william watkin's blog (since 2003)

When I was a child we used to play a gruesome game. Of a weekend you would often find me, my siblings and the occasional honoured guest, lined up on the wall of our back garden. Whoever was ‘It’ would go down the line and ask, in a tone hardened with menace, ‘What do you want to be killed by?’ Each child would choose a method of execution and the executioner would shoulder a rifle, fling some daggers, jazz up a flamethrower or what have you, ‘killing’ the person in question. The convicted would then dramatically perform their death with all the ham and trimmings they could muster. The winner was the best die-er. I was particularly good at this game. I could really throw myself into a poisoning. If you tried to stab me, you had a West Side Story jazz-fight on your hands, before the inevitable up-to-the-hilt in my gut and down I would go. The elegance of my firing squad, almost Beckettian in its reduced action, was deemed powerful and intense. Boy could I writhe on our small, ...

  Cameron Giving his Speeh at the Policy Exchange, 8th of February David Cameron's Prison Reform Speech appears to show his liberal side. But look closer and he is advocating a new form of punishment, a kind of perpetual parole. Cameron the Liberal! David Cameron’s recent prisons speech on February 8 th left many left-wing commentators wrong-footed.  Touted as the first proposal of full-scale prison reform for a generation, Cameron came over at the podium all concerned, empathetic, and sociological—although he retained his rather smug and rubicund natural demeanour throughout. We lefties didn’t know what to make of it all really.  The Guardian’s John Crace, for example, had to invent a whole new malady, the Odysseus complex , to describe the way the Cameron keeps being blown of course.  The problem was not so much the tone of the speech, Cameron only has one tone, slightly exasperated verging on tetchy then suddenly emollient, but the content of whi...