The law catches up with a stalker

THIS WEEK’S victim of the dreaded Bin Police is retired milkman Barry Freezer of Norwich (and there’s trend there) who dared to commit the capital crime of putting cabbage stalks in his garden waste bin.

I’ll say that again, shall I? He put cabbage stalks in his garden waste bin.

The 73-year-old (and why is it always our older people –war veterans and the like – who seem to be victimised by the town hall numpties?) apparently transgressed a rule which states that food which may have come into contact with meat can’t be mixed with composting waste to prevent outbreaks of diseases such as foot and mouth.

But in Barry’s case, the cabbage stalks hadn’t even been anywhere near the kitchen. They were dug up from his vegetable garden and went straight into the bin without even a nodding acquaintance with half a pound of mince.

The actions of the binmen are interesting here. Upon discovering the illegal cabbage stalks, they attached an immediate ‘red card’ to Barry’s bin, instead of the usual warning system of two yellows (no, I’m not making this up) and refused point blank to empty his bin. It should be pointed out that Barry already pays £35 a year just to have his green bin emptied although, as he says, he could burn the whole lot on a bonfire while shouting “bugger the environment”, but chooses not to.

The law which Barry apparently fell foul of is the Animal By-Products Order, imposed by the Department of Food and Rural Affairs following, in turn, a European Parliament directive which is part of an overall master plan to make all of us pay for every ounce of rubbish that we produce.

You may have heard Wee Gordie Broon declaring last week that this pay-as-you-throw system wouldn’t be introduced in Britain. Well trust me, he’s either lying or he’s deluded. It’s on its way, folks, and nothing can stop it.

THE MASSED ranks of NuLabour’s Turkey Army (“We’ll invent a job for you if you’ll vote for us”) must be getting nervous. The gravy train is heading for the buffers – appropriately enough via Crewe Junction – and the days of the government sinecure, plus gilt-edged pension, are numbered.

It’s only when you have a hard look at the government’s job creation scheme that you realise what a multi-billion pound disgrace it really is. A report this week from the Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed the astonishing number of unaccountable, unelected quangos still lurking in the shadows – 827 of them spending £101 billion of your money every year. Many of them have confused and wasteful roles with duplication rife.

Take the Carbon Trust (£85m a year) for example. Set up to advise businesses and government bodies on becoming carbon neutral, it does exactly the same job as another quango, Envirowise (£22m a year). And then there’s the Food Standards Agency extolling the benefits of a healthy diet while the Potato Council (£6m a year) launches National Chip Week.

So not only does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, it doesn’t really care as long as both hands get to dip into the taxpayers’ pockets.

AT LEAST one group of public sector workers is striving to protect and serve the public, with police in Brighton successfully preventing a planned mass custard pie fight on the prom because of … wait for it … health and safety fears.

Police pulled the plug after more than 1,200 people signed up to take part because of fears that they would not have enough manpower to be able to control the event and innocent passers-by could be targeted with the pies.

Society is also safe from flying feathers after a mass pillow fight in Leeds was cancelled, with police again stepping in to stop the gathering, organised on networking site Facebook.

Meanwhile another 73 teenagers were stabbed to death, another 27 ‘celebrities’ were caught snorting cocaine on video and a bloke down the road from me is still getting away with sneaking potato peelings into his discarded grass cuttings.

I’M RELUCTANT to join the chorus of dissenters accusing Cherie Blair of being a traitorous, money-grubbing hypocrite who pleaded privacy during her years in Number 10 only to dish the dirt on everyone and everything once she thought there might be a quick buck in it. Everyone else has had a pop, so what’s left for me?

(Particularly offensive is her overdue admission that little Leo did have his MMR jab – a revelation that could have saved hundreds of small lives – and her bizarre admission that she didn’t take her “contraceptive equipment” to Balmoral. Why do I imagine, with fingers over my eyes, some kind of weird Catholic contraption involving ropes and pullies?)

