How many times have we heard that reaction in the last few months from grieving parents whose teenage sons have been stabbed to death?

The trouble is, it never is an end to it. It always does happen again. Nobody's death seems to change anything about the basic facts of life on Britain's streets.

In many places gangs of out-of-control teenagers are free to roam and pick off targets at will. Some people will get away with a savage group beating, others are murdered with blades.

Yet a Government elected to be "tough on crime" thinks the answer is eye-catching "knife amnesties" which result in reassuring pictures of bins full of blades that are no longer on the streets. The trouble is that the people who are likely to use knives do not hand them in.

Knife crime among youths can be beaten, but not without provoking squeals of outrage from the civil liberties lobby and the likes of ultra-soft Children's Commissioner Al Aynsley-Green.

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Gordon Brown and his little helper David Miliband keep saying that the Irish should not be bullied into holding a second referendum.

But they are still pushing the Bill ratifying Lisbon through our Parliament. And they will not publicly declare Lisbon dead despite EU rules being quite clear: a new treaty must be supported by all member states or it falls.

This stance, by a major European player like the UK, does pile extra pressure on little Ireland to change its mind and ministers know it. They are being deceitful.

A far more courageous stance would have been for Gordon Brown to simply and openly declare that the Lisbon process is dead, that Britain will have nothing more to do with any sovereign powers being transferred to Brussels and that people across the EU quite obviously do not believe in a United States of Europe.

Such a stance would have won Mr Brown plenty of plaudits and perhaps even a boost in the opinion polls.

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But what an admission for a Labour government to make. It is an acknowledgement that the welfare state has created dependency and destroyed self-reliance on an epic scale.

With food and fuel prices continuing to rise and little prospect of them falling again anytime soon, the living standards of most hardworking families are in decline.

It was never right to create a financial incentive for millions of able-bodied adults to become dependent on the state, but now it simply cannot be afforded.

There are only two significant ways in which the living standards of the many can be protected. 1) make the public sector much more cost-effective and responsive to the needs of consumers (including reforming public sector pensions) thereby freeing up cash for tax cuts 

2) reform the welfare state to reduce the dependency culture and get several million people back into economic activity and making a contribution to national income instead of being a drain upon it.

Labour cannot do either of these things as it is now effectively owned by the

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I am sure the scenes were relatively mild compared to those which accompanied meetings of the notorious Bullingdon Club when Mr Johnson was at Oxford University.

But one thing stood out for me from the weekend's chaos - the ages of the participants. It wasn't how young they were. On the contrary, it was how old they were. Looking at pictures of a sea of faces, one could pick out bald patches on the heads of many of the male participants.

This was an event predominantly attended, not by teenagers, but by the 25-35 age group. The chief organiser was a 26-year-old banker.

At the risk of appearing an old duffer, I was struck by how emotionally immature these not very young adults were. A generation ago most people were married with children by their late twenties. A couple of generations before that the nation's young men were laying down their lives for their country.

But now most twenty-somethings and quite a few thirty-somethings too seem to spend their lives drifting between "gap" years, between relationships and between jobs.

For m

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Now that diesel and petrol prices are going through the roof, the politicians who listened to all those posh eco-warriors and swallowed their message hook, line and sinker are looking pretty stupid.

The British public is crying out for a cut in fuel taxes and is in no mood to be told that a "fuel duty escalator" is needed to save the planet. All those politicians who based their career on telling the metropolitan elite what it wanted to hear about global warming (yes you David Cameron and David Miliband) are changing their tune now.

They have discovered that there are few votes in turning Britain's 30 million drivers and their families into enemies of the State.

The time has come for radical action to cut the cost of fuel and do not believe ministers who say the Government is powerless to help. Th

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