A very interesting topic, Mr Hattersley, but unlike you, I think I can understand the recent examples of murder you cite. Both were, I speculate, cases of extreme anger and hatred (one from the personal experience of being humiliated by a white person, the other from identification with fellow Muslims who are being suppressed and killed by white men) being projected by association onto innocent substitutes for the real culprits.

If that is madness, it a madness that most of us, certainly I am susceptible to and familiar with. I have experienced very similar feelings, and lived them out - in "fantasy", which, thank goodness, suffices for me. My anger and hatred then abate and sanity returns.

Society has to provide a deterrent against people living out such fantasies, but the idea of "punishment" seems to me terribly "self-righteous". Given the right - or rather, the wrong - circumstances, we are all, I am sure, capable of committing the most terrible deeds.

What did strike me as the act of an abnormally insane mind, was the case in which a man stabbed to death a complete stranger for having "looked at him in the wrong way". Putting him on trial and "punishing" him with a jail sentence - to deter knife crime, I believe the judge said - seems ridiculous to me, from my not-particularly-well-informed perspective. Rather, I suggest, he needed treatment, and putting away for as long as necessary to protect society.

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