But I do find it repugnant that so many NuLabour foot soldiers, who have made their not inconsiderable fortunes out of the party, should now go for one last pay day at the expense of the poor saps left behind. Step forward, with a bucket in his hand, John Prescott, or even Tony Blair’s millionaire tennis partner Lord Levy.

Incidentally, Cherie’s book – which is damaging to Wee Gordie - was rushed out five months ahead of schedule. Perhaps the publishers don’t think he’ll still be around by the autumn. I certainly don’t.

Bashing the bishops

I DON’T want to sound like a lentil-eating, Guardian-reading, yoghurt-knitting Leftie, but was it really necessary for Metropolitan police marksmen to shoot dead Mark Saunders, the troubled young lawyer who started taking potshots at no-one in particular from his £2 million Chelsea flat?

Now if he’d been a dangerous terrorist, or even a Brazilian electrician, you can understand why they might want to pump five bullets into him as soon as possible. But he was an alcoholic suffering depression who spent five hours under siege while he blasted away at passing pigeons with a 12-bore.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to kill anyone with a shotgun, but it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. You would really want to be within 10 yards – preferably five – before being confident of inflicting serious damage.

I know, I’ve peppered several beaters on various shoots in my time. They just brush the pellets out of their grizzled beards and look forward to the extra £50 blood money that they know will be winging their way at the end of the day.

So there was no need for the police to ever come within that lethal range. They’ve got all sorts of devastating weaponry that can pick people off from up to half a mile away, so why couldn’t they just sit tight and wait him out? Why was it deemed necessary to storm the flat and engineer a fatal confrontation?

There’s something very fishy about this whole affair. No doubt all will be revealed at the inquest and subsequent inquiries.

Yeah, right.

IT’S BACK to Crimewatch corner, where we name and shame the desperados dragging our society into the gutter.

Step up to the stocks if you will, Desert Rat veteran Lenny Woodward. Now Lenny didn’t stab anyone to death or keep his children in a cellar for 30 years, but in the view of the Powers That Be, his crime is no less serious.

You see Woodward committed the heinous offence of “Putting an Empty Tomato Sauce Bottle in the Wrong Bin”, contrary to the Recycle Or Be Shot Act 2008. There is no excuse: Woodward had been issued with the full complement of blue wheelie bin for cans and cardboard, a green box for glass and a black bin for other waste. Regardless of this, he blithely threw the ketchup bottle into the blue bin when – as eny fule nos – they should have gone into the green box.

Now I don’t want to hear that Woodward is 95 years old and therefore possibly confused, or even that he is almost blind and could hardly read the council’s orders; indeed, if he’d read the “yellow card” the binmen left him and publicly apologised on his knees on the steps of Norwich Town Hall, he wouldn’t have subsequently received the “red card” that denied him any further collections.

Rules is rules. And any man who can map-read his way across the war-torn deserts of North Africa while fighting for our freedom must surely be able to understand a simple, 12-page, small-print, council directive.

Officer, take him down!

AT LEAST the criminal Woodward managed to put his rubbish into a bin, albeit the wrong one. Keith Hirst didn’t even bother trying, allegedly discarding an apple core on the public pavement.

The 54-year-old plumber, who has had heart surgery, then has the temerity to complain when he’s surrounded by five police officers, is arrested, has his fingerprints and DNA taken, is locked up in a police cell for 18 hours and then is marched off to court in handcuffs.

Honestly, some people.

WITH THE notable exception of the saintly Dr John Sentamu, when did you actually see a bishop? You know, a proper one - big fella, pointy hat, lots of purple velvet? No, I thought not.

Admittedly the rip-roaring Rt Rev Tom Butler made the news a couple of years ago when he spent too long at a reception at the Irish Embassy and subsequently climbed into the back of a stranger’s car, threw his children’s toys out and roared: “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do!” But apart from that, you don’t see much of them, do you?

