The Devil's Advocate

Long time, no see

2010-11-21T03:06:00.000-08:00

It may be just a rumour, but I might be feeling my way on this new Twitter thingy.

See you there, if I can get it together...

Slacking off

2009-09-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

This blog is having to take a break for a while due to the demands of work (paying work, that is).

It will return soon, if only to annoy the Guardianistas, although why they bother coming here is beyond me.

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

2009-08-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Blue lights and red tape

2009-07-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

HOW LONG do you think it will be before our Health and Safety nutters start killing more people every year than they actually save?

We've already had a child drown in a pond because the Hobby Bobbies called to his rescue hadn't been trained in the correct use of Wellington boots and so declined to intervene. And a woman bled to death after being stabbed by her boyfriend because armed police didn't fancy entering her home just in case the knifeman was still on the prowl.

Now we have 61-year-old Roy Adams, who dialled 999 when having a heart attack only for the paramedic who was supposed to come to his aid refusing to enter the house until he'd spent 16 minutes carrying out a risk assessment ... by which time, of course, Mr Adams was dead.

The nub of the problem was an open front door, which suggested to the lily-livered medic that there might be armed and dangerous burglars lurking within. The truth of the matter is that Mr Adams was asked by the emergency services to leave his front door open so that assistance could be at his side all the sooner. Ironic, isn't it?

The London Ambulance Service says: "In this case the medic conducted an on-scene risk assessment and had safety concerns and decided to call for back-up. The assessment is a mental check list which medics are required to go through when they arrive at an emergency. Questions include: does the scene look safe? Are there any obvious risks? Will I need extra help? Are there any steps or other obstacles that could cause a problem?"

Well no, you shithouse. There's just a dying man lying on the floor on the other side of that open door and you're such a jobsworth that you won't even help him. Honestly, it beggars belief.

EDIT: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203501/Health-safety-row-man-dies-water-ditch-999-services-stood-waited.html

Make our MPs line the road at Wootton Bassett

2009-07-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

I WAS going to go to Wootton Bassett on Tuesday. I don't know why; I just thought I should.

But when it was clear that it was going to turn into a flower-chucking, Diana-inspired media circus - as we saw on the telly later that night - I decided to give it a miss. I'll go again, another day, when it's quieter and a lone squaddie is being brought back in a body bag.

I'm torn on this whole thing. The lining of the streets of this minor English town to show respect for our fallen has grown organically, and for the right reasons. It began when a funeral cortege just happened to go down the High Street as the local branch of the British Legion were rehearsing for a parade. From there it's grown and grown, but it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between a genuine outpouring of emotion and respect and a sort of ghoulish theme park experience.

What is certain is that not a single government minister has ever shown his face in the vicinity. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, has any representative of NuLabour, the people who sent Our Boys to war, ever attended a funeral of one of the fallen. The excuse is that "if we go to one, we'll have to go to them all". Well what's wrong with that?

Unless some of the thieving bastards have resigned in the past 24 hours, there are 349 Labour MPs across the country. There is no reason at all why they can't draw up a rota to ensure that one of them manages to don the black tie and drag themselves along to any Army funeral in their vicinity. It's the least they can do.

And if that proves too difficult to organise, then let's just send toothbrush-moustached Bob Ainworth, Minister for the Armed Forces, down to Wootton Bassett every time that coffin-laden plane flies into RAF Lyneham.

The lads who are dying are simply doing the government's bidding. So why are our politicians so desperate to distance themselves from the death toll?

Coffee morning leaves a bitter taste

2009-06-30T06:53:00.000-07:00

WE ALL know that old people can be bitter and vindictive - anyone who's experienced the hand-to-hand fighting in the queue at the Post Office on pension day will know what they're capable of - but to suggest that they might willingly maim toddlers is a bit beyond the pale.

Yet pensioners have been banned from holding a coffee morning at a public library in Peterborough amid just such fears.

The seven members of the over-50s coffee morning club have met at the library without incident for the last four years, but now 'officials' claim that toddlers who use the building at the same time could be injured by hot coffee.

Well, yes, of course they could, but they could also be hit by a block of ice dropped from a passing aeroplane, struck by lighting on the way there, or battered to death by their feckless parents while social services look on.

Death to Jackson fans

2009-06-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

THE man behind the world's biggest Michael Jackson fan club claims that followers of the star have committed suicide because of his death. Gary Taylor, owner of MJJcommunity.com, said he understood the tragedies had taken place mostly outside the UK, but he believed one might have been British.

"I know there has been an increase. I believe the figure may now be 12. I believe there may have been one Briton who has taken their life," he said.

Let's hope that there's not a branch of the fan club in Bridgend, or it'll be a bloodbath.

Roll up for the pikeys' picnic

2009-06-28T04:32:00.000-07:00

POLICE in Warwickshire, where an illegal gypsy camp sprang up on a Bank Holiday weekend a year ago, decided that they needed to improve relations with 'the travelling community', so they hosted a bash for 400 them at the force headquarters yesterday.

There were traditional Roma bands, dancing, bouncy castles, story-telling and food and drink provided for free. A PC PC said: "The party is new and engaging". Yes, I bet the tax-paying, crime-plagued families living next door to the illegal site are delighted about this pikeys' picnic.

But it's not just Warwickshire where cops would rather wine and dine disruptive elements than police them. The nutter in charge of North Wales police decided that he needed to 'engage' the area's Polish community and hear from them first hand about how they were 'victims of anti-social behaviour', so set up a £1,000 bash, refreshments laid on, for around 100 people.

One small problem - no-one turned up. Amazingly, this was seen as a positive, with Community Officer PC Keith Sinclair claiming: "It's reassuring to know that they have no real concerns."

It would be more reassuring if our police had the faintest idea about what concerns the poor bloody taxpayer.

Feeding the fat cats

2009-06-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

MORE MPs with their snouts in the trough, literally this time. Under the Freedom of Information Act, we now have access to the menus in some of the restaurants and bars in the Houses of Parliament showing that MPs are enjoying meals for less than £2 - and all subsidised by the taxpayer.

At the Portcullis Cafeteria, roasted red pepper and tomato soup was just 60p, while pasta with mushroom garlic cream was £1.90. At the Terrace Cafeteria, lasagne cost £1.90 while a rump steak dinner was £3.80. Swan and lark terrine was a mere 30p while roast peacock with all the trimmings cost less than a pound. Thirsty MPs - are there are plenty of those - could get a Bell's whisky or a Bombay Sapphire gin for £1.55.

In fact, in the year 2007-08, the Commons Refreshment department spent £12.6miilion against an income of £7.2million - a subsidy on the part of the poor bloody taxpayer of £4.5million.

Now I must confess at this point that I have myself eaten in the Commons and the Lords' dining rooms on several occasions in the past. I've even had more than a few pints in the Terrace Bar, where visitors aren't allowed to order drinks (although the cheapshate MP I was with asked me to pass him some money so he could get the beers in). But I never suspected that I was feasting off the taxes of a poor pensioner. And I bet the bastards claimed for the meals and drinks on expenses as well.

I'm not sure that many of us in the private sector still enjoy the luxury of a subsidised canteen, so why should our MPs and Peers who, as we all now know, are on a pretty good whack in the first place? Perhaps the new Speaker might want to turn his attention to this disgusting extravagance as a matter of urgency. Although seeing as he's such an appalling little shit that even his own side refused to back him, I think we might be in for a bit of a wait.

I'VE long argued that when the midle classes rise up against the iron fist of the Nanny State, it won't be ID cards or uncontrolled immigration that channels their rage, but the issue of dustbin collections. Now English Heritage and the Daily Mail seem to have cottoned onto this fact and have launched a 'Not In My Front Yard' campaign, railing against the plethora of plastic bins and boxes now littering our streets.

Now it's not much of a problem at Beelzebub Mansions. We just converted a spare stable into mini recycling centre and my man Whittaker drags the containers half a mile down the drive to the road every Sunday evening. But it's the Little People I feel sorry for - those who live in terraces or flats and have a choice of either wheeling their bins through their two-ups, two-downs or permanantly keeping them in the front garden.

Given that there's usually an old bath, a decrepit bike and several empty plastic cider bottles already littering their leisure space, the arrival of three, man-size, differently coloured plastic wheelie bins seems an impostition too far, even for the Poveratti.

I NEVER knew that school was such a dangerous place - although we did have our moments when playing Split the Kipper with flick knives we'd smuggled back from a school trip to France. (Along with the porno playing cards, the football match flares and the cans of CS gas.)

A survey of 600 teachers has revealed the true extent of the horrors the Health and Safety nutters think that our children face in the playground. Footballs are routinely banned from the premises, as are egg boxes and toilet roll tubes (risk of infection). Sweets are also banned (risk of choking) as is shaving foam (quite bizarrely because of a perceived risk of drowning).

A five-page briefing note must be read before Pritt Stick is deployed in the classroom and goggles must be worn if children are going to use that well-known poisonous explosive, Blu Tack. Is it any wonder then that we're producing generations of compo-claiming wimps?

Every little helps democracy

2009-06-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

ONCE UPON a time, many years ago, I seriously considered standing for election against an arrogant, lazy and corrupt local councillor – a bloke who, amongst other things, refused to vote against the party line when an illegal gypsy camp opened up on the primary school playing field.

What put me off in the end was the sheer logistics involved. As an Independent candidate, bereft of the support of a party machine, I’d have had to do everything myself. I’d have had to pay for the leaflets and posters myself, do all the dreadful door-stepping myself, write my own supportive letters in false names to the local press and spread my own, libelous, internet smears against rivals. It was just too much to take on.

In the event, the sitting candidate was returned because no-one in that part of town could bring themselves to vote for the Tories while the Liberal candidate was caught in a compromising position with another gentleman on the local park four days before the vote.

