Get tough on crime

THERE is nothing new in knife crime or lenient sentences. In the midFifties at a village fete in Surrey, a teenage Teddy Boy was told to behave himself in the beer tent. Without warning, he stabbed my father one inch from his heart.

Because the lad came from a dysfunctional family — his father and brother were in prison — he was given a nine-month sentence and was released before my father left hospital.

Could today’s rise in knife crime be tackled by reintroducing conscription for young, unemployed men to provide them with education, discipline and the opportunity to get a career?

They could earn money and be a

better example to other young men in their peer group.

Troubled teens could be moulded into productive members of society and reduce the pressure on the police and prisons. Wellington and Nelson trained young men like that to win wars.

ROBERT BOORMan,

Cambridge. LITTLEJoHN is wearing his rose- tinted glasses when looking at the good old blackand-white TV days (Mail).

In Dickens’s time, there were gangs committing robbery with violence. In the Sixties, Mods and Rockers fought it out at the seaside armed to the teeth, and there were razor gangs at Brighton racecourse — plus the Krays and the Great Train Robbers.

Britain has always been rife with criminality. The only difference being the treatment by the state of those arrested and convicted. PaUL CHaRLES COOk,

Huddersfield, W. Yorks.