There’s that Weird Beard chap who wants to adopt a legal system whereby shoplifters get their hands chopped off (not altogether a bad thing) but would also have all the gays hung from lampposts (probably not a good thing). He also thinks that there should be a salary cap on the rich, which is a bit … err … rich coming from a bloke who costs the Church of England over £1,000,000 a year on his own.

Yes, that’s right, the 44 CoE bishops, their palaces, offices and support staff – including cooks, gardeners and chauffeurs - cost the church just under £20 million last year, double what they cost in 1997.

Now that’s an awful lot of money, especially when you think that whenever I roll up at my own village church (Christmas Eve, weddings and funerals if I’m honest) I’m immediately blackmailed into coughing up a few quid for the leaking roof or the disintegrating windows. And it’s not as if our Vicar is coining it; he’s never seen so much of his parishioners since we all got frightened by the credit crunch and fled Waitrose to join him down at Netto.

So forgive me if I cross to the other side of the road the next time the CoE pleads poverty, because it’s clearly not poor – it’s just spending its money in a profligate and perverse manner.

Nailing the nation's most wanted

GOOD EVENING and welcome to Crimewatch, where the nation’s most dangerous criminals are named, shamed and subjected to general opprobrium.

First in the metaphorical stocks this week is that threat to society, Linda Jackson of Chaddesden, Derby, who was threatened with eviction from her council house of 17 years for the heinous crime of … not mowing the lawn. The fact that it had been raining constantly, that we’re not talking knee-high here, or that Linda, 42, usually mows the grass every two weeks, cut no ice with her city council landlords. Mow or go was the message. Tough on crime; tough on the causes of slightly long grass.

This is zero tolerance. Crack down on the little things and the big things won’t happen is the theory. And that’s why I don’t have any sympathy for Rachel McKenzie, 54, an archbishop’s secretary from London, who may end up with a criminal record after being caught under-paying her bus fare by 20 pence.

McKenzie wilfully boarded the Number 12 from East Dulwich to Southwark and swiped her pre-paid Oyster card over a reader next to the driver, not noticing that the machine had beeped to indicate that she had insufficient money on the card to pay the 90 pence fare. Sorry, love, but ignorance is no defence.

When an inspector checked her card and found it wanting, McKenzie offered to pay the difference in cash, but her offer was declined. A summons was duly issued and this dangerous criminal will now appear before Sutton magistrates on May 22.

Her legal adviser describes the case as “a scandalous abuse of the court system”. McKenzie herself says: “It reminds me of the days when people used to get transported to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread.”

Count your blessings, woman. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And this utter disregard for the law of the land rumbles on. Take 82-year-old Parkinson’s disease sufferer Jean Raine from Kendal, Cumbria. When she felt unwell during a shopping trip, she dozed off in her car which was legally parked in a disabled space.

Fortunately for the safety of us all, a sharp-eyed traffic warden noticed that her disabled parking badge was upside down and duly issued a £35 penalty charge notice, taking care not to wake the sleeping felon as he slapped it on the windscreen.

Was she grateful for this considerate attitude? Was she heck. “I cannot understand why the parking attendant didn’t wake me up,” she moaned. “He must have been on tiptoes – so quiet that he didn’t disturb me.”

Yes - softly, softly, catchee monkey.

Sadly, this crime wave continues, with what the Daily Telegraph calls “the respectable headmaster of a successful primary school” being caught fishing with an out-of-date licence. Sixty-year-old Bob Yeomans, from Walsall, now faces being banned from teaching after his conviction showed up on a government check designed to identify child abusers.

Mr Yeomans may have 38 impeccable years on his record as a teacher, but that cut no ice when he was caught fishing on the River Dove in Derbyshire after forgetting to renew his licence. A water bailiff duly nabbed him, he was prosecuted under the Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975 and fined £50 with £70 costs by magistrates.

Mr Yeomans then returned to his 355-pupil school, rated “good with some outstanding features” by Ofsted, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. A year later his chair of governors was notified that there was a problem with a Criminal Records Bureau check on staff and phoned Mr Yeomans to tell him.