Now come the next election, whether that be in October or June, the disgraceful trough-snouting of the current incumbents is certain to inspire a wave of white-suited, shining knights in honest armour, eager to turn back the tide of sleaze that has engulfed the present system. But they will all face the same problems I did, only more so in a General Election scenario.

But wait, I have an answer – the Tesco Party. Yes, the Tesco Party.

Think about it. If the retail giant was to offer every potential Independent candidate the services of its nationwide network, suddenly taking on the big boys would be a distinct possibility. You’d have a least one established base in every constituency, a place to hold meetings and Saturday morning surgeries. You’d have access to advertising expertise, top class designers and the economies of scale offered by volume printing.

You’d have Tesco’s massive email database to work with and you’d know the demographics of every potential voter: “Do you have a Clubcard? Ah, yes, Mr Jones. You like Findus Crispy Pancakes, are partial to a can or two of Wife-Beater and you want to send the darkies back where they came from.”

It’s so blindingly obvious – and such a massive contribution to the democratic process – that I’m amazed no-one’s thought of it before. I may write to Sir Terry Leahy in the morning. After all, every little helps. Or is that Asda?

I WAS highly amused that UKIP has demanded a re-run of the European elections because of the way the ballot paper was folded. Apparently, because it is one of the last parties in alphabetical order, its name fell below the crease of the folded ballot paper.

Nigel Farage, the phony who claims to be actively campaigning against our membership of the EU while pocketing around £2million in salary and expenses, said the way the paper was folded made it look as if UKIP was not on the ballot paper at all.

I’d make two points. Wouldn’t the idiot be better waiting for the result before demanding a re-run of an election in which his party allegedly stands a good chance of beating Labour into fourth place? And secondly, are we really sure that people who can’t manage to unfold a piece of paper should have the vote in the first place?

Pornography or porticos: the class divide

2009-05-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

THERE’S a definite class war element to this row about MPs’ expenses. While it’s quite clear that each and every one of them is on the fiddle, I just find it heartening that the Tory fiddles have a touch of class that the Labour fiddles can’t match.

The Labour cheats claim for TV porno channels, disposable nappies, bath plugs and Kit Kats. The Tory blaggers go for portico erection, swimming pool maintenance, moat clearing and tennis court repairs.

You have to say, if you’re going to get your collar felt for thieving from the public purse, it might as well be for having your chandeliers hung (Sir Michael Spicer, Conservative, Worcestershire West), rather than for buying two Scotch eggs and a packet of mini pork pies (Derek Wyatt, Labour, Sittingbourne and Sheppey).

Meanwhile the real winners in this affair, UKIP and the BNP, rub their hands and look forward to next month’s Euro elections. And that, my friends, is where the real damage has been done. This isn’t just about snouts in the trough; it’s about a complete collapse of confidence in Parliament, and the subsequent meltdown of the mainstream parties.

Extremism is about to rule. The sad thing is, they haven’t even had to kick down the door. It’s been left off the latch for them.

Don't blame me when there are polar bears drowning in the duck pond

2009-05-16T04:34:00.000-07:00

I ONCE got trapped in the ‘Green Checkout’ at Waitrose. I had a hundred quid’s worth of shopping on the conveyor belt and when I asked for some carrier bags I was told that they didn’t have any - this was the checkout for people who had their own Bags For Life.

“OK”, I said. “Can you ask the next checkout girl to pass you some bags so I have something to put my shopping in?”

Err, no, they couldn’t. This was the Green Checkout, and therefore I couldn’t have any carrier bags. So I did what any normal person would do and walked off, leaving a pile of shopping for them to clear while the queue of smarmy, self-satisfied, middle class yoghurt-knitters tutted into their hessian tote bags.

For some reason (I believe it might be an attempt to regulate my Chardonnay consumption) Mrs Beelzebub this week decided to order online and have the shopping delivered, rather than trek the 10 miles to the supermarket. So the Waitrose van turned up this morning, as promised, and decanted £70 worth of shopping in an astonishing TEN bags – three of them heavy-duty affairs and the other seven fancy plastic efforts. One bag had a single bottle of wine in it (see what I mean?); another contained just a small box of tea bags.

Ten bags. Ten effing bags. I asked the driver if he wanted to hang on a minute while I unpacked the shopping so he could have them back. Not allowed, apparently. I had to keep them.

Well thank you, Waitrose, with your shiny green credentials. I shall now have to fire up the 4x4 and take this excess baggage to the tip, so don’t come crying to me when there are polar bears drowning in the duck pond.

So this Madeleine McCann thing ...

2009-05-09T03:53:00.001-07:00

MUCH EXCITEMENT this week as Maddy's parents release a picture of her as she would look now, two years after her disappearance from a Portugese holiday apartment while they were on the piss with their friends in a nearby tapas bar.

Which makes me think: how long are they going to keep this up? If their strategy of keeping the story in the public eye continues, we can expect similar updated pictures every couple of years. What happens in 2021 when she would have been 18? An appearance on Page 3 of The Sun? A topless photoshoot in Nuts? The mind boggles.

And meanwhile a new suspect emerges, a gippo market trader identified by a photofit sketch in a Channel 4 documentary. I publish the picture above, with no comment at all about the one alongside it.

More than a pinch of Salt

2009-05-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

POKING FUN at the Poveratti becomes increasingly difficult as certain members of the underclass seek to outdo themselves as far as terminal stupidity is concerned.

These drooling shitbags can usually be found within the pages of Closer magazine, a publication which seems to have cornered the market in benefits barmpots. First they brought us the clinically obese Chawner family, featuring that fat lass off the X Factor, who were whining about having to feed themselves on a mere £22,000 a year in state aid. Now we have the even thicker (and fatter) Leanne Salt, the single mother of eight-month-old triplets, who happily admits that she feeds her babies junk food and let’s them drink wine “because they like it”.

Leanne, 24 years old and weighing in at 29 stones, "triggered outrage" when she revealed she let the triplets try McDonald’s, fish and chips, Wotsits and microwave ready-meals. And Hobnobs.

Her mother said: “When they are hungry it’s easier to put something in the microwave because Leanne can't move with the three of them. They get Bernard Matthews’ turkey roast, roast beef, chicken. They like it all liquidised.

“I once did pasta and they wanted it, so I chewed it like a mother bird and gave it to them. They loved it - and had two bowls. It was the same with fish and chips - I chewed it for them because it was a bit hard.”

She added: “I don't see the harm - I did it to my own children.”

Hmm, one of whom is the child that turned out to be 29-stone Leanne then? The mind boggles.

You say tomayto...

2009-04-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

WITH SUMMER approaching, one of the delights of the dog-shit picnic (i.e. one on the local park) is the soggy tomato sandwich. This delicacy, which sets out from your home full of firm, plump hope first thing in the morning, disintegrates into a damp mush by lunchtime and, in my view, is all the better for it.

Talk to any chef and they'll bang on about flavour and texture. Well, a soft tomato sandwich coupled with the harsh bite of a packet of cheese and onion crisps is just a marriage made in taste heaven. The warm wet, the salty snap ... Heston Blumenthal, eat your heart out. (And he probably will.)

Sadly, there seems to be nothing in this life that can't be 'improved' by some interfering bastard or another. Now Tesco claim to have developed the world's first non-soggy tomatoes and expect to have them on sale by the end of the week at 99p for four.

"Tomatoes can be tricky to chop and a squirt of juice can easily end up on the kitchen wall or over your shirt," says a Tesco spokesweasel. "The non-leaking variety will stop that problem but without the tomato losing any of its taste."

Have you ever heard such crap in your life? How many times has your day been ruined by a squirting tomato? Never, right?

This is just genetic and social engineering. It's pathetic. Leave my soggy sandwiches alone, you fruit Nazis.

Piling into the decrepit crush

2009-04-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

I HAVE kept you informed before about my travails in supermarkets, Tesco being the worst culprits when it comes to upsetting the equilibrium. Now those posh buggers at Waitrose have come up with yet another way to enrage the passing shopper.

When you now pay your bill (and after the headmistress behind the till has frowned at you for asking for plastic bags as if you were about to drown a polar bear in the car park), they give you a little green tiddleywink. And, on the way out, you have a choice of three boxes, all representing a charity, in which to deposit your token. I presume, although I haven’t checked, that Waitrose then gives some part of its massive profits to the charity with the most tokens.

The problem with this is that it gives old people yet another reason to get in the way of the modern, younger, time-pressed shopper. Not content with forgetting that they have to pay until all their shopping has gone through the checkout and has been laboriously packed, and then taking an age to find their purse, and paying the correct amount in cash down to the painstakingly counted-our coppers, and pausing to discuss the weather and that hairy woman on Britain’s Got Talent with the Nazi on the till, they now pitch up at the box in the exit where they have to vote with their tiddleywink.

And they stop, and they fumble for their glasses, and they read the short description of each charity carefully, then they have to go for a wee, then they’ve forgotten what they read, so have to read it all again. And they still can’t make up their minds about who to vote for. And suddenly there’s dozens of them milling about in your path.

And meanwhile normal people pile their brimming trolleys into this decrepit crush like pissed-up Scousers at Hillsborough. (Have you noticed that when the media asks Liverpool fans where they were on the fateful day, not one of them admits to being “at the back of the Leppings Lane End, pushing”?)

It’s carnage: another stupid complication in what should be a stress-free experience. The only consolation for me is that out of the three charities nominated (some homeless handout nonsense, a cat charity, and the Army Benevolent Fund), our brave boys were winning by a mile … even if I did have to tread on some 90-year-old corns to cast my vote.

The Metropolitan Police: Another apology

2009-04-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

THANKS TO the Daily Mail, we now know all we need to know about Nicky Fisher, the woman hit by a TSG Sergeant at the G20 demonstrations.

She was apparently "shouting and swearing at the sergeant", has "faced shoplifting allegations in the past", is now "negotiating a lucrative newspaper deal through her agent Max Clifford" and "wants £50,000 for her story".

