Britain’s drug strategy is under the spotlight following the UK Drug Policy Commission’s (UKDPC) recommendation that there is too much energy spent on arresting drug dealers and not enough on reducing harm to communities.

Latest figures show that nearly 90,000 people were arrested in England and Wales for drug offences, with over one billion pounds spent on law enforcement, with £17.6 billion the estimated cost of the UK drug markets.

The report questions whether it is worth arresting a drug dealer if a more violent individual replaces him.

“Drug law enforcement is clearly not limited to the traditional role of arresting as many dealers as possible in anticipation of reducing supply,” said UKDPC chief executive Roger Howard.

“Drug markets will inevitably remain, and some enforcement agencies are beginning to prioritise their resources and efforts to curb the most harmful aspect of these.

“But to do this means having a much bigger picture of the harms being created and much better evaluation of the real impact and value for money of enforcement.”

What do you think of the UKDPC’s recommendations? Is the UK’s drug enforcement policy clever and nimble enough? Or is there a danger of the police going “softly, softly” on drug dealers by pursuing more innovative approaches?

To the surprise of many, not least the newspapers and TV channels that were telling us right up until Wednesday afternoon that his release was imminent, Ronnie Biggs has been refused parole.

Reason — a bad attitude. 

The 79-year-old Great Train Robber may be physically frail but is clearly unwilling to show the required amount of remorse that would get him out of jail and could now spend the rest of his days behind bars.

All the other 11 members of the gang that held up the Glasgow to London night mail, coshed the driver and made off with 2.6 million pounds served just a third of their sentences. Biggs wasn’t even on the train on that notorious night in 1963. He was down on the embankment.

His son Michael says Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s decision is devastating, his lawyer calls the decision to keep Biggs in jail “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Yet the original crime was audacious and huge. Biggs’ cheeky hop over the walls of Wandsworth prison and his subsequent two-fingers to justice from the safety of Brazil clearly rankled with the British establishment. If he had been released, he would probably have become a magnet for old lags all over the country, as far as his physical condition allowed.

Do you think he should have been allowed parole?

Abolish money. Punish the  looters. Eat the bankers.

Ageing 1960s hippies and their youthful anti-globalisation descendants joined in an angry  anti-capitalist protest at the Bank of England on Wednesday, waving placards and shouting slogans reflecting  a common fury at perceived corporate greed.

With worldwide recession destroying jobs by the week, protesters at the G20 protest in the City of London demanded an end to what they see as a global, predatory system that robs the poor to benefit the privileged.

“Welcome to Pig City: One war — class war” was the placard held up by a masked man standing on the doorstep of the central bank.

As hooded protesters scrawled “Peace and Love” on the walls of the Bank, Drogo, an elderly man in flowing multi-coloured robes and carrying an orb on a wooden stick, pointed at staff peering out of the Bank of England’s windows and said:

 ”I am here to tell these fat bankers to get off their arses and save the planet.

“They have to do it because they are still in charge – for now. But of course capitalism has to go down. We have had enough.”

One man strolled along Threadneedle Street dressed as a white-faced corpse in top hat and tails with a placard round his neck that read: “Their greed is killing our planet.”

Some windows were smashed. Protesters hurled paint bombs and empty bottles and occasionally threw punches at police, who responded with baton blows. 

Police said they had deployed one of Britain’s biggest security operations to protect businesses, the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange and other financial institutions.

But the clashes were almost desultory, if briefly dramatic. There was no general looting.

This was not Seattle, 1999, when demonstrators successfully disrupted a World Trade Organisation meeting, or London’s anti-Iraq war demonstration of 2003, when hundreds of thousands joined together in an impressively unified march for peace.

The G20 meeting was due to take place several miles away in the Docklands area of east London on Thursday.

On Wednesday, there were just 4,000 demonstrators, and the range of causes they espoused was  varied in the extreme, bringing together anti-capitalists, environmentalists, anti-war campaigners and conspiracy theorists of various stripes.

For much of the day the mood was carnival-like. The police managed to seal off the handful of streets around the Bank from the rest of the City, where workers went about their business normally.

A brass band played for several hours. And as the day wore on, protesters peeled away from the knots of angry young men taunting riot police to dance to a mobile disco set up on the steps of the Bank.

Above the disco, someone had fixed a large poster which read: “Hundreds of Architects and Engineers Demand a Real 9/11 Investigation.”