“I said ‘Is it a member of staff’ and he said ‘No, it’s you’. He had to visit me and decide if I was fit to work with children.”

He is now waiting on a decision on his future, but has so far been allowed to keep his job.

Now this may seem like a petty intrusion on a capable man’s career, but ask yourself this: do we really want our young people to be casting off their hoodies and guns and to instead spend their spare time tickling trout without a licence? I think not. A crime is a crime. There are thousands of possible mugging victims out there but not very many brown trout. It’s a case of supply and demand.

And after all that, I really can’t be arsed bringing you the story about the man who hung a Jolly Roger flag outside his house to mark his daughter’s pirate-themed birthday party. I think you can guess what happened next.

OF COURSE, many of the above crimes against society could – and should - have been eradicated if the nation’s network of CCTV cameras actually worked. After all, we have an incredible 4.3 million of them – astonishingly a quarter of all the CCTV cameras in the world. No, really. That should, in theory, mean that Big Brother Britain is the safest country on earth. Sadly street robbery and violent crime (as well as illegal fishing, bus fare evasion, upside down parking and illicit grass growing) are at their highest levels ever.

The problem is that these much-vaunted cameras are crap. They might have cost billions of pounds, but the cops can’t be bothered reviewing them because it’s too much like hard work and even the Home Office admits that four out of every five images requested by the police are completely useless when it comes to identifying suspects. So we’re the most watched society in the world and it’s all a waste of time. Brilliant.

The real problem is that this false reliance on cameras – on our motorways as well as on our high streets – has allowed the police to abrogate responsibility for patrolling our neighbourhoods. And that means that old ladies are falling asleep in parked cars willy nilly and nobody is doing anything about it. It’s an absolute disgrace.

Welcome to the Banana Republic

I HAVEN’T got anything against Paratrooper Stu Pearson’s right leg. The problem is, neither has he.

Sergeant Pearson, 31, had his left leg blown off by a landmine in Afghanistan 18 months ago. He’s now got a highly technical, hydraulics-aided prosthetic limb, although he still needs to use a wheelchair when the appendage becomes too painful.

But it seems that this leap forward has caused the Department of Work and Pensions to declare the Queen’s Gallantry Medal holder as “fully fit”. He therefore loses his £325 a month Disability Living Allowance but, more irritatingly for Stu, he also loses his blue disabled parking badge.

As he says: “I can’t get my leg out of the car without opening the door as wide as possible so have to park in disabled bays. They give blue badges to people just because they’re fat these days, but a guy gets his leg blown off for his country and doesn’t qualify.”

You can understand his anger. While Stu is struggling in from the far reaches of car parks at Tesco or Lidl, those lying benefits scroungers with a magical Tin Leg of Money dangling redundantly from their arms will be rolling into the prime places, smug smiles of feigned injury firmly in place. You can see them every day. They don’t even know how to walk with a crutch, never mind put any weight on it.

When I come across one now I honestly feel like kicking their magical Tin Leg of Money away while shouting: “It’s a miracle! This fat, anorak-wearing fraud can now walk!”

Of course, doing so would see me arrested, charged and probably imprisoned, where I’d have a rent-free room with a television, as many Class A drugs as I could manage to take and, if you believe the tabloids, a constant supply of hot and cold running prostitutes. The notion appeals all the more.

IF YOU want further evidence of the warped values of our sick society, you need look no further than the case of the two elderly sisters from Wiltshire who have had their fight to earn the same inheritance tax rights as gay couples thrown out by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Joyce and Sybil Burton (89 and 82) have lived together in the same home since birth. They have paid their taxes, cared for ageing parents until death without any help from the state, had brothers who fought in the Second World War and a sister who was a nurse throughout the Blitz.

Yet because of our shabby inheritance tax legislation, when one of the sisters dies, the other will have to sell the £875,000 house and move out to pay the £50,000 tax bill. Does that really seem fair to you? Who in their right mind could possibly think that this was a reasonable demand by a reasonable government?