She lives with her dog Poppy and her boyfriend "in a rundown basement flat of a Victorian house facing a council estate in Brighton", of which "the front door is adorned with an anti-fur slogan and a 2003 Glastonbury Festival sticker". Furthermore, her boyfriend is "an overweight young man in an England football shirt".

Finally, while she has lived in the flat for around ten years, "she did not appear to have a full-time job".

Now we know all this, and we chuck in the fact that she's probably a vegetarian as well, I think we can all agree that she got what was coming to her.

Good evening, all.

Breaker, breaker. Put the hammer down ...

2009-04-13T08:51:00.000-07:00

I’M QUITE confident that I have been advancing the argument that lorry drivers were responsible for 99 per cent of the murders of young women in this country long before Jeremy Clarkson got himself into trouble for suggesting the same on an edition of Top Gear.

It is therefore encouraging to learn that I was right all along. Right, that is, if we accept the American model.

According to the FBI, they have a remarkable 200 truck drivers listed as probable murderers, many of them being suspected serial killers, and that truck driving is by far and away the profession of choice for men who enjoy killing women as a hobby.

Altogether now: “Kill a whore, change gear, kill a whore, wield ball-pein hammer, change gear, kill a whore, wear upside down V-neck jumper as underwear, change gear, kill a whore …”

The Metropolitan Police: An apology

2009-04-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

IT HAS come to my attention that Mr Ian Tomlinson, the citizen described as an “innocent bystander” in a previous post on this message board, was actually nothing of the sort.

According to the forces of law and order, and their willing servants in the national press, he was in fact a shiftless alcoholic who had been living apart from his “loving” family for the past nine years. He was homeless, eking out an existence in sheltered housing and shop doorways, regularly took drugs, was obviously a paedophile and probably a terrorist.

He therefore obviously deserved to die. Keep calm and carry on.

EDIT: And meanwhile this big bastard needs sorting out (3.10 onwards).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V23PGWd46MM&feature=channel_page

They might have uniforms, but they're still thugs

2009-04-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

FROM THE sublime to the ridiculous ... the Met have been caught red-handed probably contributing to the death of an innocent passer-by during the G20 non-riots, while police in Scotland have been told that they mustn't finish the sentences of people with a stutter in case it offends them.

Other nuggets in the 140-page diversity handbook issued to the Porridge Cops include not leaning on someone's wheelchair, not chewing gum while speaking to the deaf (and even I can see the sense in that) and accepting that it's OK to "wear clothing and accessories of any gender in public as long as the genitals are covered." (I think that's what they call the Kilt Clause.)

It was a shame that newspaper-seller Ian Tomlinson wasn't stuttering or obviously deaf or wearing a kilt when he wandered into the crowds of G20 demonstrators on his way home from work last week. His only crime was to have his hands in his pockets while failing to move swiftly enough away from the police dog snapping at his heels. (Although I do suspect that he might not have been the full shilling.)

But that was no excuse for a uniformed thug to baton him across the back of his legs and then launch him face-first onto the pavement. If you didn't know by now, Mr Tomlinson died of a heart attack minutes later.

Contributing to this disgrace is the fact that the Dibble on duty had deliberately obscured their identification numbers on their uniforms. Now I quite understand why they might not want to wear name badges, but unidentifiable numbers? I'm afraid that stinks to high heaven.

Any football fan knows all too well the abuse that is meted out to ordinary people doing ordinary things by the hyped-up Bovril Brigade enjoying their Saturday overtime. We also know that the only difference between us and them is that they're allowed to wear armour and use weapons. That apart, we're all just lads up for a scrap.

This time though, they've gone too far. It can't be that hard to identify the cop responsible for this cowardly attack. I hope his eventual fate reminds his colleagues that the general public isn't just fodder for their bullying entertainment.

The prodigal returns

2009-04-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

AMID THE driving winds and hailstones of last night, there comes a knock at the door of Beelzebub Mansions. A bedraggled figure lurks on the doorstep, clad only in a ‘Jade RIP’ T-shirt and a pair of floral, knee-length shorts. It’s only my man Whittaker, back from his self-imposed round-the-world exile.

(You may recall that he fled the country in shame shortly after the hunting ban was introduced when he turned up for his first ‘drag’ hunt wearing lipstick and high heels.)

He is somewhat sheepish. Is there, perhaps, a position still available for a Gentleman’s Gentleman?

I update him on the credit crunch, the financial crisis, and the fact that Mrs B is currently preparing a nourishing grey squirrel casserole as we speak. But my heart isn’t in it. I point him towards the stables and tell him he’s welcome to huddle down amidst the straw and the livestock.

To be honest, I’m very aware that it’s Easter weekend and the Christmas Stilton still lurks at the back of the fridge. Someone is going to have to evict the blue-veined bastard, and that someone isn't me …

Goodbye reality

2009-04-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

AS I write, the Sky News helicopter clatters high above Jade Goody's funeral cortege as it makes its four-hour journey through London. The event is being covered live.

Chavs step out of the doorways of Pound Shops to throw flowers onto the bonnet of the hearse. Grubby tramps on their benches tip their bottles of plastic cider in respect. Someone has sent a floral display that spells out the immortal words 'East Angular'. Another is in the shape of a Marmite jar (you either love it or hate it).

I shall now light my Jade Memorial candle. I may later pop out for a kebab. With poppadoms.

She truly was the Poveratti's Princess.

The bane of the bongo-banging benefits bandits

2009-04-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

SO WHAT was that all about then? I’m all for people being allowed to protest against the government, but I’d be happier if they actually had a sensible, single cause in mind.

The shower of soap-dodgers (and you’ll never see those words in the same sentence again) who turned up in the City of London today were such a confused bunch of lentil-eating loons that it’s hard to find any sympathy for them.

What do we want? Jobs, Justice, Climate, No to Nuclear, No to Globalisation, Republicans ‘R Us, Kill Clarkson, No to Heathrow Runway 3, Stop the War, No More Smoking Beagles, Calm Down and Carry On, Meat is Murder, Shoot the Fox-Hunters, End Capitalism … the capitalism that pays for your education and your dole money? Are you sure?

It was an endless jumble of knee-jerk, Leftie bollocks. And can you imagine the smell? It was 18 degrees in central London and the aroma of patchouli oil, skunk and hand-knotted sweaters, all tinged with a whiff of damp lurcher, must have been horrendous.

And full marks to the corkscrew-haired Tarquins and their crusty mates for trashing the Royal Bank of Scotland building. That’s the RBS which is now owned by the taxpayer. And guess who will pick up the bill for the damages? Yep, the taxpayer.

Of course, the government could easily have avoided any of this nonsense with a single stroke of the pen. Once they knew when the demo was planned for, they should have just changed the signing-on day of every unemployed, bongo-banging benefits bandit to April 1st and the problem would have been solved.

Oh for the days of proper demonstrations, like when the Countryside Alliance came to town, got truncheoned by the Met Police, but still found time to pick up their own litter and replant most of the bedding plants in Hyde Park.

And all this just because The Queen wouldn’t lower the flag on Buckingham Palace when Jade died …

Whither now, dear Bazza?

2009-03-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

THE FINANCIAL crisis gripping the regional newspaper industry means that I have finally lost my last paying customer. It's been a good innings so I'm not complaining, but where now for Mr Beelzebub?

I won't miss the Wednesday night slog, with 900 words to turn out (and occasionally churn out) between the end of Coronation Street and the midnight hour. And I won't miss writing for other people's newspapers. When I was an editor I could say more or less what I wanted in my own newspaper, as long as I was prepared to defend myself in court and on the streets. When you're submitting stuff to other editors, you naturally pull back a bit.

Maybe that's the answer. Freed from worrying about what other editors have to print, I can now be more potty-mouthed and more offensive than ever. And if you don't like it, don't come here.

Hmm, I'll mull it over for a while. Maybe a daily blog is the answer - although if the half a million of you who have visited this site had chucked in a penny a time, I'd be more amenable to banging on.

In the meantime, here's the last newspaper column, as it appeared in the York Press under the name of Mike Bentley.

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I THINK it was the East German Stazi who were the most successful when it came to persuading children to inform on their parents. Now, inspired by these secret policemen, some of our schools are now in the same game, urging their Kindergarten Quisling pupils to go home and pester their mothers and fathers into adopting a healthier lifestyle.

“Please Daddy, don’t smoke that cigarette.” “No, Mummy, put the Chardonnay down.” It must be a nightmare, being nagged by your own offspring in what was once the comfort of your own home. No wonder digging an extra cellar appears to be an attractive pastime for hen-pecked middle class dads.

And it’s not going to stop there. The most alarming story of the week revealed that an army of snoopers is being recruited by the government to ‘nag’ colleagues, family, friends and neighbours into leading a healthier life. These so-called “public health mentors” will be enlisted by the NHS to offer on-the-spot advice to people whom they judge to be smoking, drinking, or eating to excess.

So eating a third fried breakfast of the week in the works canteen, having “one for the road” in the local after work, or smoking too many fags while waiting for the bus will lead to the office sneak sidling up to you and whispering a health warning in your ear: “You don’t want to be doing that …”

And what if you ignore these warnings? What then? Does the sneak then shop you to social services, who will come round and take your children away? Are you hauled before the Health Courts and fined or imprisoned?

The government thinks this initiative will help to cut NHS costs. I do hope they’ve factored in the increased number of office sneaks who will be presenting themselves in A&E with broken noses.

IT’S TIME to come clean. My name isn’t really Mike Bentley and I’m not just a mere newspaper hack. I’m actually a field officer in the government’s top secret Department of Misinformation. Sorry about that.

