Months away from his retirement and his reputation in tatters as a result of his affiliation with the Iraq Aggression, the once widely respected British prime minister Tony Blair seems to have completely lost the plot.
While not nearly as bad as American prisons, jails in Britain are increasingly plagued by problems of overcrowding.
"Full to the bursting point," is how the prime minister described them.
Far from being a point of concern, Blair insisted that the British public should be gleeful about this state of affairs.
Yet Britons didn't seem too gleeful when a convicted child porn user was spared prison because of overcrowding.
This came after Britain's home secretary, who's responsible for the prison system, called on judges to give more lenient sentences to non-violent criminals so that precious prison space could be reserved for the most dangerous elements.
While convicted pedophiles were spared incarceration, the British prisons could find space for a peace campaigner who refused to pay a 50 pound (about US$98) fine and a climate change protester who also refused to pay a fine.
Apparently opponents of wars of aggression and of climate change are considered public threats but child porn users are not.
But rather than building more prisons or reviewing sentencing guidelines to see if they are rational, the Blair government is instead launching even more nanny state regulations.
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