Why don’t you take a stroll along Pentonville Road singing "My Old Man Said Be An Arsenal Fan", by way of an experiment? My guess would be that you’d discover where "bitch slap" shades into "kick the living shit", round about the Modern Cafe.

Other than that, I will now happily testify on your behalf in any future trial, something along the lines of "from his postings on the internet, your Honour, it seemed clear to me that he was a classic keyboard warrior who was happy to talk the hard man but who visibly posed no danger to man, beast or fly".

‘More people have phones, so it’s easier to report’.

‘More people have insurance, and so must report offences which they previously wouldn’t have reported’.

‘People report crimes now which they would have accepted in past times’.

‘The police are inflating the figures to justify demanding increased resources’.

‘Only fear of crime has risen, driven by the evil punitive tabloids with their Daily Mail agenda’

and anyway, if crime HAS risen, it’s all Thatcher’s fault.

(I did mention "Senior Lecturers from the School of Moral Panic" though. And as if by magic, up pops dsquared !)

Have you ever considered the startling idea that people who use turns of phrase and figures of speech might just be doing that? It’s a controversial idea for an "academic" so far up their own arse that they are the subject of major key papers by leading topologists, but I believe it is commonly found among human discourse.

This is John B’s blog, not Crooked "ain’t we clever" Timber. On Crooked Timber I probably would have said "There is the obvious danger that if I was attacked by a young gentleman sporting a hoodie, I might have to drop my copy of Rousseau and defend myself with a proportionate use of force."

Of course you are perfectly correct about the excellent crime record of this Labour government.

"This would obviously be a "grossly disproportionate" response.."

Not, I think, if you stopped kicking him once he was down, and didn’t use anything external as a weapon.

It’s hardly likely to happen, but my daughter did witnness a girl being, apparently at random, punched very hard in the stomach in broad daylight in Kentish Town a year or so ago.

This would obviously be a "grossly disproportionate" response and I for one would find it difficult to muster the energy to sign up to the campaign to have you released (particularly now that I know it was premeditated).

However, as luck would have it, we know from the crime statistics (squaresville … yawwn) that episodes of unprovoked attack by youths, women being punched at bus stops, and indeed, youths having the living shit kicked out of them by internet keyboard warriors, are all on the way down and have been for years. So there is actually no crime trend to worry about, except for one which exists purely in the imagination of wowsers and squares.

I must be such a square to consider punching a woman in the face at a bus stop, for a laugh, a form of physical assault.

If this activity was being performed by US troops in Iraq, you’be using it to justify suicide bomb attacks.