As the sisters say: “If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world. But we are sisters, and it seems we have no rights at all.”

Perhaps the nation’s usually verbose feminist movement might want to take up the case of these horribly victimised old ladies? Because what’s going to happen to one of them is a hundred times worse than being shouted at in the street because you’ve got a moustache.

I ALWAYS laugh when I hear that Britain has dispatched electoral observers to some dim and distant shore to keep an eye on the voting habits of a bunch of former colonials. And that’s because our own electoral process is now as open to fraud as the worst kind of banana republic.

Oh, how we titter as the Americans end up electing the gibbering George Bush because of hanging chads in Florida. Oh, how we tut as Robert Mugabe makes a mockery of Zimbabwean democracy. Well before we laugh too much, we could do well with having a hard look at our own practices in places like Bolton and Burnley.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust is hugely critical of NuLabour’s introduction of postal voting on demand - i.e. that you don’t have to give any reason why you can’t turn up in person and vote in the normal way. This is because the system makes it possible for one person to control the ballot papers of every person in a multi-person dwelling. And let’s not beat about the bush here; we’re talking about houses containing large numbers of relatively recent immigrants who have brought with them a culture where women and junior members of the family do what they’re told by the household senior.

The Rowntree report is explicit: “Greater use of postal voting has made UK elections far more vulnerable to fraud.” Examples abound from the last General Election of the ballot papers of entire streets being collected up and handed over to one person, who then presumably voted the way he’d been persuaded or even bribed.

And it could have been even worse than that. So desperate are NuLabour to hold onto power (and we must assume that they think they are the party that stands to benefit from such practices) that they even thought about introducing voting by text message – a recipe for widespread fraud if ever I’ve seen one.

So please, spare me patronising smiles when some ex-colonial civil servant sets off with his pith helmet and malaria pills to cast an eye over the electoral process in Bongo-Bongo land. He’d do far more good if we sent him to Bradford.

YOU KNOW, I can’t help but feel that this bloke in Austria is getting a rough deal. Let’s face it, which one of us has never locked a young girl in the cellar for a few months?

Let him who is without sin …

It's April Fool's Day again

DO YOU ever get the feeling that you’ve woken up in a parallel universe where it’s April Fool’s Day every day? It certainly seemed like that on Wednesday, St George’s Day, when I opened my super soaraway Sun to read that those irritating Europeans had snuck up on us overnight and unilaterally split the country into three Euro territories.

Actually, ‘unilaterally’ isn’t quite fair, because Wee Gordy Broon has long since sold our sovereignty down the river and we’re inexorably now part of a federal European super state. Why do you think he wouldn’t let us vote on it?

Still, it’s a bit of a shock to wake up in Huddersfield and find out that you’ve been forcibly twinned with Helsinki. (“Herring for breakfast again, Father?”) But that’s what’s happened, however extraordinary it may seem.

The entire eastern side of Britain has been annexed to parts of the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden in an arbitrary grouping called the North Sea Region. Similarly, a chunk of southern England has been linked to northern France and Belgium (the TransManche Region) while the west of Britain, from the tip of Scotland down to Land’s End, has been lumped in with Ireland and coastal areas of France, Spain and Portugal to form the Atlantic Region. It’s all quite barking.

The “stated strategic objectives” of this underhand integration are to “support the emergence of a common space of citizenship, a sense of belonging to a cross border area with a unique identity”. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t share a “common space of citizenship” with a fisherman in a Portugese village. I don’t even share a “common space of citizenship” with a Glaswegian Mars Bar-fryer, a Welsh benefits fiddler or a tarmac-laying tinker, and I have no wish to, thank you very much.

Of course, there’s a hefty element of bribery at work here. Each region has millions of Euros to spend on indoctrination, and grants will be available to organisations willing to stage a pro-EU publicity campaign and promise to fly the EU flag for at least a week.

