Chinese burns for ungrateful immigrants

STICKS AND stones may break my bones but, to be perfectly honest, an angry Muzzie waving a bit of cardboard isn’t going to hurt me at all.

That’s why I’m uneasy about the lengthy jail sentences handed out this week to four men who were part of that notorious demo outside the Danish embassy in London. Three of them got six years apiece; the other – a father-of-five BT engineer – got four.

Their crimes were various, but seemed to me to have mainly consisted of doing a bit of loud shouting.

Of course, holding up a placard reading “Behead those who insult Islam” is a bit over the top, but we’re a tolerant nation; we can handle the flak – especially when it doesn’t even involve us, as with the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.

And I fully take the point that if I wandered round holding up a sign reading “Give Chinese burns to ungrateful immigrants” then my feet wouldn’t touch the ground before I was facing 10 years on Dartmoor and being very careful not to drop the soap in the shower.

But the right to demonstrate is the right to demonstrate and freedom of speech is freedom of speech. What worries me is now that the cops have made an example of an easy (and probably popular) target, what happens the next time the Countryside Alliance shows up with a banner reading “Actually, forgive our dreadful rudeness but we really don’t care very much for the Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP”? The police have now got carte blanche to wade in batons flailing. (Just like they did last time, come to think of it.)

And to put those six-year sentences for doing a bit of shouting in context, what about the case of Yassin Nassari, from Ealing, west London, who was last week convicted of “possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist”?

Mr Nassari was nicked at Luton Airport with plans for a home-made rocket in his case. He was en route for a terrorist training camp in the Middle East. His computer at home contained documents about martyrdom and weapons training, as well as instructions on how to construct the Qassam artillery rocket. Police also found several graphic videos of terrorist attacks and beheadings at his home.

Nassari, the wannabe terrorist with the knowledge, the skills and the will to do serious damage to the citizens of this country got just three and a half years. He’ll be out in 21 months – even earlier if there’s another NuLabour early release panic. How that compares with shouting “Murder Tony Blair, he’s a liar and a coward,” I don’t know. After all, it happens every night in our house.

SADLY, WE have another case of False Hero Syndrome. Particularly tragic as it concerns a 16-year-old on his second solo flight.

Sam Cross, of Hornchurch, Essex, was ordered by air traffic controllers to do another circuit as he was coming into land because there was a faster plane behind him. Sam then lost power, stalled, and crashed. Eyewitness Louise Sutherland said she thought he had deliberately crashed onto a cricket pitch to avoid hitting any buildings or people.

Now I’m sure it makes his parents feel better to think that, but he lost power and lost control of his plane. He had no choice where he crashed. And even if he did have some control, he’s got the choice of hitting a tower block of flats or some nice grass. What would you do?

I don’t know why this nonsense annoys me so much, but it just does.

WHILE WE’RE on about dodgy foreigners (see above), we should keep an eye on the situation on the River Kennet, near Reading, where 60 swans have been caught in a slick of cooking oil.

We’ve been here before with asylum seekers eating swans. It’s just that they never tried to fry a whole river’s worth before.

THE BBC ties itself in knots over the fact that its production staff have been routinely ripping off the simpletons who phone in on competition lines or because it reassembles film to suit the plot of a programme, but is it really that serious? So they fiddled a Children In Need competition or a Comic Relief scam – so what? The money still went to charity.

Do we really care that a woman was shown bidding at an auction on Flog It! when she had attended a different auction some weeks previously? Or, in Channel 4’s case, that Gordon Ramsey didn’t really catch the three fish he subsequently cooked on an ice flow?

(And how will this new “honest” approach that we’re promised affect cookery programmes anyway? Will we have to wait for 90 minutes while a dish actually cooks, instead of having “one we made earlier” produced from the oven?)

The BBC has been lying to us for years, the prejudices of its own staff responsible for both cultural and political deception. As for the rest, well it’s television, stupid. It’s not real. Next you’ll be telling me that they fiddle the evictions on Big Brother.

SO THIS fake eviction on Big Brother. Was it any surprise that the week the hideous Charlie was up for the chop, they decided that the eviction wouldn’t really count? And what about this week? She’s firmly in the frame again when Big Brother decides that Ziggy and Chanelle have been talking about evictions and therefore have to lose a vote each – a vote that would surely have seen the dreadful harridan at the mercy of the public once again?

Next you’ll be telling me that Blue Peter doesn’t replace dead pets with lookalike substitutes.

I REALLY don’t see the point in the tit-for-tat expulsions of Russian and British diplomats. It’s a throwback to the Cold War years and, seeing as we’ve got about 70 staff in each other’s countries, chucking out four spies apiece isn’t going to make much difference.

Of course, if Mr Putin really wanted to hurt us, there are far better ways. How about recalling all the Russian workers in the catering trade or, even better, withdrawing a couple of hundred lap-dancers from our gentlemen’s establishments? Without a steady supply of nubile Russian blondes the whole industry would grind to a halt, leaving bored businessmen having to ogle the tattooed charms of Lucy from Luton rather than the more exotic allure of Ludmilla from Leningrad.

As for retaliation, we could just ban their billionaire barons from buying Bentleys … or football clubs.