WE BEGIN with a literary reference. Don’t panic. We’ll be sneering at poor people, slagging off the Scotch and rubbishing the Turkey Army before long.

It was Mark Twain who said: “There are three types of lies – lies, damned lies, and statistics.” He may well have had a point. Because according to Sky News (yes, I know), one in 10 people in this country claim that they’re being stalked. Now let’s just think about that. One in 10 people is what … six million, give or take an illegal asylum seeker or two?

Now assuming that stalkers - by their very nature - concentrate on a single victim, that would suggest that another six million people are hiding in hedges, rooting through bins, training midnight binoculars on bedroom windows and, at a push, bringing innocent pet rabbits to a rolling boil with a stalk of rosemary and a finely diced leek.

Why hasn’t anyone noticed them then? With six million perverts out there, you shouldn’t be able to move without tripping over a shifty bloke with a squint and his trousers round his ankles.

By rights, there should be queues in the communal gardens of blocks of flats. You’d have to take a numbered ticket to secure your ten minutes looting the washing line of the object of your desires. Think of it as a trolley dash.

No-one would be able to get a pay-as-you-go phone line after dark as the massed ranks of heavy breathers clogged the airways. Newspaper sales should be rocketing as nonces painstakingly cut out individual letters to assemble their missives of unrequited love. Buy shares in Pritt Stick now.

Statistics, eh? Two out of three adults don’t believe them.

BRITAIN’S PUBLIC sector employees (aka the Turkey Army) went on strike on Monday to protect their extremely generous pension rights. You can’t really blame them for that, although I do hope the cheeky buggers had the grace to blush as they bleated about their “harsh” treatment.

(And what better day than a Monday to go on strike? Long weekends all round.)

No, what offended me was the boasting of the assembled trades unions that this would be the biggest dispute in Britain since the General Strike of 1926. Is that really something they wish to aspire to?

The General Strike was brought about by poverty, hunger, disease and appalling rates of infant mortality. The working classes (and by that I mean the proper ones, not just the leather-elbowed, lentil-eating Guardian readers of today) were suffering terrible deprivation and stopped work out of desperation, rather than out of blatant self-interest. The comparison is therefore distasteful, to say the least.

The NuLabour apparatchiks who were manning the imaginary braziers this week weren’t on strike because they couldn’t feed their organic children. They were striking in an attempt to preserve an unfair advantage: the gilt-edged final salary scheme pensions, linked to an early retirement date, that are denied to most of the rest of us.

And we’ll not even mention the endless sickies, the extra “public” holidays and the massive numbers of early retirements (and we’re talking at the age of 50-ish here) through so-called ill health that exist in the green and flowering glades of those Elysian fields.

So forget the romantic notions propagated by the Lefties and their media partners. The only principle being fought for in this altercation is the very Thatcherite belief that “Greed is good”.

WE’VE BEEN told how to wash our hands, now we’re being told how to run our baths. Apparently you’ve got to put the cold water in first, and if you don’t one of that nice Mr Prescott’s inspectors will be round to rap your knuckles.

And just in case you can’t be relied upon to manage this simple task, new building regulations will ensure that all new homes are fitted with a special valve that will never allow hot water to exceed the temperature of 49 degrees C.

I hear on the wireless that this new law was pioneered in Scotland. Funny that. The Scotch have never struck me as a people overly concerned with such matters.

WHILE WE’RE on the subject of that nice Mr Prescott, I was rather surprised to see him responding to a story concerning the £70,000 a year in public money he claims for his constituency home by saying: “I have not made any money from of politics, for God’s sake.”

Now I know he’s a Class A nincompoop, but even he must realise that a salary of £135,000, expenses of over £100,000 a year (plus that seventy grand), a magnificent pension pot, that eight-bedroomed turreted house in Hull, a grace and favour flat in London and the free use of a magnificent country house are not the usual accoutrements of a bar steward on the Hull-Zeebrugge ferry. Well not unless the punters are exceedingly good tippers, anyway.

AND JUST when your faith in the parliamentary system was fading, along come Liberal Democrat MPs John Barrett and Andrew George, who have tabled a Commons motion demanding that internet auction sites should be banned from selling Blue Peter badges.

Well, I suppose it gets depressing having to worry about the war in Iraq, our appalling schools, the collapsing NHS, a laughable public transport system, the rising crime figures and seemingly rampant corruption in public life all of the time.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone who seriously thinks Doctor Who could ever be played by a woman, of anyone not laughing themselves silly at that cocky bloke on Millionaire who was convinced Harold Pinter was dead, or of anyone who can't see the Coronation Street storyline about Rita drinking too much looming in the politically-correct distance.