Didn’t they used to call people who sold out their country for 30 pieces of silver “Quislings”?

WE THEN adjourned to Holyhead magistrates’ court where, presented before district judge Andrew Shaw, was a man who posed as Darth Vader to attack a Star Wars fan who had founded his own Jedi church. No, really.

Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27, from Holyhead, admitted assaulting Barney Jones and cousin Michael with a metal crutch. They suffered minor injuries. Hughes, who was drunk and dressed in a black bin bag, shouted “Darth Vader!”, jumped over a wall and attacked the cousins, who were filming themselves playing with light sabres in the garden, with a metal crutch. (I wondered how long it would be before the Magical Tin Leg of Money made an appearance in this story.)

Mr Hughes apparently has a chronic alcohol problem and had drunk the best part of a 10-litre box of wine. Further to that, the court was told, he could not remember the incident and only realised what had happened when he read about it in local newspapers. The judge warned Hughes that jail remained a possibility before adjourning for reports until 13 May.

So it’s alright to bandy light sabres about in public and to worship craven idols, but not alright for a man who’s had a swig of pop or two to remonstrate with the non-believers? The mind boggles.

WEDNESDAY didn’t get any better, with another daft story dropping out of the internet ether claiming that a toy manufacturer in the Ukraine has announced that it is to sell dolls of the former German dictator Adolf Hitler. The 16in figurine - complete with moveable arms to reproduce Hitler’s infamous salute - will first go on sale in the capital Kiev.

So again, we check the calendar, convinced that this is another hoax, only for a seemingly-convincing video report to turn up on the BBC website by mid-afternoon. So it must be true, surely?

It seems lucky owners will be able to choose to dress their mini-Fuhrer from a selection of outfits including ‘early days Adolf’ (brown shirts and jodhpurs) and ‘wartime Adolf’ (a grey double-breasted tunic, black trousers and simple Iron Cross medal).

The doll will also come with accessories like a miniature Blondi, Hitler's faithful Alsatian, whose loyalty was repaid with a cyanide capsule in the Berlin bunker.

The appearance of a plastic Adolph in the playroom raises some interesting issues. Barbie should be OK, being the sort of Aryan superdoll of which he approved, but those mixed race Bratz will be heading to the dungeons of the toy fort before you can say ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Fireman Sam will come in handy in case of another pesky blaze at the Reichstag and it will be interesting to see which side the Airfix air force comes down on. Anyhow, don’t be surprised if the Dolls’ Dictator annexes Legoland and then invades Balamory.

AND THE madness continues. Which is the next story of the day that’s too stupid to be true? The priest who floated off into the skies over Brazil attached to a thousand helium balloons? The trainers that can grow a full size at the turn of a button? The Bruce Oldfield designer uniforms for McDonald’s staff? Or the drought in Turkey that is causing a nationwide shortage of that tea break essential, the fig roll?

I just head back to bed, hoping that Thursday will be a better – and more sensible - day.

The magical Tin Leg of Money

A FEW weeks ago I wrote about the plethora of so-called authorities now allowed to legally spy on us – all in the name of national security - by intercepting our post, reading our emails and tapping our phones.

While accepting that the security services and the cops should have such powers, as long as they were underwritten by a judge, I complained that it was dangerous in the extreme to give the jobsworths at our local councils spying rights on the basis that once they had them they were sure to abuse them.

Soon after publication I had two angry messages from local government bods. How dare I brand them Little Hitlers (although I had done no such thing) and that I ought to know that they could conceive of no situation that might cause them to invoke such Draconian measures.

Yeah, right.

Fast forward a month or so and the story breaks that a couple from Poole in Dorset had been under surveillance by their local council for two weeks for threatening national security by allegedly sneaking their three-year-old daughter into a local primary school when they didn’t live in the correct catchment area. (If only Osama had thought of that one, eh? Packing our schools with children from too many streets away? That would teach the infidel running dogs a lesson or two.)