This is how it works. Fifteen long years ago, when the NuLabour project was first conceived, the shape-shifting lizards behind the grand scheme recognised that the Great British Public might not be entirely amenable to being treated like lab rats in this social engineering experiment and would need some kind of outlet for their anger. They therefore proposed to install supposedly dissident columnists on newspapers across the land through whom readers could vent their bile. Spleen Diffuser Agents (Grade 2) is our civil service name. Smoke and mirrors is our game.

(Littlejohn is one of ours, as is Rod Liddle. Not Jon Gaunt though; he failed the entrance exam.)

You see, while we were wibbling on about minor scandals, the major outrages were going on behind your back. While we were moaning about a family of fat people getting £20,000 a year in benefits because they were too lazy to work, hundreds of MPs were pocketing that amount and more by fiddling their expenses – all by the book of course.

While we were complaining about our imaginary relatives being left on trolleys in hospital corridors, the reality of the situation was over a thousand patients dying in one hospital alone because target-chasing managers refused to employ enough staff to clean the excrement off their charges.

While we were shaking our heads at a 27-year-old reality TV ‘star’ selling the rights to her own death for £700,000, a dodgy 50-year-old failed banker was using public money to fund a pension of that amount for every year until he keels over – not to mention a £3million lump sum.

And it worked, brilliantly, for many years. Good God, they even managed to drag the country into two pointless foreign wars without widespread revolt. People were more concerned with the rumours we were spreading about them being fined for putting the wrong kind of cardboard in their recycling bins, or how some anonymous school somewhere down south had re-written the words to Baa Baa Black Sheep.

But now it’s over. The bubble has burst. The bright shiny people of the Blah years have been reduced to malodorous, shuffling hulks, made stupid by lies and staggering from crisis to meltdown like zombies who’ve lost their sat navs. The project has failed and chaos reigns.

Our elected representatives seem to be institutionally corrupt, indulging in morally fraudulent expenses claims to an extent that would have Mr Plod feeling collars in any branch of commerce.

The nation faces financial ruin, lulled into a spending frenzy by an unsustainable property bubble. And while hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs, the public sector keeps on recruiting – and handing out pay increases.

The education system is a farce, where every child gets a full set of A-levels before going on to university still unable to read and write properly, and where their main ambition is to emulate a dead reality TV star who was famous for being famous.

We’ve surrendered any kind of control of our borders as far as illegal immigration is concerned, yet we’re about to force British citizens to fill out a form consisting of 53 intrusive questions before allowing them to leave the country. It’s now illegal to tell a joke about homosexuals, but extremist Muslim preachers can call for gays to be stoned to death and no-one blinks. And, in a final sign of the collapse of our civilisation, Pot Noodle have launched a Donner Kebab flavour.

So my work here is done. I’m being relocated to teach Advanced Spokeweasel on a politics course at a polytechnic down south. That’s all. Over and out.

Pip pip!

The children's programme for the over-50s

2009-03-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

ARE YOU sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

From 1950 until 1982, generations of children gathered around the wireless at quarter to two waiting for a programme called Listen With Mother, first on the Light Programme, then on the Home Service, and then on BBC Radio 4. At its peak, over a million youngsters were listening. Then came that flashy television thing, its hi-tech stampede led by Muffin the Mule, and life changed forever.

But not at the BBC. Still, somewhere in those dusty corridors, the Children’s Unit lived on. I like to think of it as a kindly spinster in a moth-eaten cardigan smelling of 4711 cologne and cats. But the lure of computer games and the 42-inch plasma was irresistible. By 2001, Radio 4 was down to one just children’s programme, a strange concoction called – in the irritating, illiterate modern parlance - Go4it. For some reason it went out at 7.15pm on a Sunday, just after The Archers, when there was presumably a high residual audience of receptive five-year-olds … not.

Now I don’t know how much radio programmes cost to make – let’s guess at £10,000 a go. What I do know is that every Sunday night for eight years, the Beeb has happily broadcast Go4it to an audience of … nobody. That’s over 400 episodes, all gratefully received by … nobody.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer has admitted that Go4it sometimes attracted zero listeners from its target four-14 age range, but did manage to catch the attention of up to 450,000 listeners aged between 52 and 55. When he says “catch the attention”, I suspect he means “people who had fallen asleep during The Archers and left the radio on”, but there we go.

Now my beef is this: for eight years, the BBC has spent a small fortune – perhaps £4million - on a programme that has singularly failed to get anywhere near its target market and therefore completely failed to fulfil its public broadcasting remit – and yet nobody seems to have noticed or even cared. Don’t they check these things? Do they just go on pumping out irrelevant crap regardless, without anyone giving a toss whether or not the money it’s costing is being well spent? Can you imagine that kind of arrogant waste being tolerated in any kind of commercial business? I don’t think so – there you have to graft for your money, rather than it being handed to you on a plate.

THAT FAT lass who turned up for her X Factor audition looking like a cross between Miss Haversham and a Lidl trifle has been bleating in the papers, along with her equally obese family, about the difficulties of getting by on a mere £22,000 a year in benefits. Apparently 19-year-old Emma Chawner (5ft 3in, 17st), sister Sam (21, 5ft 9in, 18st) and parents Phillip (53) and Audrey (57), both 24st, are all “too fat to work” because of a claimed hereditary problem. Utter laziness, I’d call it.

Asked why they didn’t simply go on a diet, Mr Chawner said, “We don’t have the time,” adding: “We love TV. It’s on from the moment we get up. Often I’m so tired from watching TV, I have to take a nap.” Yes, pal. I bet you do.

Emma says: “I’m a student and don’t have time to exercise. We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don’t know how.”

Let me give you a clue, love. Eat less, do more. It’s not exactly rocket science, is it? And give the microwave pies a miss, even if you did once buy some pears “but they tasted funny”. Sheesh.

AS THE jobless total tops two million for the first time since Phillip Chawner last did a day’s work (that’s 1997 to you and me), it’s nice to see that the government is sharing our pain and cutting back on frivolous spending. That’s presumably why they spent £780,000 on flowers in the past four years. Yes, £780,000.

Unsurprisingly, Baron Mandelson of Hartlepool is first in the queue at the florists, spending £500 a week on flowers for his office since returning, unelected, to the Cabinet five months ago. Meanwhile the education department under Ed Balls has spent a mere £174,000 dressing up its Whitehall offices like a pop star’s wedding.

Why? No-one is suggesting that the people who run the country should hold meetings huddled in the gutter under a tarpaulin while fending off assaults from obese chavs intent on stealing their Rich Tea biscuits, but is such blatant largesse really necessary? Will fewer 15-year-olds pass their exams if Interflora stops paying daily visits to the oak-panelled offices of ministers? I don’t think so.

WHILE WE’RE at it, a quick look at one of the few job vacancies available to the nation’s unemployed reveals that Gordon Brown is advertising for a ‘Director, Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit’ at a cool £100,000 a year.

Should Phillip Chawner be reading this and fancy a punt, the job apparently entails: “Providing leadership in the delivery of the key responsibilities of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, including unlocking delivery obstacles, performance management, performance policy and capacity building and cross government learning on delivery”.

Now I’m sorry, but I haven’t got the faintest idea what any of that means. It’s a coded language; strings of gibberish that only those already inside the public sector can understand. So that conveniently counts out the likes of you, me and Phillip ‘Fatso’ Chawner.

LORD AHMED, who was jailed for 12 weeks for sending text messages shortly before he killed a man in a fatal car crash, has been released after just 16 days inside. Why am I not surprised?

Put your trust in the Tooth Fairy

2009-03-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

SO THIS quantitative easing we’ve been hearing about. What’s that all about then?

As I understand it, it means that the Royal Mint will run off loads of new banknotes in an attempt to kick-start the economy, but what happens to the money once they’ve printed it? How does it get into the hands of the likes of you and me?

As ever, it appears that it doesn’t. I think they’re just intending to give wads of cash to the now State-owned banks, who will use it to it to pay their miserably-failing bosses huge bonuses while continuing to withdraw the overdraft facilities of small businesses. So unless you’re a Ferrari dealer or an expensive Russian escort (one’s a car, the other isn’t) you’re unlikely to see a penny of this new money.

I have an idea. Why don’t we enlist the Tooth Fairy to ensure a fair distribution of all this cash? And let’s not stop at tucking tenners under pillows. Let’s hide money in McDonald’s napkin dispensers, railway train seatbacks, Tesco carrier bags and behind park benches. Tucked into the pages of the Daily Star and inside Greggs’ pasty cartons. In packets of Silk Cut Purple and under hedges in lay-bys (traditional home – before the Internet - of lorry driver porn mags).

Come on Gordon, that kind of redistribution of wealth would really kick-start the economy. And cheer everyone up as well.

SPEAKING of McDonald’s, and whatever the eco-protesters say, now and then you just have to succumb to the lure of the Golden Arches. And now they’re all made out of organic food grown by pretty people in their flower-strewn allotments (well that’s what it says on TV), then there’s no guilt attached either.

I had my most recent MacAttack last week. Quarter Pounder with cheese and a large fries since you ask. Black coffee, six sachets of sugar. As usual, the five-star kid who served me had acne of Krakatoa proportions and there was a tramp in the corner arguing that it might be 10.31am but he still wanted an Egg McMuffin to go with his Special Brew, but what I hadn’t bargained for were the number of fat kids spending their half term holiday not only eating between Happy Meals but actually eating between snacks.

It was a real struggle just getting to the counter through this waist-high tide of pre-pubescent porkers. It was like walking through quicksand. Strawberry shake-flavoured quicksand.

It appears that the problem of obese children has now got so bad that last week one expert demanded that gastric bands should be fitted to all porkers aged over 15. Well, hang on a minute. I may have hit on a radical solution to this problem. Why not just stop them stuffing their faces while spending sedentary hours in front of the telly or the Nintendo? Encourage them to get some exercise. Make them EAT THEIR GREENS. It’s not rocket science, is it?

When I were a lad (and it was all fields around here), I used to come home from school, get hit with a ruler because my tie wasn’t done up, be handed a slice of bread and dripping and sent back out on the paper round. Either that or onto the park for a 37-a-side game of Next Goal’s The Winner.

