LET me take you on a whistlestop tour of Worcester Magistrates Court. Are you sitting comfortably? Today, like most days, it’s the usual rogues’ gallery – thieves, thugs, women beaters, drug addicts and slack-jawed lackwits.

So, who is standing up for you, the law-abiding, hard-working men and women of Worcester?

Who is fighting the corner of the besieged, the burgled and the generally brutalised?

Enter the heroine of the hour Miss Wendy Coggan, the larger-than-life chairman of the magistrates bench.

Surely she and her two colleagues will now dispense some serious justice. Well, no actually, not really.

You might think a woman caught with a four-inch kitchen knife and cannabis in her car and already on bail for wounding would at least get a suspended sentence.

Wrong. She was given 180 hours of unpaid work. How’s that for a stern message? Bet she won’t do that again.

What about the big guy who butted someone until he had a black eye, a cut lip and a badly swollen face?

Surely, he has to go down.

Wrong again. He got 100 hours of unpaid work and the victim was given £50 of compensation. I bet that takes the sting out of being beaten to a pulp.

I could go on but I think you get the point. Why don’t some of these liberal, hug-a-hoodie magistrates do us all a favour and do something else?

Perhaps they could become florists or babysitters or set up their own cake stall. The woolly sentences they dish out are pathetic.

We need shrewd, decisive, oldfashioned hard nuts such as retired district judge Bruce Morgan in the chair.

Mr Morgan was Worcester’s answer to Judge Dredd, striking fear into the hearts of hardened criminals.

The withering looks he shot defendants over the tops of his spectacles were enough to reduce them to knock-kneed, gibbering wrecks.

If you dared to confront him he would not only send you to jail but he’d have you hauled back from the cells later on and do you for contempt of court to boot.

I’m not in favour of human cloning but if there was ever a justification for it – here it is, a veritable army of Bruce Morgans delivering real justice.

Mr Morgan understood something vital – he knew that criminals and not victims should feel afraid.

Come back Bruce. Worcester needs you.