Gary Monro’s blog

The standard shirt and tie uniform at Huntercombe Young Offender Institution - which housed, amongst others, robbers, would-be murderers and rapists - was replaced with jogging bottoms and t-shirt in order to make the warders appear less intimidating and to put the inmates more at ease.

At first he complied when the prison governor ordered him to wear the casual blue polo shirt and jogging bottoms. But Mr Brooks, a burly, tattooed former prison guard with ten years’ experience in adult prisons, said he soon noticed that he was treated with less respect by the inmates. He reverted to wearing the collar and tie because he believed that it taught dangerous young offenders respect for authority.

From then on he was barred from going on the courses he needed in order to earn promotion. He resigned 10 months later.

What a dilemma. In order to resist the right-on political correctness of a service that regards criminals as the real victims Mr Brooks had to disobey a dress code that his employer, however misguided, had every right to enforce.

Andrew Darkin, a member of the national executive of the Prison Officers’ Association, said that the new uniforms represented a misguided ideology pushed forward by those who wanted to “empathise” with violent young criminals. He said: “The ideology is, ‘Let’s help children, let’s not punish them’. We are talking about children who have done some heinous crimes — rape, armed robbery and attempted murder.”

In contrast, mobile burger and ice-cream vans will enjoy bumper sales as they serve a captive audience in Hyde Park. Supermarkets yesterday also reported rocketing sales of beer and blank video tapes as shoppers prepared to watch the concert from home.

There’s more than just Live 8 going on today it seems. Since I’m not a sports fan I have only the barest clue of what events are occurring but, it seems, there’s a full calendar today:

Richard Ratner, a retail analyst at Seymour Pierce, said that the combination of Live 8, the Wimbledon women’s tennis final, the one-day cricket final between Australia and England, the start of the Tour de France and the British Lions’ rugby game against New Zealand would have a “major” effect on retailers by keeping people glued to their televisions today. “I don’t think it will be easy for the retailers,” Mr Ratner said.

Mr Abbas is hoping to involve Hamas in preparations to ensure a smooth exit by Jewish settlers and soldiers next month. Israel fears that the inexperience of his fledgling administration and the lack of unity among his security forces will lead to chaos in the Gaza Strip after an evacuation.

Mr Abbas has pledged to ensure a peaceful transfer of powers and to prevent militants from firing on withdrawing soldiers and settlers. But as the withdrawal nears, a fragile truce Mr Abbas reached with Hamas and other militant groups is falling apart and attacks on Israeli targets have increased in recent weeks.

Zimbabwe’s slum clearances claimed the lives of a pregnant woman, a toddler and a baby as police razed a shanty town outside Harare, sending 10,000 people fleeing into the bush.

The latest raid against what the government calls “illegal housing” took place as Anna Tabaijuka, the UN’s special envoy investigating the ruthless operation against informal settlements, was reportedly praising President Robert Mugabe for his “visionary approach” to rehousing.

Well, it’s certainly a novel approach to rehousing. But visionary? Only if you’re envisaging mayhem and suffering.

According to the UN over 200,000 people have been made homeless by Robert Mugabe’s evictions - which makes Anna Tabaijuka’s claims a little difficult to sustain. Mugabe says the operation is designed to rid Zimbabwe’s towns and cities of “criminals” and “illegal black-marketeers inhabiting insanitary slums”.

Ministers “bullied” academics who wrote a report criticising plans for identity cards, the director of the London School of Economics (LSE) has alleged.

The LSE report sparked a row after it claimed the cost of ID cards could reach three times the government’s estimate of £6bn over 10 years.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke said the study was “technically incompetent”.

As well as accusing the LSE of incompetence Mr Clarke also said the findings were ‘fabricated’ and that one of the academics - who was against ID cards - was partisan. So Mr Clarke isn’t exactly taking their report very well, then.

LSE’s Howard Davies said the report involved 60 contributors and took 6 months to compile. In addition, it had been overseen by a dozen LSE professors.

Mr Clarke had branded the study as “mad” before he had even seen it, Mr Davies added.

“It is unfortunate that, on an issue where the civil liberties concerns are so serious, the government should have chosen to adopt a bullying approach to critics whose prime motivation was to devise a scheme which might work at an acceptable cost.”

The LSE report also claimed plans for ID cards were too risky and lacked the trust of the public.

And the government’s proposed system was so complex it could itself become a target of terrorists, the academics warned.

The LSE academics need to be careful. If they’re decreed to be ‘antis’ then maybe that’s the kind of information that could be held about them in the identity database. There’s no telling how it might be used against them in the future…