Release the wandering tigers

MUCH IS made of the lack of opportunity for members of our ethnic minorities, so it’s good to see a couple of bright youngsters showing the rest of their compatriots the way to a lucrative life.

So let’s say you’re a typical Muslim lad: Bollywood and bangra, baseball cap and a pimped-up Vauxhall Astra with those boom-boom speakers that let you generously share your musical taste with sleeping neighbours. How are you going to make your fortune? It’s easy. Just shave your head, grow a silly “upside-down man” beard, and start wearing a sack. Sooner or later people will notice the change in your appearance. Then just sit back and await the six o’clock knock.

True, you might have to put up with the minor inconvenience of getting slightly shot, but as long as you don’t mind that – as well as spending a few days in a nice warm nick being questioned by the spooks – you can expect a decent pay-out of at least … ooh … say £500,000. And you get to go on the telly. Money for old rope, isn’t it?

Forgive my facetiousness, but when you look at the eye-rolling protestations of the Liberal Left over the Forest Gate raids, it’s difficult not to scratch one’s head and wonder what on earth is going on. I don’t for one moment believe that MI5 relies solely on the word of the nosy old woman in the laundrette when it comes to intelligence gathering. They must therefore have had substantial and substantive information that something fishy was going on, and that it involved chemicals in some way.

What then are they to do? Wait for an anthrax bomb to go off in amongst the crowds watching Ingerland on a big screen? Keep watching and waiting until one of the suspects starts heading towards the nearest tube station? Send round Sergeant George Dixon to tap politely on the door and inquire as to whether or not the occupants were actually suicide bombers and careful as you go?

Of course not. Once there was any significant information regarding a real threat, correct or not, there was only one course of action to take. Get in there quick and sort it out one way or another. That we should now be talking about a massive tax-free compo hand-out for hurt feelings and a broken front door shows how barmy we’ve all become. Do suspected burglars and drug dealers get cashback every time they’re nicked? I think not.

And anyway, no-one’s yet explained where that £38,000 in used fifties that was hidden in the Forest Gate house came from. Perhaps someone had won an earlier series of Opportunity Knocks.

BACK TO those big World Cup screens that the BBC erected in towns and cities all over the country at massive expense to the poor licence-payer and against the advice of police. What were they thinking of?

Has no-one in the Beeb’s Stupid Ideas department ever watched a football match in a pub? Did they not think what might happen when that drink-sodden scenario was multiplied by a factor of 100? And then brought nicely to the boil by an absence of Factor 50?

Expecting some of the drunken scrotes who’d be attracted to these bright lights to behave themselves impeccably while watching the tactical genius that is Sven Moron Eriksson floundering in the face of lesser opponents was a triumph of hope over experience. It was therefore no surprise at all when minor riots broke out in Liverpool and London, resulting in the plug being unceremoniously pulled at many venues.

I would suggest that the BBC might want to pay the costs incurred by the police and councils who had to clear up the mess they created, but of course, it would be you and me who paid, wouldn’t it?

(Oh, and congratulations to The Sun for almost avoiding mentioning the war by sneaking the headline “Late rally in Nuremburg” into its coverage of the Trinidad and Tobago match.)

THERE MUST be some terribly clumsy children out there. I arrive at this conclusion after reading that the council in Torbay has identified the resort’s trademark palm trees as “a danger to the public”.

Councillor Colin Charlwood (Liberal Idiot Party) has confidently declared “What if one of those sharp leaves caught a child in the eye, for example? It’s a bit like keeping tigers – they are beautiful to look at, but you wouldn’t want them wandering the streets.”

Right, two things: firstly, thorough research via that interweb thingy tells me that there hasn’t been a single case, anywhere in the world ever, of a palm tree leaping out and blinding an unsuspecting child. That means – if Councillor Halfwit is to be believed – that it must be clumsy children stumbling onto the palm trees.

Secondly, who is he to unilaterally declare that we wouldn’t want tigers wandering the streets? I can think of several situations where a tiger or two would be a welcome addition to the pavement populace – particularly anywhere the BBC has erected a giant World Cup screen.

I WAS going to write about The Dangerous Book for Boys, the bestseller that encourages fathers to introduce their male offspring to the more robust activities of their youth, but unfortunately I’m stuck up this bloody tree at the moment …

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 doesn't think that Argentina are going to win the World Cup, of anyone who phoned up Alan Green on 606 to say "Everything's fine, we've qualified", or of anyone who doesn't think that Sven has completely lost the plot if he can't see that Gerrard needs to play in the hole. Warning: Comments from Porridge Wogs and women will be deleted.