If, in a moment of madness, I’d wandered up to the larder and helped myself to its contents, I’d have been locked in the coal cellar until Christmas. These days kids waddle in from school, stock up on an armful of e-numbers and a Bacardi Breezer and park their vast bulk in front of the idiot box to watch the soft porn on satellite. And it’s not entirely their fault. Not even those whose parents bleat: “It’s their glands.”

For a start, successive governments have allowed the wholesale selling-off of school playing fields. Lazy, anti-elitist teachers reluctant to run sports teams and greedy head-teachers eager to take the builders’ shilling to fund their next black, bicycling lesbian outreach worker to teach 3C that “men are evil and middle-class white men are even more evil” are all complicit in this scandal.

The compensation culture also plays a part. Mr Jennings is unlikely to take his class on a field trip to Malham Cove if he thinks he’s going to be sued senseless if little Damien slips and cuts his knee on an aggressive, if ancient, ammonite.

Consequently, organised school sports or outdoor activities are virtually non-existent, which might come as a relief to those of us who had to do cross-country running in our grubby Y-fronts because we’d forgotten our kit, but also neglects a vital aspect of life’s education, namely that team sports provide a very good early lesson as to what lies ahead. Namely, you lose more often than you win.

And then there’s the climate of fear we create around our kids. In my largely car-free village it’s a rare, if welcome, sight to see children playing out unsupervised. Too many parents are simply paranoid. Is there really a child-molester on every street corner? I don’t think so. Uncle Jimmy might be a little careless with his hands when it comes to the piggy-back rides, but surely that’s just part of life’s rich pageant?

I’ll tell you what really worries me. Here we are, with British soldiers under daily attack in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we’re breeding kids who daren’t set foot across the doorstep in case they’re menaced by an empty crisp bag blowing down the street. Where are the soldiers of the future, willing to march bravely through Luton while half a dozen Muslim extremists call them cowards, murders and rapists? Answer me that.

Where the women smell of mutton and look like Jimmy Krankie

2009-03-08T06:57:00.000-07:00

THERE ARE few compensations for those unfortunate to live north of the border, where the weather is foul, the food deep-fried and where all the women smell of mutton and look like Jimmy Krankie. Trust me, it bears little resemblance to the idyllic scenes you see on the front of shortbread tins.

One of those very few compensations has always been the Jocks’ tolerance of public drunkenness, to the point that the only way to safely walk down a city centre street after nine o’clock at night is to be bladdered yourself, your own drunken weavings then mysteriously co-ordinating with the wobbles of oncoming imbibers like some kind of intricate plankton dance.

I remember with head-banging horror the first New Year I spent in the Far North – on a small island in Shetland, so probably more Scandinavian than Caledonian. There were 12 houses on this island (I say houses, but hovels is probably more accurate). In each house was, on average, eight people. It began early on December 30th. A group from one house would set off to the next house, dodging puzzled sheep being blown past them at head height in the constant blizzard, where each visitor would then give each resident a dram from his or her bottle. The recipients would then reciprocate with a dram of their own. And then on to the next house, and the next. When you got back to your own quarters you simply started again.

This went on for several days – how many I can’t tell you, because I can’t stand whisky and was therefore in bits by early afternoon on Day One. Suffice to say, I’ve never touched a drop since and never will. But I think we’ve established the fact that strong drink is an integral part of Scotch culture.

And cheap strong drink even more so. I was hugely impressed to see an item on the telly a few weeks back claiming that you could buy seven, one-litre bottles of cider (I think it was a brand called ‘Lunatic Soup’) for just a tenner in some Glasgow corner shops. Let’s see John Lewis match that.

But, it seems, no more. Ministers are set to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol in what is called a radical plan to reduce binge drinking. It is alleged that alcohol misuse costs the NHS and the justice system £25billion a year (although the Ministry of Guesswork may have had a hand in that calculation) with a disproportionate share of the bill coming from Scotland. Another statistic claims that the average Scot gets through 125 bottles of wine a year, which seems rather modest to me, even if you factor in the teetotal percentage of the Presbyterian population who worship at the Wee Free.

The idea is that your average alcoholic scrote will be priced out of the market, unable to afford to buy the drug of his choice. (Although that doesn’t seem to have bothered the heroin and crack addicts, who’ll simply burgle your house to fund their habit. Have they really thought this through?)

So tell me then, Lord McPorridge. Where will you pitch your price to stamp out this avalanche of alcoholism? The answer, it seems, is 40 pence per unit. That heinous charge will make the average 13 per cent alcohol bottle of wine a whopping … £3.90.

Three pounds ninety? Are they joking? That’s really going to stem the tide, even in a place where you can get seven litres of cider for a tenner. You’d be hard put to find a drinkable bottle of plonk at that price in most supermarkets.

So it all seems a bit daft. Perhaps we can rely on those rebellious Scots to boot this daft idea into touch before the idiots down here catch on to it. But then, they did cave into the smoking ban a full year ahead of the rest of us …

LAST WEEK I was complaining that while we were being subjugated by a camera-saturated state jackboot, it was now an arrestable offence for a Japanese tourist to take a photograph of a policeman. Well you’ll be glad to know that they’re just as heavy-handed when it comes to their own. (The cops that is, not the Japanese tourists.)

The kitchen in a police station in Brighton has had problems recently with rubbish littering the floor, spilt food and dirty crockery left in the sink. Instead of doing what you or I would do and leaving a stroppy Post-It note above the sink, senior plod instead decided to install a CCTV camera above the sink in a bid to catch the guilty parties. So that’s the police, spying on themselves, in their own police station.

Chief Superintendent Graham Bartlett (he’s new, so that might explain a lot) said: “A small minority of people have been misusing the facilities. I have therefore had to reluctantly take the decision to use an overt camera to dissuade people from spoiling the facility for others”. (Can’t you just hear that pinched, nasal drone?)

So there we have it. Too busy to catch alcohol-crazed Scotch burglars, but more than ready to nab whoever left that festering Pot Noodle in the sink. It really is enough to make a cat laugh.

There's an inebriated accountant with a dissolving liver clogging up intensive care

2009-03-02T15:06:00.000-08:00

I’VE BEEN telling you this would happen for years. The middle classes are finally on the verge of revolt.

According to The Guardian, the police are preparing for a ‘Summer of Rage’ as victims of the economic turndown take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions. Polishing his extendable baton, Superintendent David Hartshorn of the Metropolitan Plod “raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming ‘footsoldiers’ in a wave of potentially violent mass protests as middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger”.

Well they’ve been doing it in Europe for years. In recent weeks Greek farmers have blocked roads over falling agricultural prices, a million workers in France joined demonstrations to demand greater protection for jobs and wages and Icelandic demonstrators have clashed with police in Reykjavik.

As ever, a delightfully funny and rather rude website called the Daily Mash (www.thedailymash.co.uk) does it better than I could, so I make no apology for quoting their take on the story: A senior officer said that “Economic downturn means people you would not normally associate with civil unrest taking their anger on to the streets. It’s a very special time in a policeman's life.

“A lot of my lads were too young for the poll tax riots and so this could be their only chance to knock the absolute living shit out of a Guardian reader. Ideally it’ll be the sort of people who have fancy dinner parties, with their Le Creuset pots and their Cloudy Bay and their nonce friends, passing round the marijuana cigarettes and raising money for Hezbollah.”

He stressed that anyone who is thinking about protesting this summer should not be put off, adding: “Come to London. Have a day out. Throw bricks, deface banks with your tins of Farrow and Ball paint and above all, when the policemen charge at you, stand your ground. And when six of my lads are dragging you by the hood of your Fat Face cagoule into the back of a van, please do struggle a bit, thereby giving them reasonable cause to boot you squarely in the kidneys. They love that.”

Marvellous stuff.

MAYBE THE Met aren’t being unreasonable. After all, it’s becoming clear that the real rot in our society isn’t caused by the workshy, benefits-bleeding Poveratti, but the supposedly squeaky-clean middle classes. Just look at their drinking habits, for instance.

Some of them imbibe more than a glass of wine a night. Outrageous. What kind of burden is that imposing on our struggling health service? Nary a night passes without an inebriated accountant with a dissolving liver clogging up intensive care. And that’s if they don’t have diabetes as well, the lardy-arsed, glucose-gobbling wasters.

Still, the Nanny State has an answer. They’re going to fit CCTV cameras inside shops, supermarkets and pubs so Big Brother can identify those of us who take too much advantage of Threshers’ three-for-the-price-of-two wine offer. Presumably we’ll then get the six o’clock knock from one of Harriet Harman’s hit squads and be carted off to a gulag in Glamorganshire where we’ll be taught the error of our ways.

In the London borough of Islington, it is already compulsory for any premises applying for an alcohol licence to fit CCTV. Expect that to spread as the Town Hall Trots find another way to bully the small businessman.

I was talking to the landlord in one of my locals the other night. He reckons that it would cost him three grand to fit a basic camera system. That is money he can’t afford. He’s already been battered by the idiotic smoking ban (to the point that he’ll now allow you to smoke as long as you sit by the log fire) and by supermarkets selling bottled lager for less than bottled water. This added expense will merely nudge many pubs over the edge. Thinking about it, maybe that’s the plan.

IT’S IRONIC that in the week that our already camera-saturated nation had another level of surveillance inflicted upon it, it also became illegal for an ordinary citizen to take a photograph of a policeman. Counter-terrorism, you see. And they’re obviously getting twitchy about middle-class rioters snapping them snapping limbs during this summer’s coming demonstrations.

I’VE A new modern day parable: Beware the empty barber.

I’d been trying to find time for a haircut for weeks and was starting to look like Worzel Gummidge, but every time I found half an hour to spare, my usual premises were either closed or packed to the rafters.

