Obsolete

Congratulations to the pranksters, extreme right-wingers, republican/loyalist dissidents, fundamentalists or security services which performed today's hilariously pathetic 'attacks' in London. There hasn't been such a humourously useless attack in Britain since the Real IRA fired mortars at the MI6 building, breaking a window.

There's little point in commenting on these incidents as yet, but the reliable Richard Norton-Taylor from the Grauniad has written some quick analysis. I'm not sure whether this was simply a warning or possibly a distraction from something else big that is going on/going to happen. The next few days may be very interesting.

Also of note today is this:

Overall crime in England and Wales has dropped by a further 7% in the past year, contributing to a "historically unprecedented" fall over the past decade, according to official figures published today.

But this continuing fall in total crime is marred by an apparent rise in violence against the person, with the number of incidents recorded by the police topping the million mark for the first time.

Home Office statisticians describe the continuing fall in overall crime - down by 44% from its peak in 1995 - as "quite extraordinary and historically unprecedented, at least for the last century".

The 2004-05 results of the British Crime Survey, which is regarded as the most reliable indicator of crime trends, show that overall crime fell by 7% in the past year, with a 20% fall in domestic burglary, an 11% fall in car thefts and an 11% fall in violent crime.

If these figures are right, have we all just become more sensitive to crime? It's still never out of the gaze of the media. Poverty certainly hasn't dropped by any significant margin, so it can't be down to that. I don't have any answers, and I haven't seen any that have been suggested either.