The hard core of violence-prone protesters were a tiny minority. Some masked and hooded young men belied their mysterious appearance by being friendly and talkative.

One, 19-year-old student Francis, explained: “Bankers have made bad gambles and we are all paying for it. They must take responsibility for that.”

There was even a good-natured counter-demonstration by pro-capitalists. One of them, Simon Richards, 50, from Gloucester, western England, said: “We have come to stage a counter-demonstration to show we are not intimidated by the terror tactics of these  protesters.

“We are in favour of free market rather than state control.”

Protester Mia, 21, a student from Denmark, waving an anti-war banner, said the range of causes on offer was a  strength, not a weakness.

She said she wasn’t just angry about international conflict.

“We’re here to protest about all of it. All these crises are linked,” she said.

“The U.S. has to borrow lots of money from China and other places to pay for all these wars, meaning they have less money for housing and other parts of their economy. It’s vital to demonstrate about it, provided it’s peaceful.”

 Here are a selection of placards and graffiti seen at the demonstration.

 ”Capitalism isn’t working”

“Drop books, not bombs”

“Banks are evil”

“People will stop robbing banks when banks stop robbing people”

“Make love, not leverage”

“Resistance is fertile”

“Housing is a right, not a privilege”

“You can rent the house you used to own”

“Eat the bankers”

“Banker, rhymes with ?”

A committee of MPs has warned police they must not impose restrictions on demonstrations “unless it is necessary and proportionate to do so.”

“The right to protest is a fundamental democratic right and one that the state and police have a duty to protect and facilitate,” said Andrew Dismore, chairman of the human rights committee.

The warning follows widespread protest at the way police handled a climate camp last year in Kent when demonstrators accused them of going in far too hard. 

They said police had used sleep deprivation and psychological tactics against environmentalists, including playing loud recordings of Richard Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” and the Clash hit “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”.

With huge demonstrations expected in London next month for the G20 summit — probably the biggest since the anarchic Mayday protests of the 1990s – the issue is a topical one. 

Do you think the police here overstep the mark in their handling of public demos?

A colleague tells me of a quick way to make cash for anyone who wants to. His neighbours discovered a pile of old taps and central heating pipes they had lying around had more value than they thought. A scrap metal merchant gave them £75 for them. ”It’s a bubble,” the merchant said.

It may be a bubble, but it’s proving a lasting one and one that’s causing problems in unexpected quarters too. In my salubrious part of Surrey, local churches are struggling to keep their roofs on and it’s not because of the volume of their congregations’ singing either. Thieves are stripping lead roofing and flashing to melt down and sell on.

It’s become a multi-million-pound problem across the country. Police have urged residents to call them if they ever see someone climbing on church roofs. And the churches themselves have decided they can’t afford to turn the other cheek. They’ve tried stake-outs and security patrols. Now, some are investing in special coatings that leave a unique lasting chemical impression on anyone who comes into contact with them.

It doesn’t solve the crime immediately, the police still have to find and arrest suspects for that to happen. But it’s a hefty deterrent - if they catch anyone climbing on roof tops they can carry out a quick check to discover if they have any traces of the chemical on them - if they do they can then be linked to specific offences and prosecuted.

There’s a line in the Old Testament of the Bible where Moses warns the Israelites, “Be sure, your sins will find you out.” I’m not sure he had this kind of technology in mind. But perhaps churches ought to be putting it on warning signs.

A new pilot scheme which allows worried parents ask police if someone with significant access to their children is a convicted sex offender has been launched by the government.

The Home Office says it will make it possible for single mothers, for example,  to find out the background of a new boyfriend, or for worried parents to check out babysitters.

The measures do not go as far as ”Megan’s Law” in the United States that allows local communities to find out about convicted paedophiles living in their area, but Sara Payne, whose daughter Sarah was murdered by a predatory paedophile in 2000, has campaigned for such a law in Britain and said the new pilot scheme was a welcome start.  

However, probation officers and charities have warned that the disclosure could force some offenders to hide from police checks. They also voice concern that the scheme could simply be ineffective because parents would be unlikely to check on their partners while pointing out paedophiles carefully groom victims over long periods of time.

Is the scheme a good idea, or does it go too far or not far enough? Send us your comments.

Ever wanted to know how many crimes were committed in your local area?

Well, by the end of the year you’ll be able to get some idea with every police force required to produce online interactive “crime maps”.

West Midlands and West Yorkshire are two of the forces who have put information about the number of offences in different neighbourhoods on their Web sites and on Wednesday the country’s biggest force, London’s Metropolitan Police, activated its crime mapping site.