When I say under surveillance, I mean the full James Bond monty: followed on school runs, tracked throughout the day by council officials, and watched at night to see where the family slept (they owned two homes, one of which was in the right catchment area).

It further transpires that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has also been used by local councils to spy on dog-owners suspected of not cleaning up after their pets and to place surveillance cameras in old baked bean tins in lay-bys to catch fly-tippers.

Now both of the above are clearly anti-social acts (although I reserve judgement on that terribly middle class ‘crime’ of school-blagging’), but do they really deserve to have powers intended to fight terrorism used against them? Why can’t our councils deploy one of their bin police or traffic wardens or one-legged, black, bicycling lesbian outreach workers to stand by the side of popular footpaths and shout: “Oi! Pick that up, mate!”

Isn’t that more cost effective than having two nerds from the planning department going out at night with infra-red goggles, those shoes with a compass in the heel and a cyanide capsule just to photograph Mrs Goggins from Number 32 letting her toy poodle Tony do a whoopsie on the footpath?

I HAVE noticed a new badge of honour on the scrote estates – the single, aluminium NHS crutch. You can see them in Lidl or stood smoking outside flat-roofed pubs; seemingly healthy members of the underclass with a crutch dangling ineffectually from one arm, supporting nothing more than a benefits claim.

And watch the papers for more evidence. Most of the stories about charity fraudsters, eBay conmen or thieving junior accountants feature a picture of the alleged miscreant, crutch wobbling harmlessly in the breeze. Only this week a “sicko from Scarborough” who conned Tom Cruise and John Travolta by posing as the grieving dad of dead actor Heath Ledger (yes, I know, weirder sentences you will never read) appeared outside the Crown Court, crutched-up and seemingly only a gasper away from an oxygen mask.

(This chap is a bit of a belter if we’re honest. He’s got 40 previous convictions for dishonesty and has a tattoo claiming that his mum died in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Unfortunately – or even happily, I think - she was alive and well and living in Doncaster on 9/11.)

The Daily Mail this week attempted to draw the family tree of Shannon Matthews’ dysfunctional family. It was Mission Impossible from the start; the chart, littered with multiple children by multiple fathers, ended up resembling the formula for DNA. Still, they helpfully highlighted those family members in jail or on bail for perverting the course of justice, benefits fraud or, in one case, serving life for murder. I can’t help but think that it might have been a greater public service if they’d flagged up the clan members who dangle the magical Tin Leg Of Money while queuing up to buy their scratchcards.

MUCH HAS been made of the impact of economic immigrants from eastern Europe on modern life. The lentil-eating Lefties claim that they make us all richer; the hard-pressed public services in places like Norfolk complain that their children are swamping schools to the point that it’s no longer necessary to employ covert surveillance of middle class parents because they’ve all moved away anyway. (Let’s face it; who wants little Hermione to come home speaking fluent Albanian?)

My own experience of the new migrants is overwhelmingly positive, to an embarrassing point. The Polish waitresses in my favourite gastropub are charm personified – a million miles from the surly, resentful, slack-jawed English dole scum who occasionally turn up for work. The organic farm shop where I buy my carrots, artfully smeared with mud, is manned by Lithuanian crop-pickers.

But the most impressive bunch of grafters are the Romanian gypsies who run the car-wash operation at my local Tesco. I often struggle to get my car back from them, such is the care they lavish upon it, and all for a tenner. And you know what? Not a single one of them has a magical Tin Leg of Money dangling from their arms.

Yoghurt Knitters 1, Chinese Thugs 0

AFTER THE humiliation that was the much-vaunted opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, it took the debacle of the Olympic Torch procession to restore a bit of national pride. And didn’t we do it well?

As the blue-tracksuited Chinese thugs, who were according to the newspapers highly-trained killers from crack military special forces units, struggled to cope with a man with a fire extinguisher and a few barmy yoghurt-knitters, it did your heart proud to watch democracy in action.

Have some of this, Denise van Outen! Stitch that, former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq! It was fantastic; an utter farce from start to finish.