Then, on coming out of an unfamiliar pub in an unfamiliar part of town on Friday afternoon, I found a barber’s shop two doors down that was absolutely deserted, apart from the barber. Or so-called barber.

I now know why the shop was empty on a Friday afternoon. It is the worst haircut I have ever had. I look like that kid out of the Adams family and, to be honest, given my sparse locks there was little scope to cock it up in the first place.

So now you know – beware the empty barber.

I SAW a television advert the other night for our local Safety Camera Partnership. What’s that all about then? Never mind the waste of the money that they’ve already stolen from us, but do they really expect anyone to say: “Ooh, that’s a good idea. Let’s have some more speed cameras”?

Six out of seven dwarfs aren't Happy

2009-02-22T07:51:00.000-08:00

THE MARVELLOUS Mr Keith Waterhouse, that distinguished journalist of these parts who has just turned 80 years old, has come up with many wonderful inventions during his time toiling at the typewriter. The fabulous Billy Liar; Sharon and Tracy, the indolent shop assistants; Clogthorpe District Council, where members argue in circles before adjourning to nearby hostelry The Limping Cockroach; and, perhaps the best of all, the Department of Guesswork – now the privatised National Guesswork Authority – where Waterhouse’s brother-in-law Arnold works tirelessly to provide the country with nonsense statistics and meaningless facts.

This government agency – slogan, “Inaccuracy is our Middle Name” – performs a vital function in these simplistic times when the media demands simple ways of explaining simple stories to a stupid public. That’s why every new skyscraper is so many times “the size of Nelson’s Column”, why every new building site would “cover four football pitches”, why anything liquid would be enough to “fill five Olympic swimming pools” and why obscure African countries are “the size of Wales”. (Only a far more attractive place to live.)

This statistical twaddle has now spread to everyday life. Rarely does 24 hours pass without an idiot survey turning up in our newspapers. Only this week we were told that “Children are the main victims of the recession as their parents lose their jobs, pocket money is cut and school trips are deemed too expensive”.

This insight into our modern world came courtesy of research group Nfp Synergy (never trust a company with a lower case letter in its name) which claimed that seven per cent of children between 11 and 16 said one of their parents had lost their job. Fine, so that’s 93 out of a hundred who haven’t. Good news, I would have thought.

More than a quarter of 11 to 13-year-olds said they had had their pocket money cut (so three-quarters haven’t) while 20 per cent said their parents had told them they will not be going on holiday this year (but 80 per cent will).

And one in 12 children said their parents could not afford to send them on school trips. Well boo hoo. That means that 11 out of 12 families can still afford to send their children on school trips.
Most of these so-called surveys are just a marketing exercise, a way to get free editorial space from an over-worked newsroom. Thus a holiday company (whom I refuse to name) announces that the favourite activity of children on holiday is to spend time in the swimming pool, with 92 per cent of them in the water every day. Funnily enough, this company is currently pushing holidays at resorts with super pools, slides, wave machines and all.

A dating website announces that 65 per cent of men think that it’s OK to have sex on a first date while 65 per cent of women think that it makes them look “easy”. I’m not great at maths, but I suspect that based on those figures, 35 per cent of women are very busy indeed.

And then there’s the truly execrable. “People from the South West love to warble while they wash”, according to a shower company … based in the South West. It’s just nonsense.
I do wish they’d stop insulting our intelligence with this gibberish. The only statistic I’ll ever believe is that six out of seven dwarfs are not Happy.

IT IS Shrove Tuesday next week, a time when we’re all supposed to be giving something up for Lent. But surely they’ve got this wrong? January is when we give things up; February is when we start doing them again.

All those people who gave up smoking are back on the fags; the non-drinkers are walloping it down like a squaddie on leave; and the exercise fanatics have long since given up on exercise and are lying on the couch eating oven chips dipped in brown sauce while watching Come Dine With Me along with the rest of us.

Here at Beelzebub Mansions we have invested many pounds in what I call “January equipment”, most of it already redundant. There’s the stepper, a blue bikey-type thing that you walk quickly on. It has been used twice. There is a blue trampoline, which has been used once. There is a blue exercise ball thingy, which has been used less than once, being responsible for an immediate bad back. (I’m noticing a trend here. Why are all these instruments of torture coloured blue?)

Similarly, the gym membership now lapses unused, although the direct debit goes out of the account once a month, the bookshelves groan under the weight of diet tomes and the expensive trainers that make you walk like an African warrior (why would you want to?) have been consigned to the utility room cupboard, never to emerge again.

A QUICK Christmas Stilton update: it’s still there at the back of the fridge, belching Port fumes at the Branston Pickle and trying to get the Dairylea to join it in “roasting” a carton of Philadelphia. I’ll keep you in touch.

THE FORMER head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Dame Stella Rimington says people in Britain feel that they’re living under a police state.

Excuse me, but when even the Spooks think that we’re under the cosh, isn’t that time to get really, really worried?

Jake Thackray v Jim Davidson? No contest

2009-02-16T07:36:00.000-08:00

THERE’S OFTEN talk of a North/South divide, usually based on some soft Southerner claiming that we all wear flat caps and keep pigeons and whippets. (I’m guilty on only two of the three charges. I don’t like pigeons.)

From my point of view, as a proud Northerner, it’s more about class, or dignity, or self-respect. We have it, they don’t. Remember the glorious Thatcher years? Yes, we might have been out of work and stood around a brazier in a donkey jacket, but they were the ones who turned up at football matches waving their wads of tenners. Who’s the class act there?

They had Watney’s Red Barrel; we had Sammy Smith’s. They had Mike Brearley; we had Sir Geoffrey. They had Jim Davidson; we had Jake Thackray (I suspect that comparison clinches the deal in anyone’s mind. The Bantam Cock versus that hilarious ‘Chalkie’ routine? No contest. Type his name into YouTube and you’ll be there all night. Altogether now, “Yan, tan, tether …” )

And so it goes with public art. We have the Angel of the North; they are soon to have a great big plastic horse wedged between two electricity pylons on a housing development in Kent. And not just Kent, but Ebbsfleet, Kent.

Have you been there? It’s the worst kind of new town horror show. Full of chavs and hoodies with only a Eurostar railway station and a failing football club to put it on the map. And now they’re about to get a White Horse. Not a classy, limestone-carved one like the Yorkshire version at Kilburn, but a 164-foot tall monstrosity designed by an ‘artist’ whose most famous recent work was dressing up in a bear suit and stalking a Berlin gallery at night for 10 days.

The artist’s impressions published in the papers this week were horrendous. It looked like a plastic Brittain’s farmyard model perched in a Blue Peter-produced bog roll and sticky-backed plastic landscape. Perhaps that’s to be expected when the £2 million project is being paid for by property developers.

And the legs looked all wrong. Mind you, as Northerners we must admit a degree of culpability on that score. You see, our most famous Northern artist, L.S. Lowry, couldn’t draw horse’s legs. No, really, trust me on this. Look at any Lowry painting in which there’s a horse and you’ll find that it is conveniently parked behind a low wall, a stack of cotton bales, a gang of tubercular children or a flock of coughing pigeons. He just couldn’t do it. Even Rolf Harris does better horse’s legs than Lowry could do. Oh, the shame.

Anyway, back to the point. There is only one man in this country who can do public art properly and that’s Antony Gormley, the man who sorted the aforementioned Angel and also populated the Merseyside seashore with those wonderful standing figures. But wait, I hear you catcall. Gormley was born in Kent. Yes, he might have been. But where did he go to school?

Ampleforth, Yorkshire, of course. Enough said.

WHILE WE’RE talking about Watney’s Red Barrel, I should alert you to the new drink from India that may very well turn up on the shelves of a Lidl near you any time soon. It’s been developed by the Hindu nationalist movement and it is made from … err ... cow’s urine.

No, really. The bovine brew is in the final stages of development by the Cow Protection Department whose head, Om Prakash, says: “Cow water is undergoing laboratory tests and should be on sale very soon.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t smell like urine and it will be tasty too. Its USP will be that it’s going to be very healthy.”

I just thought I’d let you know, just in case you end up in a London pub, any time soon.

STILL ON the subcontinent, a group of young Indian women are planning to send pink knickers to a radical Hindu organisation that has been threatening to attack unmarried couples celebrating Valentine’s Day.

The 10,000-strong group, formed during a Facebook campaign, defends the right of women to pop down the pub for a swift one and goes by the quite wonderful name of the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women.

Do let me know where the local branch meets, won’t you?

I WAS watching that Lorraine Kelly on the telly the other morning when she wrapped up a story about Jennifer Aniston hitting a landmark birthday by asserting that “40 is the new 30.”

I bet there was an angry traffic cop on every street corner on her journey home …

WHAT IS going on with our OAPs? We’ve got used to them stomping around the Post Office after collecting their heating allowance, waving wads of notes like Cockney plasterers, but now they seem to be bonking themselves silly as well.

Take Coronation Street, as accurate a snapshot of Northern life as you’ll ever find. We’ve got Ken Barlow getting jiggy with the gorgeous Stephanie Beacham (I’ve reported him to the RSPCA – that poor little dog shouldn’t have so many walks) and Eileen’s Dad inviting himself inside Rita’s boudoir.

And even Norris Cole has been invited to play Hide the Sausage by fellow competition fan Mary. It’s outrageous.

Mind you, I suppose they could just be trying to stay warm …

Always look on the bright side ...

2009-02-08T12:24:00.000-08:00

SO, WE can’t all be suffering bankruptcy and redundancies in this recession, so which businesses aren’t suffering from the economic downturn? Allow me to suggest a few.

Condom manufacturers, for obvious reasons, as people stay in instead of braving the Arctic weather and stupid restaurant prices (and seek to avoid the expensive consequences of their cavorting). Camping sites and camping suppliers, as that holiday villa in Tuscany turns into a holiday field near Torquay.

