How utterly depressing. I had an intimidating and humiliating encounter with two young men (one a stockbroker in the City, he said) on a train the other night that left me feeling completely despondent about the state of British society. If it had been the first such incident I'd experienced, or if I thought it was the last, I wouldn't have found it so angering. And if just one person in the full carriage had had the courage to speak up, I would have a bit more hope for us all.

Something has gone horribly wrong here.

If you want to get a true gauge of the depravity to which English society has sunk, catch the last train from Liverpool Street to Southend on a Friday night. I promise, you will either blow your brains out or renounce your citizenship. In a blow to those who think that trouble in our society is caused by the feckless, drug-taking inner-city unemployed, most of these people are workers in the city. A drunken, violent, puking, foul-mouthed gaggle of monsters from hell.

I will be in London next week and I am almost for the first time since I've been travelling there in the past 15 years, feeling a bit of trepidation.

Kev, what a coincidence -- my disturbing train incidents always happen on the night trains from Liverpool Street to Southend or Shenfield.

How tragically unsurprising to see the police implicated in this fellow's tragic suicide, by following a familiar inversion of their duty to protect the innocent and pursue the guilty.

It is precisely upsetting and infuriating events like this that risk provoking a dangerous, extremist backlash against the awful country we have allowed ourselves to become. Incidentally, it will also favour, as Peter Hitchens argued on Sunday, those fundamentalist Muslims already here who despise our historic openness and tolerance - things which seem to be imploding into permissiveness and immorality - and endorse only the loathesome Sharia.

Britain may well have become a debased and disgusting society in general, but one only has to get out and about to discover that decency and kindness still abound among many English people, living out their characteristically understated lives, far from the big cities and especially from the capital.

For their sake and ours Melanie I do urge you to keep up the good work, just in case it's not too late to turn back from the dreadful course our society has already taken.

Perhaps George Monbiot or AL Kennedy will write a trenchant article in the Guardian about it ....

If you search the archives of any local paper you'll find such stories of continual harassment - but unless the victims are black (and therefore victims of racism rather than generalised thuggery) it rarely makes the headlines.

In yesterdays Sun

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2003511459,00.html

"A MUM who hired two minders in a bid to protect her family from yobs has admitted defeat — and moved.

Bev Rodgers paid the guards £70 a night after louts broke her partner’s jaw, raided their home and torched their cars.

The mum-of-two, 38, vowed to stay put on Sheffield’s Manor estate.

But she gave up when the gang continued to run riot. They started three fires at the family’s semi, stole a pet ferret and smashed fences.

Bev, who is keeping her new address secret, said: “The yobs just saw the minders as a challenge.”"

If you voted for new labour you don't deserve anything better. People just refuse to believe that Tony, with his nice smile and a decent education could turn a blind eye to social disintegration - he gets away with it because most of you idiots can't see through him -even after all this time ! - for god's sake, how many kids will be killed at school or on the streets before you understand.

The implication on all these threads is that the responsibility for these incidents belongs with New Labour. But this sort of behaviour was prevalent in our society long before the Labour Party came to power. If anything, its worst excesses were the product of the Thatcher years. If Tony Blair is repsonsible for a man in a wheelchair taking his own life, then by the same yardstick Thatcher was responsible for the massacre at the Heysel stadium in 1985.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

There are as many translators as there are humans.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger

Do you really have nothing better to do than whip up paranoid hysteria?