The government believes that the maps will help alleviate public perceptions about crime, revealing that the number of actual offences is far lower than many people fear.

“By rolling out up-to-date, interactive crime maps, we can better inform people about crime problems in their area, and enable them to have much more of a say in what their local police focus on,” said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith last month.

“The latest annual crime figures showed another drop in crime nationwide but it’s important that people understand what this means to them in their local area and where challenges remain.”

New London Mayor Boris Johnson, who made providing the maps a key manifesto commitment, said it gave people the chance to see how their local police were performing.

‘This new online service means that Londoners will, at long last, be able to get information about crime levels in their neighbourhood at the click of a button,” Johnson said.

But how much use are they? The Met’s maps currently only provide details of burglaries, robberies and vehicle crime. The Police Federation, the body that represents rank and file officers, said the maps are not going to help and could even give criminals an idea of where the police are vulnerable.

Criminologists also argue that the data can be misleading as areas with high crime often have low reporting rates.

Looking up the crime statistics for my “sub ward” of London, I discovered the number of crimes fell from 6 to 5 last month, with my area given an “average” crime rating. And to be honest, I don’t know whether that should make me feel relieved, or worried.

Whose DNA is it anyway?

A “citizens’ inquiry” instigated by the Human Genetics Commission, a government advisory body, wants the records of people who have not been convicted, or whose convictions are long spent, to be deleted from the forensic National DNA Database and says the whole archive should be overseen by an independent body.

The database was established in 1995 in Britain - the country where scientists first pioneered the technique of DNA fingerprinting.

It now contains genetic profiles on more than 4 million people, representing the highest proportion of any population on a forensic DNA database in the world, at over 6 percent.

A future government might misuse the information, members of the inquiry fear. One  says keeping all the DNA records would be the first step towards a totalitarian state.

Police, though, find the database a boon, especially in trying to solve ”cold” cases from the past.

What do you think? Is the database becoming too big?

Conservative Swindon council is planning to pull the plug on the 400,000-pound annual grant it makes towards running its speed cameras, saying the money could be better spent on other traffic-calming measures.

Its head of highways, Councillor Peter Greenhalgh, is widely quoted in newspapers as saying cameras are “a blatant tax on motorists.”

Local councils can no longer keep the fines the cameras bring in, which may explain why they may feel less enthusiastic about them than before, but there are plenty of other bodies like the AA which have always felt cameras are over-used and no substitute for active policing.

The Department for Transport says some 1,745 deaths and serious injuries are prevented every year by the cameras.

Would you be happy to see other councils follow Swindon’s example or do you believe that speed cameras are a necessary evil to improve road safety?

 Gordon Brown may have won the 42-day detention vote, but the victory was ”hollow”, ”shameful” or “tactical”, depending on which newspaper you read. 

Under the headline “Westminster for Sale”, The Times said Brown had humiliated parliament with a victory secured through bribery and bartering.

“The prime minister staked his reputation on 42 days to look strong. Instead, he looks weaker. He has failed to win the argument, so has chosen to strike a deal,” it said in an editorial.

“This hollow victory will buy him time in the Westminster village, but at a sad and further cost to parliament’s prestige.”

Brown scraped through thanks to the support from Democratic Unionist MPs, the Daily Telegraph said in an editorial. And he made so many concessions that the legislation ended up looking like a “dog’s breakfast”.

“Why does it feel so much like a defeat?” the paper asked.

It’s because he “lost the argument and shredded his majority”, the Guardian said. He only won “thanks to backroom deals”.

“It was a forced victory in the worst of circumstances, a law no one wants imposed by a government that wanted to look strong, but ended up too weak to accept the obvious,” it said in a leader.

The Daily Mirror said Brown had been “lucky” and must now move on to focus on key issues such as high petrol and food prices. 

“He must take control of the agenda and show families, workers and pensioners what a Labour government is doing for them,” its editorial said.

A lone voice of support came from The Sun.

“Gordon Brown is entitled to considerable satisfaction after his victory,” it said. “He stood up for the fight against extremism in the face of deeply hostile criticism.”

 The 42-day limit is backed by police and security chiefs and will help protect the country, the paper added.

However, The Independent said it was now up to the House of Lords to challenge the legislation and continue its “doughty defence of Britain’s threatened freedoms”.

“We trust that…the Lords and Ladies will show their mettle,” the paper said.