Look out - here comes the Wakey Wakey Squad

IT SEEMS that never a day passes without our media-obsessed Ministers popping up on well-known heavyweight political programmes like the Lorraine Kelly show or Hole in the Wall to announce yet another ‘major initiative’. It’s either creating non-jobs, tackling knife crime, or telling us we’re all fat and are going to die young. (Let’s face it – that seems like a decent option at the moment.)

Wednesday’s Crackerjack pencil went to the ginger midget Hazel Blears, our Communities Secretary (no, I don’t know what one of those is either), who dismounted from her motorbike to announce that a crackdown on ‘Shameless’ families could see state officials turning up at people’s homes to get them out of bed for work and make sure their children go to school. No, really.

Here are the brave new words: “In a recession, there’s no space for freeloaders. We need a more muscular approach to the ways the state intervenes into deliberately-unemployed people’s lives.

“We should give local agencies and voluntary groups new powers to do whatever it takes to get people off the sofa and into a job.”

So let’s get this straight. It’s 7.30am outside a tower block on an inner city sink estate. Up above around 500 scrotes snore soundly, sated by an overdose of Findus Crispy Pancakes, White Lightning, Tesco Value Fags and Freeview porn. Suddenly a coach rolls up. It’s the Wakey Wakey Squad - 50-odd social workers, bailiffs and assorted Plod, all come to arouse the underclass to put them to work painting old ladies’ fences and scrubbing graffiti off the underpass.

So what happens next? Presumably they have to kick in a few doors to wake the heavy sleepers and drunks. Do they then wash and dress their children, stoke them up with Ready Brek and pack them off to school? Do they find the missing gym kit or write the notes excusing Tyrone from games because he’s got a verruca? And what do they do with the kids who are being hidden underneath a divan bed in a bizarre kidnap plot?

Do they then do the same to the adults, ignoring Frank Gallagher’s whining because his poached egg isn’t runny? How do you dress an uncooperative lowlife? Do you iron his hoodie and brush the dandruff off his baseball cap?

How can this possibly work? Have you ever heard of anything so daft in your life?

If we then multiply that one tower block requiring 50 public sector staff by the number of tower blocks in Britain, then add in every other slovenly abode on a dodgy estate across the nation, and you can see just how stupidly impractical this whole thing is.

It’s nonsense, blathered out by an idiot politician and unthinkingly reported by an increasingly under-resourced and amateurish national press. Did no-one think to say: “Hang on, Hazel, how is this actually going to work?” No, of course not. The column inches are in the bag; the TV minutes have been logged by NuLabour’s media stormtroopers.

It demeans every other sensible policy that might, once in a blue moon, emanate from Westminster. And it demeans the noble craft of journalism, and as a hack that makes me very cross indeed. It’s pathetic, just pathetic.

HAVE YOU seen that telly advert for financial services giant Norwich Union announcing how it’s changing its name to something moronic like ‘Aviva’, in which famous stars recall how they had to do the same to achieve real fame?

There’s Richard Starkey (not even the best drummer in The Beatles), Walter ‘Bruce’ Willis, Dame Edna and Vincent ‘Alice Cooper’ Furnier, all extolling the benefits of a new monicker. But I can’t help feeling that if they really wanted to make the point, they should have put a phone call in to a certain Paul Gadd. I wonder why they didn’t?

OVER THE past few months, I’ve been replacing any expired lightbulbs at Beelzebub Mansions with these new-fangled low-energy things. It has to be said that they’re hopeless. They give off a horrible, dim, cold light; they’re twice as expensive as the normal ones; they flicker in a way that can cause migraines, nausea or even epileptic seizures; and if you break one they’ll fill your home with poisonous mercury gas and kill all your children.

But try to buy a traditional 100 watt bulb and you’ll struggle, because retailers have been bullied into adopting a ‘voluntary’ ban on them after government pressure. Why so?

It appears that we blithely signed up to the ban during a European Union meeting in Brussels in March 2007, attended by Tony Blah. Over what appears to have been an amenable lunch, we also agreed to build thousands of wind turbines, give over millions of acres of productive farmland to growing ‘biofuels’, pay fines of millions of euros if Mrs Smethwick from 37B chucks an errant Brussels sprout into her ‘fortnightly’ bin, and to let Mr Berlusconi have first go on Lucy Pinder now she’s been evicted from the Big Brother House.

I’ve actually followed this one through with assorted council officials. Once everyone sobered up after the meeting, the rest of Europe waddled off home and said no more about it. Here, being less than a generation away from Nazism, the policy was ruthlessly imposed despite it being impractical and unworkable.

So we now we are chucking away light bulbs – and fittings – that are tried and tested, that don’t make a silly buzzing sound, are cheaper, more effective, safer, don’t make anyone ill, and are probably more environmentally-friendly. And that, we are told, is progress.