Of course, you might ask why the Beijing Olympic Games Sacred Flame Protection Force, as they are apparently known, were allowed to jog through the streets of Britain in the first place, manhandling Lord Coe and roughing up assorted Z-list celebrities as they went. After all, didn’t we have enough of our own paid heavies to cope with the demonstrators? I’m thinking of the cycle helmet-clad coppers in high-visibility jackets and the outer layer of riot police. Wasn’t that enough to guarantee safe passage?

I know that if I was a pro-Tibet protestor (and, truth be told, I’m rapidly heading that way) the sight of China’s finest coming the big man on the streets of the capital wouldn’t have put me off; rather, it would have inspired me to have a pop at them. Me and that Max Mosley.

Meanwhile our brave Prime Minister, Wee Gordie Broon, managed to “welcome” the Olympic Torch to Downing Street without actually touching it, so continuing his craven habit of distancing himself from anything that might look remotely negative including, it must be said, most of his own government’s policies. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

I’M PUZZLED about all this fuss surrounding property prices. According to the hysterical London media, we’re suffering from a massive financial crisis because house prices have dropped 10 per cent in the last three months. Well so what?

I sit here in Beelzebub Mansions, my country pile apparently worth £10,000 less than it was worth last week, and how have I been affected? Well, not at all, really. My mortgage payments, vast though they are, haven’t increased. There are no bailiffs banging on the door and, as yet, I can still afford to feed the family by shopping at Waitrose, rather than Lidl. So what’s all the fuss about?

The only people who might be affected are those whose fixed-term mortgages are coming to an end (and are you really going to tell me that they didn’t expect the rate to increase when they renewed?) and those people who are trying to move house. And even then, we must presume that the house they are looking to buy will have decreased in value by a similar amount to the house they are trying to sell.

It’s all a lot of fuss about nothing. The only thing any householder has to worry about is if Max Mosley moves in next door and there’s insufficient sound-proofing. As for the rest, it’s just London-based journalists sweating that the sale of their two-up, two-down terrace in Notting Hill won’t fund their exodus to a country pile where they can wear green wellies and moan about smelly cows.

SPEAKING OF which, expect some serious media condemnation of the Dewsbury Moor estate, where Shannon Matthews lived with her “extended family” until her alleged kidnap.

When this story broke there was much soul-searching about the way the Matthews and their ilk were portrayed by the press, particularly in comparison to those nice, middle-class McCanns. The red-top tabloids held their noses; the posh papers condemned the hypocrisy.

But now, with Karen Matthews charged with perverting the course of justice in connection with her daughter’s disappearance, all bets are off. The Sun, the paper you lot buy in greater numbers than any other than this one, were first out of the blocks comparing the estate to Beirut and whining about grown women making their way to the shops, in the rain, at midday, while still wearing pyjamas and slippers. (To be fair, they used to do that in the street where I grew up, on their way to buy a pint of ‘loose sherry’ from the off licence.)

Bailiffs abound, we are told, and residents happily show off their electronic tags as some sort of fashion item. The easy comparison is made with the fictional Chatsworth Estate, home of the TV series Shameless. Unfortunately that doesn’t quite stand up. Consider this: Karen Matthews has seven children by five different fathers. Two of those children she calls ‘The Twins’, not because they are twins, but because they have the same father. That’s close enough.

Now there’s not a TV scriptwriter on earth who could have come up with a line like that. Not even if they moved Max Mosley in next door.

NOW I know that they’re trying to show willing, but some of the madcap schemes that the Powers That Be come up with only go to show how far removed from reality they really are.

The latest embarrassment is the abandonment of the plan to make all paedophiles register their email addresses so that social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook could ban them from pretending to be attractive teenage boys when in fact they were 50-year-old lorry drivers from Tamworth.

One small point: it takes approximately five seconds to set up a new email address, something that clearly didn’t occur to the great brains who run this country. If the cat wasn’t laughing before, it is now.