Depriving inmates of exercise, or the ability to take a shower, is bound to lead to resentment and depression. The crumbling infrastructure of our jails is also a cause for concern. The soaring number of suicides in Britain’s jails, especially in young offenders’ institutions, is a lethal by-product of our Government’s refusal to adopt a sensible, or humane, prisons policy The scale of the problem is plain. Britain’s prison population is the highest in western Europe. We are cramming more and more people into our jails to little discernible benefit to society. The latest report from the Prison Reform Trust makes it painfully clear that our system is badly failing to rehabilitate young offenders.
Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, has pointed out in the past that overcrowding is linked to the increasing number of suicides Such a link is hardly surprising. Perhaps they should consider whether record labels and promoters are culpable, alongside the singers themselves.All too often the police have treated assaults on gay people as unimportant.

The fact that they are taking their responsibilities seriously is to be welcomed. This investigation also represents another victory for Peter Tatchell, the human rights activist who has never been afraid to swim against the tide; he has campaigned bravely to highlight the dangers of the propagation of violent homophobic propaganda through reggae. He has also drawn attention to the sickening persecution of homosexuals in Jamaica, where the leading gay rights activist was murdered earlier this year.Some have argued that since this music reflects a particular slice of Jamaican culture it is wrong to get too upset by the bigotry They are wrong. Any incitement to violence against a minority group is unacceptable, and it would be a betrayal of the memory of people like David Morley, people murdered simply because of their sexuality, to turn a blind eye.. The murder of David Morley, a survivor of the 1999 Soho pub bombing, in a suspected homophobic attack has brought to wider attention what the gay community has known for some time: that the number of such attacks in Britain is rising. Yesterday it was announced that Scotland Yard will investigate some artists to determine whether their lyrics constitute an incitement to violence.

The casual bigotry of some of these singers is unacceptable, and the police are right to respond to the concerns raised by launching this investigation. Some in the gay community argue that the increase in so-called “gay bashing” is due to the growing popularity in this country of homophobic reggae acts.The police are taking this link seriously. Figures released by the Metropolitan Police earlier this year demonstrate a 10 per cent rise in the number of homophobic assaults in London since 2002.
This is partly due to the fact that the police have been more assiduous in recording such incidents since homophobic crimes were classified with race attacks in last year’s Criminal Justice Act But thatis not enough to explain the rise. Will Ukraine face east towards Russia or west to Europe? That is the question that voters will have to answer at the run-off in three weeks’ time.. And while its outcome may not decide the fate of the world, it will help to determine the future of Europe and its borders.

Also the closest of races, the Ukrainian election was scarred by even dirtier tricks and more dubious registration procedures than the one across the Atlantic. Like the US election, it was also the subject of close – in this case, perhaps too close – attention from abroad. While the world’s attention has been fixed on the voting in America, another significant election has been taking place. “In fact, I have always been a little embarrassed at having my name on the door. I have never looked on the company as an ego trip.”After Hanson’s retirement in 1997, his main activities were concentrated on his battle against British membership of the European Union.Nicholas Faith. The step was not taken, however, until 1996, five years after the collapse of the ICI bid and after the death in August 1995 of Gordon White.Hanson was naturally shattered by White’s death, but in his business activities he remained philosophical, treating the break-up of the group as “natural evolution” (which it clearly wasn’t) “My child is Hanson plc,” he said.

“But my grandchildren are the five companies that we have created and I shall enjoy watching them grow.” They didn’t, of course, but he probably didn’t care too much, for he was never sentimental – he never felt inclined to treat the group named after him as a lasting tribute to his business capacities “I have never been a monument man,” he once said. At the same time, potential takeover targets had learnt to concentrate their activities on core businesses and to sell off those that did not fit, thus reducing their attractiveness for buccaneers like White and Hanson.But the point at which the Hanson technique met, if not its Waterloo, at least a check that proved to be final, came in 1990 when Hanson bought a relatively small stake in the most vulnerable of British industrial groups, ICI, as a sighting shot for a full bid, or rather as Hanson preferred to put it, a “friendly merger”. If the bid had been successful, Hanson would have merged its own chemical interests with those of ICI and sold the remaining subsidiaries, providing the new group with considerable financial fire-power.But ICI launched a highly effective PR campaign against the bid, focusing on the unfortunate – if largely irrelevant – fact that some of Gordon White’s racehorses were in fact owned by the group (White and Hanson were both keen on horse-racing, and their Ever Ready subsidiary sponsored the Derby for a number of years).Following the inevitable collapse of the ICI bid, Hanson’s long-term failure to invest in its businesses ensured that the only solution was to break the group up into – relatively logical – industrial groupings. By then the group was so big that they had to take over ever-larger companies to have any impact on the overall figures.