I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore

I SUPPOSE I’m what you would call an “early adapter”. My first mobile phone wasn’t so much a brick as a briefcase. I had satellite telly from Day One, through one of those squarials, rather than through Mr Murdoch’s dish, and the man came round to fit the Sky+ box the day after it was launched.

I like technology and the convenience it brings to my life. I like trying something new. (Heston Blumenthal’s recipe for 24-hour steak lies in a 50-degree oven downstairs as we speak, as pink and flaccid as a Cleethorpes sunbather.

That’s why I was one of the first people to embrace internet banking. Back in 1990, when I had no money for Nigerian scammers to steal anyway, I threw caution to the wind and signed up to First Direct at a time when carrier pigeons and donkey carts were used to carry cheques down the information superhighway.

We’ve had our ups and downs, mostly due to my almost permanent insolvency, but the relationship has survived. Even when my current mortgage provider promised me a few bob a month off my payments if I moved my bank account to them I declined, preferring to stay with the tried and tested. And, of course, they’ve made thousands of pounds out of me during the past 15 years – bouncing cheques, overdue credit card payments, charges for letters: you know the score.

Now, at last, I’ve reached the “head above water” stage. I owe them nothing, I’m usually in the black and, consequently, my banking is genuinely free. At least it was.

My good old friends at First Direct have announced that from February, all current account holders who have less than £1,500 stashed away will be charged £10 a month for the privilege of phoning their call centres. (They have them in Leeds, Scotland and Liverpool. If a Scouser answers the phone, I hang up immediately. Well would you let one of them dabble in your finances?)

I cannot tell you how angry I am about this. I supported this company when it was new and risky. I’ve stuck with it through a misguided sense of loyalty. And now they want to rip me off to help fund their obscene profits just because they’ve been banned from over-charging poor people with huge credit card debts. Well it’s just not good enough.

I now have to move my bank account, with all the form-filling frustration that entails. I have to build up a new credit history. I have to memorise a new PIN. And I’m effing fuming.

I feel like the Peter Finch character in the fabulous film Network, the newsreader who cracked up live on air shouting: “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

So First Direct can get stuffed. The clipboard-wielding Council Tax man who’s coming round to see if I’ve fitted a new toilet roll holder can get stuffed. The local council clown who wants to fit an electronic chip to my wheelie bin can get stuffed. Civil disobedience starts here. I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

YOU KNOW that time of year when the council decides to resurface every road in the area because if it doesn’t spend all its money, it’ll lose it out of next year’s budget? I suspect that our old friends in the Jokeforce, the secret government department set up to provide material for satirical columnists, is having a similar crisis, because this week they’re everywhere.

So where to begin? Well, there were the two government policy statements in one day: shoplifters and other “minor” criminals are to be let off if they say sorry, while homeowners (yes, owners) could be thrown out of their property if a family member persistently misbehaves.

Quite where they’re to go once they’ve been evicted isn’t clear. And who gets the house? A party member? I think we’ve been here before.

Moving on, we have parents being threatened with “intervention” (NuLabour’s latest buzz-word) if social services judge them to be ineffective parents. Punitive measures could include nursery rhyme classes where Ma and Pa Scrote would be forced to learn the words to Baa Baa Ethnic Minority Sheep.

In Market Harborough, Leicestershire, a kiddies’ Postman Pat musical ride outside a shop has been outlawed by the authorities in case someone walks into it. It’s been there, keeping thousands of kids happy, for years. Number of cases of Patricide? Zero. Go figure, as the hamburger-eating surrender monkeys would say.

I’m sure you’ve all read about the 200 drug addict prisoners who are to pocket £3,000 apiece because they were forced to go cold turkey in the nick. There’s Mr Blah’s European Human Rights Act in operation, my friends. I’m only surprised that Cherie didn’t get a piece of the action in bringing the case.

The ceremony of switching on the Christmas lights in Scarborough won’t be happening this year. Ten thousand people turned out last year, which has frightened the fire service who only feel capable of coping with 2,000. Rather than try to make it ticket only, the council has pulled the plug completely. Presumably the Chair of the Public Works Committee will now have to sneak out at 3am and flick the switch when no-one is looking.

Race watchdogs (what a horrible, authoritarian nomenclature that is) are studying a reissued edition of the 1939 Dandy comic Christmas issue because it contains within the dreaded N-word. Well it would, wouldn’t it? It’s a historical document, not a handbook for modern life.

Now Desperate Dan, Little Plum and Korky the Cat face prosecution and, presumably, a good old-fashioned book burning. Again, haven’t we been here before?

YET THROUGH the doom and gloom, a bright light shines. A lady called Sue Palmer has opened a nursery in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where the 20 young customers are actually allowed to PLAY OUTSIDE!

The children only come inside for breaks and the rest of the time are allowed to make mud pies, build dens, roam around and explore. They learn about wildlife and insects, sit round a campfire and play on an obstacle course. They have learnt that stinging nettles sting, that brambles scratch, and that fire burns.

Ms Palmer should be made a Dame fast … before she’s sent to prison for child abuse.

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 lost money betting that those lions couldn't eat the elephant on Planet Earth, of anyone not sympathising with David Archer now he's kept the whining wife but lost the best cowman in Borsetshire, or of anyone not outraged at the way Coronation Street scriptwriters disregard simple facts. Everyone knows that Jack Duckworth was born in 1934, but these idiots had him celebrating his 70th birthday last week. History cannot be rewritten in this slapdash way.