Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime ...

THE POLICE helicopter hovers overhead. Three Transit vans roar down the country lane, disgorging a riot gear-clad snatch squad. Meanwhile an Armed Response Unit has plotted up in a nearby hedge, fingers hovering on the triggers.

And all because two girls have drawn a hopscotch grid in the road.

You think I’m joking, don’t you? Sadly not. In Halesowen, West Midlands, 14-year-olds Kayleigh Mangan and Georgina Smallwood were accosted by two community support officers and told to get a bucket of water and clean the chalk marks off the quiet street in which they live. Local kids had already been warned off “excessive” bike riding and told to stop playing ball games in the street.

A spokesweasel for West Midlands Police said officers had responded to a complaint about “numerous chalk markings on a large stretch of the pavement”. He added, probably in a nasal monotone: “There have been many reports of anti-social behaviour in the local area and we will deal robustly with this issue. By targeting what may seem relatively low-level crime, we aim to prevent it developing into more serious matters.”

So there you have it. Playing hopscotch turns you into a drugs baron or axe murderer. And I can just picture a young Al Capone skipping across the cobbles of turn-of-the-century Chicago.

THOSE OF us with a genuine social conscience constantly worry about the lack of integration of ethnic communities in this country.

That’s why the planned Muslin day at Alton Towers – now cancelled through lack of support - was such a bad idea. Surely we should be finding ways of living together, instead of perpetuating the ghetto mindset of voluntary segregation?

Unless it’s the Welsh we’re talking about, in which case I’d saw their country off from the mainland and set it afloat tomorrow given half the chance. Well, it’s not as if they want to belong to Great Britain, is it?

Look at that drooling Welsh nationalist youth in the Big Brother house. He’s already confessed to ostracizing English-speaking kids at his school and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s doing an A-level in cottage burning.

And then there’s the whole issue of teaching Welsh in schools in the first place. Do you know how many millions of pounds we’ve spent inflicting this dead language on generations of schoolchildren? No, neither do I, but I bet it’s a lot. And how many new Welsh speakers are there after nine years of this enforced brainwashing? Just 75,000.

It’s madness. Why aren’t we teaching them something useful, like Spanish or Chinese instead?

And it’s not just Welsh. There’s £600,000 of “European” money sloshing around in the system that’s meant to be spent on promoting the use of the Cornish language. (European money means taxes we have paid to the government which then goes off to subsidise Estonian turnip farmers, a fraction of which then comes back to us in the form of spurious grants.)

As ever with the Turkey Army of public servants, a “Cornish Language Officer” has been appointed (nice pension, free pasties) to further the use of the language in public life by having official documents translated into bi-lingual form, although one would hope that most of the inhabitants of Cornwall already speak the mother tongue and could therefore cope perfectly well with an English version of the driving licence application form.

Still, all is not lost. There appears to be three different versions of written Cornish and the 400 poor souls who still speak it cannot agree on which version should be the official one. The whole process has now stalled while old bearded men dressed in sheets mumble at each other in caves.

And the Cornish Language Officer? He’ll be out and about banning hopscotch.

HEALTH AND Safety update: Fresh from their triumph of being handed the responsibility for prosecuting the Metropolitan Police for shooting a passing Brazilian, the Nanny State Nazis scored another victory last week when Margaret Beckett, our hapless caravan-dwelling Foreign Secretary, invoked their dark powers to have a pop at the Americans.

Put on the spot after planes carrying bunker-busting bombs to Israel were found to be refueling at Prestwich Airport in Scotland, Mrs Beckett climbed down from her four-berth Bailey Pageant Champagne to tell Mr Bush that he had been very naughty – not for upsetting the soap-dodgers by landing his filthy weapons of war on British soil, but because failing to reveal the nature of the cargo had “health and safety implications”.

Magic! Let’s see how much protection a hard hat and a high-visibility jacket provides if that lot goes up.

COMPO CORNER: An American woman, “returning from war-torn Israel”, tells The Sun how she was terrified when she looked out of her hotel bedroom window in Cardiff to see explosions and a tank battle going on in the street below.

“Troops with guns started shouting ‘run for cover’”, she says. “I ran from the window and ducked onto the bed.”

It turned out to be a film crew working on the Doctor Who Christmas special. If I were the great man, I’d get back into that Tardis sharpish before the ambulance-chasing lawyers turn up.

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 hope that Coronation Street's Clare and Ashley Peacock call their new-born son Drew, of anyone not distraught that Fred ... I say, Fred ... Elliot is going to keel over and die in The Rover' Return on his wedding day, or of anyone not equally upset about the news that Jack Duckworth is packing it in next year.