Accountants and insolvency experts, obviously; JobCentre staff, bailiffs and funeral directors, likewise. Plumbers, because it’s cold; sparkies, because the burst pipe has wrecked the electrics; plasterers, because the burst pipe has brought the ceiling down; mechanics, because we’re all holding onto our cars for longer; divorce lawyers, because there’s nothing more likely to cause a row than money – or, more probably – the lack of it.

Greggs will be doing OK, pasties being the food of the starving masses; pawn shops should be cashing in; Butlin’s bookings will be up and Pontin’s have just announced 2,000 new jobs. Blockbusters and Dominoes will be packed out.

Barbers should be doing all right and retailers of cheap suits, shirts and ties should see sales rise as we all dress up a bit for the office, anxious to look like professionals as the cost-cutting management casts its beady eye over us. Cobblers will be busy re-soling, life coaches will be busy … err … coaching; Christmas clubs will be rolling in cash and tobacco smugglers will be coining it.

And Sky telly will be sitting pretty: it’s almost the last luxury to go, just before quilted toilet paper.

So when you look at it, that’s a fairly significant slice of the service industry economy. Millions of workers bringing in billions of pounds. So where’s the crisis?

Call me a cynic, but I think that far too many companies are taking advantage of the hysteria being whipped up by the media – mainly the BBC – to shaft loyal employees in pursuit of a fast buck and easy profits. And those left behind feel that they have to bow to management’s demands and do the jobs of two people or risk joining the “right-sizing” exercise. Just a thought, like.

I WATCHED a dreadful television programme this week in which 20 boys and girls, aged from 8-12, were left to their own devises in separate houses without any adult supervision.

The boys spent the first day having water fights, the second day drawing up rules about water fights, and the third day crying for their mums because they couldn’t even work out how to put hot water in a Pot Noodle.

The girls, by contrast, decorated their house, cooked themselves some food, and quickly formed themselves into cliques and got involved in the most horrendous kind of psychological bullying you’re ever likely to see. The deadlier of the species, as they say…

IF YOU’RE not a great flier, you wouldn’t have wanted to be on the flight from Moscow to New York that was reported in The Independent this week. Under the headline ‘This is your pilot slurring’ it tells how an Aeroflot pilot made a welcome announcement to passengers that was so garbled that it was impossible to tell what language he was speaking. They became so scared that a group of passengers demanded to see the man at the controls to check whether or not he was drunk.

The pilot refused to leave the cockpit to reassure the passengers, who were told by the crew they should either stop complaining or get off the plane. The Moscow Times, which had a reporter on board the plane, claimed that an Aeroflot representative boarded the aircraft and told the passengers it wasn't a big deal if the pilot was drunk.

“Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself,” the representative allegedly said. “The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit.”

So, that’s all right then …

ARE WE returning to the days of the East German Stasi, when children would spy on their own parents and report them to the security services? I only ask because Carol Thatcher has been temporarily banned by the BBC for a throwaway comment she made in a private, off-air, conversation

Now I don’t agree necessarily with her terminology; it was a little insensitive, at the very least. But what has it come to when ordinary citizens – as she was once she was off screen - are hauled up before some kind of judge and jury for conversational remarks?

You may not have noticed, but we are in the teeth of a monumental economic crisis; wildcat strikes caused by the employment of foreign labour are playing straight into the hands of the BNP; Iran has just launched its first satellite, a possible precursor to a nuclear threat; and Ken Barlow is about to jump into bed with Stephanie Beacham. And all we can worry about is a silly comment from a gregarious woman whose background can hardly be described as streetwise? It’s enough to make a golliwog laugh.

I KNEW that Obama bloke was a wrong ‘un. Only two weeks after becoming President, he’s already going on television to admit “I screwed up” after appointing two cabinet members who then turned out to have forgotten to pay their taxes.

I knew he would be disappointing, but I didn't expect him to cock up this early. Bring back that nice George Bush.

SAW Lenny Henry on that Comic Relief programme the other night. I tell you what, he must be so glad that famine and war zones exist otherwise he’d be selling diamante brooches on QVC. Or crappy motels for shiny-suited sales reps who eat Ginsters’ pasties in their Vauxhall Vectras.

Money for nothing and the sack for free

2009-02-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

WHAT’S THE difference between a mechanic at the Land Rover plant in Solihull and a woman behind the counter of a Woolworths in Yorkshire? About £2.3 billion, apparently.

That’s the amount of money Baron Mandelson of Hartlepool is going to cough up to ailing car firms in the form of loan guarantees and ‘green research’ grants – but not to rescue struggling retail outlets that have been on our High Streets for 100 years.

It’s nonsense, of course. The car companies are in trouble because no-one is prepared to fork out for a new car in the current climate. The money is safer under the mattress. Cash is king, and we’re all holding onto every penny we’ve got.

Even the 90 per cent of buyers who use some kind of finance deal to buy their car aren’t biting – and that’s if they can actually get a loan. The big banks are causing havoc at the moment, closing the accounts of loyal customers if they stray over their overdraft limit two months running or refusing home improvement loans (where there’s ample equity in the property) because you missed a credit card payment in 2003. And yes, I know people this has happened to.

Like that magnificent VAT reduction of 2.5 per cent (at a time when most shops were offering 30 per cent off everything), it’s a token gesture and money down the drain. People will only start buying new cars again when they feel confident in their economic prospects or when they’re actually encouraged to do so by government aid.

Why aren’t we doing what they do in Germany and France? There you can get a grant of 2,300 Euros if you scrap a car more than nine years old and buy a new one. The scheme is green – new cars being far more environmentally friendly than old ones – and gets the economy moving again. But no, all we get is an inadequate handout to firms that are mostly foreign-owned anyway and no help whatsoever for the poor punter – unless he’s prepared to ride round in a battery-powered go kart. Which is a great idea if you live 800 feet up a hill amidst the snow and fog, as I do.

And why is the government actively campaigning against the use of Land Rovers? Why is diesel so expensive and why is the tax four-wheel-drive owners have to pay so disproportionately punishing? Go on, explain that.

I SUPPOSE that we’re expected to be grateful that the BBC has imposed a bonus ban and a pay freeze on its top 400 senior managers. How nice of them not to pocket even more of our money in these difficult times. But then you do the sums.

The Beeb claims that the bonus and pay freeze, in place until July 2010 (my, that’s tough) will save them £20 million. Okey dokey - £20 million divided by 400 equals £50,000. This suggests that each and every one of those 400 senior managers would have expected to receive £50,000 in salary increases and bonuses in the next 18 months. And given that the average bonus is said to be 10 per cent of salary, that puts most of them on half a million a year.

Can that really be right? Is it really the case that 3,584 of us cough up our £139.50 a year just to pay the salary of ONE senior BBC manager? It’s enough to make a wounded child in Gaza laugh.

STILL, IT’S not all bad news amongst the Guardianistas. ‘Top bosses’ in the NHS collected salary increases of 10 per cent last year, more than four times that paid to nurses.

The average pay of an NHS chief executive is now £146,100, plus a bonus averaging £16,579 and an ‘executive allowance’ covering household expenses of £10,731. Oh, and let’s not forget the car allowance of £9,700.

And while we’re at it, we should note that the number of council workers on an annual salary of more than £50,000 has risen by almost 20 per cent in the past year. There are now 37,000 of them out there, up by 6,000 from a year ago.

As Matthew Elliott, chief exec of the Taxpayers’ Alliance says: “Councils are ignoring economic reality and simply recruiting more managers and handing out more pay rises than taxpayers can afford.”

It does seem perverse that at a time when every other industry is struggling to survive, the public sector seems to sail on regardless, drunk on the heady wine of other people’s money.

A HOAXER has finally owned up to inventing the condition of ‘cello scrotum’, first mentioned in the British Medical Journal back in 1974.

Doctor Elaine Murphy – now Baroness Murphy - has confessed to writing to the journal as a prank after reading of other, real, complaints like guitarist’s nipple and fiddler’s neck. Which gets me thinking.

Which made-up illnesses would you invent? There’s obviously ME of course (“Oh, boo hoo, I can’t get off the sofa because I’m so tired so I can’t go to work”), but the one I fancy is Attention Surplus Disorder.

It’s like the opposite of the imaginary Attention Deficit Disorder, and afflicts children whose parents spoil them rotten rather than imposing a traditional set of disciplinary values. You can see the poor victims, running around like headless chickens, in a Harvester near you every weekend.

So that's what they call garage music...

2009-01-25T06:42:00.000-08:00

AS THOUSANDS of people lose their jobs every week in the private sector, Wee Gordie Broon’s Turkey Army marches on in double time, with eight out of 10 local councils announcing that they have no plans to cut back on planned recruitment.

Thus we have £40,000-a-year posts (plus gold-plated pensions) for Sausage Content Enforcement Officers, Stairlift Speed Control Executives and Canine Kerbside Output Managers. Well, probably, anyway.

I suspect that it was one of these made-up-job merchants who turned up at the garage workshop of 61-year-old mechanic Len Attwoood, in Witham, Essex. The chap with the clipboard (and surely a high-visibility jacket, hard hat and ear defenders) informed Les that he was from the Performing Rights Society and had noticed that the premises didn’t display a sticker showing that he had a licence to play music in public. This is not surprising, because Les doesn’t even have a radio, never mind a revolving Sunday Night at the London Palladium stage on which top variety acts regularly perform, watched by Simon Cowell, some dolly bird, and that bucket of lard Piers Morgan.

But wait, sayeth the jobsworth, your customers might have their car radios playing when they drive into your garage. Verily, thou will either buy a PRS licence or thou will be fined a cool £2,000.

And what do you do? How do you appeal against the mindless excesses of these people? Well you don’t, unless you fancy taking them on in the High Court while running up thousands of pounds of legal bills (while they fund their own action out of your council tax).

