EVERY once in a while, a spelling or typographical error will appear on this page… or on any page, in any newspaper, anywhere, for that matter.

Despite every care and precaution, those of us who work with the printed word know that it is nigh on impossible to completely avoid mistakes.

Occasionally, a reader will get all sniffy about a spelling mistake in this newspaper. Of course, hindsight, like the art of the armchair critic, is a luxury recreation that knows no deadline.

When I was the letters editor of this newspaper, there was one particular bore who used to write in all the time. Nothing better to do, obviously. Then one day, he sent in a missive littered with errors. I wrote back, requesting that he made a well-known saying or phrase out of the following… glass houses, people, stones, shouldn’t throw.

*THERE have been the predictable howls of outrage over the perceived severity of sentences being handed out to rioters. In some cases, they are indeed draconian. There again, murder, arson and wholesale theft are also extreme acts.

However, perhaps if we’d had a few conversations about the rise of a British underclass a few years ago, much of this breast-beating could have been avoided.

The last government’s main achievement was to build an enormous state-dependent clientele.

It set out to create a grateful electorate in hock to a benevolent system that would never fail in providing for a new breed of careerist claimants.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. The Establishment is turning on the Frankenstein monster it created and many will say and about time, too.

*ONE way to sap the energy of anti-social and unfocused individuals would be to introduce a form of community service.

Most people – apart from politicians terrified of alienating anyone – would welcome such a move. I can never understand why the British Left won’t wear such notions. Despite their liberal pretensions, they have actually always been very close to old-style Soviet socialism, a system in which refusal to work was never an option.

I really don’t see what would be wrong with a system whereby people were given so much time to find a job and then – if unsuccessful in their attempts – would be asked to perform some tasks that would help the community in exchange for taxpayers’ money.

Let’s face it – there’s no shortage of jobs to be done.