If you don't like it, don't go back

IN THIS blinkered, bag-of-shite life that we endure, badgered by targets and rankings, it still comes as a surprise that prisoners of the Devon and Cornwall Police are being asked to fill out a 'customer satisfaction survey' after spending a night in the cells.

Rapists, paedos, thugs, drunks and fiddling NuLabour MPs are being asked to rate their incarceration experience based on the quality of the food, the cleanliness of their cell, the lighting and air temperature, the quality of the towels provided and how 'safe' they felt. (Safe? They're in the fucking nick. How safe can you get?)

The full list extends to 41 questions and also includes requests for ratings on bell/buzzer instruction, the provision of outside exercise if requested, the suitability of any reading material provided and whether or not lags were sufficiently instructed in how to make a complaint.

The clown in charge of this madcap pandering to miscreants is Chief Inspector Ivan Trethewey, the force's 'Head of Custody' who, in the weasel words of modern Britain, says: "I wanted a reality check: what I think the service is that we are providing versus what detainees tell us we are giving them."

The last time I spent a night in the nick (Good Friday, 1975, since you ask), customer satisfaction surveys were a bit thin on the ground. I was on my way back from a football match in a car we'd borrowed from a bloke we didn't actually know. I was booted across the concrete of a service station, 'accidentally' had my head smashed against the roof of the van as we were loaded up, 'fell down' the stairs at the nick and was given one paper plate of cold baked beans and two cups of machine tea a day, before being chucked out 64 hours later on Bank Holiday Monday morning, penniless and 150 miles from home.

But it certainly worked for me. I haven't been back since.

Surely it's time to sterilise the poor

SO WHAT are we going to do about Theresa Winters, the 36-year-old mother of 13 who is pregnant with her 14th even though every single one of her children has been taken into care?

This mad woman is locked into some kind of battle of wills with the social services, vowing to keep on producing children until the authorities allow her to keep one. The financial bill for the care of these poor kids runs into millions of pounds; the emotional toll is even greater, with many of the children severely disabled or now dead. Yet still we allow this utter nutter to irresponsibly procreate, while getting through 40 fags a day and a carton of Findus Crispy Pancakes while on benefits.

You all know the answer, however unpalatable it might be. She has to be stopped. She has to be sterilised. As should many of the thick-as-mince underclass slappers who see producing a child as a lucrative, home-securing career.

The problem is, who decides? Who will be the Lord High Childkiller, sitting in judgement on the poor and the disadvantaged; deciding which couple might fashion a credible life from the dregs of their miserable existence while giving the tramp-stamped, lycra-legginged, benefits-blaggers a fast track to the sterilisation ward?

Well let's have a points system. Unless you can clock up a sufficient score for being in a stable relationship, with at least one partner working (or willing to work), and without several previous multi-coloured offspring, then you won't be allowed that cash-generating infant. The minute you turn up at the doctor's surgery with your beneficial bump, then you'll be shipped off to the government abortion facility before you can say Gordon's Gin.

It might seem harsh, but you have to agree that it would meet with the approval of most poor bloody taxpayers.