Pre-Crimes
Blair to tackle ‘menace’ children
Tomorrow’s potential troublemakers can be identified even before they are born, Tony Blair has suggested.
Mr Blair said it was possible to spot the families whose circumstances made it likely their children would grow up to be a “menace to society”.
He said teenage mums and problem families could be forced to take help to head off difficulties.
He said the government had to intervene much earlier to prevent problems developing when children were older.
There could be sanctions for parents who refused to take advice, he said.
I was going to write a load of gubbins about this, about how you really should go watch the video of Blair being interviewed, because it’s frankly astonishing. Not just the mad gleam in the eye, but the fact that he quickly stops pretending that it’s about anything other than “teenage mums not in a stable relationship”. And woop, it’s the dying arse-end of the Major government all over again. Only with added megalomania.
I was going to go into sheer astounding impracticality of whatever the hell it is Blair’s actually suggesting (like how in 2004, over 40,000 children were born to mothers under 20 outside of marriage (ONS), a figure which hasn’t changed significantly since Labour came to power). I was thinking of drawing some sort of Venn diagram or other illustration of how Xs often being Ys doesn’t mean that Ys will usually become Xs. Or possibly a picture of a monkey trying to open a tin of soup. One of the two.
And I was just going to bang my head against random items of furniture and howl in pain and confusion at the utterly contradictory way that there’s this headlong rush towards evidence-based social intervention – if only we can collect enough data, we can control all of society! – based entirely on assumption, prejudice and blind faith.
But I can’t be arsed to do any of that, so I think I’ll just make a joke about Minority Report. Ahem. Hey, that idea’s quite like Minority Report, don’t you think? Heh.
Eh, needs a little work, perhaps.
Wayne Rooney 
One of the greatest moments in the history of Newsnight Review (or The Late Review, as it was then) was when Tom Paulin somehow managed to find deep meaning in Speed.
Criticisms? Sure. Duh. The tone flaps about a bit, as I said. They actually include for real that thing from the Orange adverts, where the guy ruins movie pitches by saying (**SPOILER**) “could they save the day through picture messaging?” (Seriously, they do). And the ending is more than a touch anti-climactic, going a bit too far down the comedy flightpath, and lacking the really big scene you wanted with Jackson going mano e snako with a seriously huge bastard snake.
