media with an ever decreasing readership, but your boring and predictable BBC bashing is jolly tedious! Get some brains please!
- Griswald Goodsoup, UK, 2/5/2012 16:26

This idea of comparing the size of the BBC team and Team GB is absolute nonsense. Using this rational the World Snooker should have no more than 4 people covering it and only 2 once they reach the semi-finals but the London Marathon can have about 30,000. I wonder how much TV production experience you have and can you provide an exact numerical breakdown of how many people you'd have covering the games?
- David, Dorset, 2/5/2012 17:46

"If the BBC were to reimburse each licence fee payer, that would come to £5.38 apiece. It’s a pie and a pint, and I’m not going to sneer at that." -- You don't have the time, you're too busy sneering at the BBC. Thank God we haven't left the organisation of these games to visionless nobodies like you, eh? The rest of the world would arrive in the summer and instead of finding a modern, technologically savvy country ready to beam positive images of itself across the globe they'd find a fat, balding old f@rt sitting in the corner nibbling on his lard pie, sipping warm beer and boasting to his equally dull mates how he 'got one over on the communist BBC'. We really would be the 'laughing stock of the world' then.
- Dave Spart, Hackney, 2/5/2012 17:47

Here we go again, another "bash the BBC" article from Mr Doughty. As the national broadcaster in the home nation - and renowned across the world as probably the best broadcaster on the planet - the BBC will be expected to produce a good show and have archive footage of every event (which will probably produce a revenue stream for many years to come). Or would Mr Doughty, who usually is a firm defender of the idea of "Great Britain" wish to see the BBC ridiculed across the world just because it would satisfy his anti-BBC predisposition?
- cp, Kent Europe, 02/5/2012 15:53

As many have discovered since the French revolution developed modern metric measures and Napoleon spread them around Europe by force of arms, counting by 10s looks simple but is not necessarily the most natural and easy way to measure things.

The kind of people who are confused by the old measures are children who have been deprived of the chance to learn them.

Like the 10-year-old singing the Sherman brothers' Mary Poppins song about 'tuppence a bag' at school, who had to ask me this week: 'Dad, what's tuppence?'

We now have generations of children who have trouble understanding English literature because they do not know the meaning a yard or a furlong or a quart.

I think we should listen to Lord Howe, who says that we cannot continue in the present mess, and it would be madness to go backwards. That’s good enough for me: if Lord Howe says it would be madness to go backwards, back we should go.

We must ban centimetres, metres, litres, hectares, kilograms, and all the rest of it. Local council trading standards officers should be put to work to arrest and charge anybody who talks in tonnes rather than tons. A judicial inquiry must be called to examine the criminal behaviour of BBC executives who have condoned the use of kilometres in place of miles.

Local council trading standards officers should be put to work to arrest and charge anybody who talks in tonnes rather than tons.

Lord Howe thinks it's madness for us to use imperial measurements? That's all the incentive I need

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... z1vCKAVhrR

Another Hitchens-style rant that can be boiled down to "I haven't managed to grasp a simple system in 40-odd years, mainly as a result of bloody-minded stubbornness and xenophobia, so let's go back to a clumsy, illogical system that suits me as a result".

I.e. the usual Mail situation - we demand that you do what I, a vocal serial complainer wants, and bollocks to what you want.