Knives.

The Devil's Kitchen is now the Devil's Knife. No doubt the hand-wringers will bleat that this new name 'glorifies knife crime' but, well, let them. They'd find something to whine about if he called it 'the Devil's Teaspoon' or 'the Devil's Very Nice Six-place Dinner Service in Fine Bone China' They just like to whine.

In that Tory manifesto, the Cameroid insists that people are not going to prison often enough for knife crime. Considering that the mere possession of a knife is a crime, that sounds like a good thing. Threatening or attacking someone with any weapon - even a teaspoon - is criminal. Merely having the weapon - even a teaspoon - is not, or rather should not be.

They have banned us from carrying anything we might use to defend ourselves. This has had absolutely no effect at all on those carrying weapons for criminal purposes. Criminals don't say 'oh, sorry' and stop being criminals just because you ask them to. They ignore laws. The clue is in the name.

Now they are working on getting rid of dogs. Little by little, news item by news item, a ban on dog ownership is peering over the horizon.

Criminals already know that if they break into a law-abiding person's house, they will not be looking down the barrel of a gun. I've never owned a gun but someone breaking in wouldn't have known that for sure. Now they do. Soon they will also be sure there's no dog here. They also know that if they mug someone, it is very unlikely that the victim will have any sort of weapon on them.

These bans always hand the advantage to the criminal because the criminal ignores the law and the law-abiding don't. Criminals now know for certain that their targets are unarmed. Cameroid will make this worse.

To date, we can still have a knife in the kitchen so any burglar will have to take care there. They know, of course, that if their victim attacks them, that victim will be punished. The burglar has no need to steal, just get cut and sue for compensation. The Cameroid says he will improve that situation but doesn't say how. The only weapon available in the house is a knife, and he wants more people to go to jail for knife crime, and yet he says he wants to defend people who protect themselves against violent criminals. What do we do - fend them off with a colander?

This selective legislation on a single potential weapon is insane, on the surface. However, consider the effect of saying 'weapon' as opposed to saying 'knife'. Weapon is a generic term that doesn't conjure up any specific image. Everyone sees something different. Knife - as soon as anyone says that, it conjures up very specific images indeed. The shower scene in Psycho, any serial-killer film, that time you cut one slice too far when chopping an onion... we can all easily envisage the effects of a knife. The psychology of such lawmaking ensures it gets popular support. Once that's done, it's on to the next specific thing.

So now we are to be so scared of knives that a butcher cannot use one in a supermarket because he doesn't have the right bit of paper to say he can. Try buying a kitchen knife nowadays. You'd think you were buying a can of nitroglycerine. Best of all, try buying one while looking dishevelled and twitching. Scares the crap out of them.

People are scared even of a photo of someone with a knife. The very mention of such an implement is enough to induce a panic attack. I wonder how those people manage to eat.

So, good luck to the Devil's Knife in his new, non-sweary incarnation. Won't be long before somone is offended though. There's no escaping it. Those people are offended for a living.