We’re being bullied, harried, picked on and victimised and no-one seems to give a damn. Worse than that, our elected authorities seem to be forever searching for new ways in which to punish us … and then charge us for the privilege.

Can no-one stop this madness?

TELL ME this. If Nick Leeson got six-and-a-half years in prison in Singapore for “speculative trading”, why aren’t we seeing British bankers being marched off in handcuffs? What’s the difference?

Their lack of care has plummeted the financial industry into crisis, pensioners and savers have seen their investment income decimated, bully boy tactics are being employed against anyone who might accidentally miss a credit card payment and the £500 billion that Wee Gordie bailed them out with seems to have disappeared into thin air and they’re back banging on the door asking for more. To the tune of another £410 billion, if you don’t mind.

I have an idea where all that dosh might be going, and it’s not to us. A mole tells me that bankers are being made redundant by one firm, collecting their big cheques, and then moving on to the next branch in the City. The big job losses you keep hearing about aren’t affecting the boys in the red braces; the permanent victims are low-level admin staff. Worse than that, when they move to their new desks a few hundred yards down the road, they’re going into positions with guaranteed bonuses (yes, bonuses) set at 2007 levels.

Now it seems to me that we now own most of the banks in this country. Is it therefore unreasonable that the government should apply a bit of common sense to the manner in which billions of our pounds are being chucked away willy nilly? Because the snouts are obviously still in the trough, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.

I SUPPOSE a more sensible question would be: “Is there anyone not on the take?” We’re used to our policemen having second jobs while they’re supposed to be out on the beat … or filling in diversity questionnaires. Now, after retiring at the age of 45 with a handsome pension, they’re piling into lucrative second careers, but once again at the public expense.

When Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alf Hitchcock leaves the Metropolitan Police in April, aged 49, he’ll go with an £80,000-a-year pension. And where will he go? Straight into a £120,000 a year job with a government quango called the National Police Improvement Agency, where he will ‘mentor’ potential chief constables. And where he will pocket another huge pension once he retires from that job.

I reckon Nick Leeson got it wrong. He should have joined the local Plod.

I TURNED on the television on Tuesday afternoon in a state of great excitement, expecting to see a successful black man in the prime of his life enthralling his audience with the power of his personality. Instead those idiots at the BBC had gone and replaced Ready Steady Cook with some tosh from America.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about when it comes to Barry Obama. Is it really so special to have a black President? Zimbabwe has had one for years, and you could hardly call him a raging success.

And then there’s the biggest disappointment: Obama can’t dance. All these years we wait for a black President, and when one turns up he wibbles around the dance floor at his inauguration balls like a drunken uncle at Christmas. What were the odds on that, eh?

POOR BOY George, banged up for 15 months after an unfortunate bit of rent boy/radiator interface. Never again will he be able to sing: “I’m a man, without conviction…”

A sudden outbreak of common sense

2009-01-19T11:52:00.000-08:00

A POLITICIAN from Manchester called Gramha Sitnerg has caused a bit of a fuss by claiming that dyslexia is a myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching.

Well said, that man! At last some common sense creeping into the public arena. (Although as Mr Sitnerg is a Labour MP, don’t expect to hear from him again. Lord Dracula of Hartlepool has probably already been round to administer punishment. And that’s if Alistair Campbell didn’t get there first to kick his door down at six o’clock the next morning.)

But before he’s silenced, let’s listen: Dyslexia, he says, is “a cruel fiction that should be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

“The education establishment, rather than admit that their eclectic and incomplete methods for instruction are at fault, have invented a brain disorder called dyslexia. To label children as dyslexic because they're confused by poor teaching methods is wicked.

“If dyslexia really existed then countries as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100 per cent. There can be no rational reason why this brain disorder is of epidemic proportions in Britain but does not appear in South Korea or Nicaragua.”

And you’ve got to say that there’s not much to argue with there. How come this blight apparently occurs in the back streets of Salford and Moss Side but not in the much poorer back streets of Seoul and Managua?

All I know is that when I was at school, we didn’t have dyslexia. We just had thick kids and lazy kids. (And polio and whooping cough and diphtheria and rickets, but enough of that.)

Now no-one wants to victimise children who are simply lacking in the brain department, but giving them soft excuses for under-performing isn’t the answer. They need help, proper help - and that, according to many experts, is the synthetic phonics method of teaching which, in one area of Scotland, has wiped out so-called dyslexia.

But wait, what’s this? It appears that there are currently 35,500 kids receiving disability allowance for being dyslexic, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £78.4 million. So it’s not only a great excuse for not doing any work, but it pays a wage as well? Splendid stuff. It’s enough to make a tac lugah.

I TEMPTED here to lay into ‘nut allergies’, again something we didn’t have when life was played out in black and white, but it can’t be much fun if your child suffers from this affliction so I’ll leave it. I must be going soft.

But ‘milk allergies’? What on earth are those? I ask because Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate, which even the most dyslexic kid must recognise might possibly contain milk, will in future carry a health warning saying “Contains Milk” – right next to that famous little logo of a glass and a half of milk. And a list of ingredients beginning with ‘milk’. So that’s clear then.

Cadbury say that they are “meeting legal requirements”. In that case, the law is indeed an ass. And be careful, because asses (or, more correctly, Jennies) might contain milk.

THIS RECESSION is really biting on the High Street. In Poole, Dorset, a Pound Shop has closed with the loss of seven jobs because a 99p Shop opened up opposite. No, really.

Customer Karl White said: “I would certainly cross the road if it meant I could get a similar item for a penny cheaper. The more you buy for 99p, the more pennies you save. I’ve just bought six items so I’ve saved 6p.” (I suppose we have to praise the education system for Mr White’s obvious numerical acumen.)

Interestingly, wounded Pound Shop owners say they hope to reopen the branch under a new name. Go on then … let me guess.

MORE BAD news for the Poveratti. A company called Newcastle Productions, which makes Findus Crispy Pancakes, the staple diet of scrotes, has gone into administration. This creates an immediate problem: from where will the Underclass now get their daily protein?

Well, there’s always Pot Noodles, Ginsters and Greggs. Cold beans straight from the tin. Or, for those special occasions, Iceland mini chicken kievs on potato waffles. And the real Giro Day luxury, a Fray Bentos tinned pie. Marvellous stuff.

EVER WONDERED why your TV licence fee costs so much? Well on Wednesday of this week the BBC launched Persian TV, a Farsi language channel aimed at the Iranian market, at the small cost of £15 million a year.

So that’s the entire population of Cambridge contributing every penny of their licence fee to provide a television channel for people in a distant foreign country who aren’t going to pay a penny for the service. Why? What is going on here?

The director of the BBC’s World Service, Nigel Chapman, says: “Persian TV builds on our distinguished history of broadcasting in Persian and brings the best of the BBC’s news and documentary programmes to audiences.”

Again, why? Why isn’t the BBC spending money on local radio and television, bringing “the best of the BBC’s news and documentary programmes” to audiences in Towcester and Trowbridge rather then Tehran? And buying Bruce Forsyth some new jokes? It’s an utter disgrace.

I DO feel a bit sorry for HRH The Prince of Wales being dragged into this so-called Royal racism row. So he calls a friend of Indian descent ‘Sooty’? So what?

Have you seen the bloke concerned? He’s a dead ringer for Harry H. Corbett.

Look out - here comes the Wakey Wakey Squad

2009-01-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Telling hoodies not to polish the slide with bread paper

2009-01-05T05:57:00.000-08:00

I BET that when you bought your Lottery tickets on New Year’s Eve, you didn’t think that your hard-earned cash would be going towards paying almost £40,000 a year to a Community Space Challenge Co-ordinator in the London borough of Southwark. But it did.

That’s just one of the many non-jobs highlighted in the end of year report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and by no means the daftest.

What a Community Space Challenge Co-ordinator actually does is described as “Telling young people ‘at risk of offending’ how to use public spaces”. Quite what that entails I’m not sure, but presumably it involves wandering around the local park telling hoodies not to polish the slide with bread paper and to perhaps try not to stab each other while queuing for a go on the witch’s hat.

We should not belittle this job. Southwark is a tough patch, where even the area’s top clergyman is liable to get legless at an Irish Embassy reception, clamber into a stranger’s car and throw the owner’s children’s toys into the road shouting “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do”.

So who else is on this Roster of Nonsense? Well, there’s the £42,000-a-year Head of Participation and Inclusion at Hertfordshire County Council, whose job description seems to be “encouraging people to play musical instruments”.

What about the £37,000-a-year Head of Communities and Partnership in Charnwood, tasked with “ensuring that community issues are resolved with lasting solutions”?

And then there’s the £20,000-a-year job of Street Football Co-ordinator at Moray Council in Scotchland … err … organising and promoting street football. Actually, I quite agree with that one. I can think of no better use of public money than getting kids away from their computer screens and out into the fresh air … as long as it’s not my wall they’re kicking the ball against.

The problem with this explosion in the number of State apparatchiks is that public sector workers used to be rewarded with generous pensions for all their years of lowly-paid toil for the benefit of others. But no more. The average public sector worker was paid £21,413 in 2008, more than those on the private sector average of £20,715.

Furthermore, despite the economic implosion engulfing us all, their jobs are still regarded as much more secure than those of the rest of us. It’s the Turkey Army principle, where NuLabour must create safe jobs for the people most likely to vote for them next time around.

The place to see this obscene snout-in-the-troughery to full effect is in the jobs section of Wednesday’s Guardian. There, despite the recession and jobs losses already in the thousands, the number of public sector posts up for grabs has increased by 14,000 in the past three months. In the past three months. Something to think about when your new council tax bill drops through your letter box this week.

I SUPPOSE I can see why all of our Olympic gold medal winners picked up further gongs in the New Year’s Honours (even if Sir Chris Hoy is just a very fast paperboy), but why was the tax-dodging Lewis Hamilton granted an MBE?

OK, so he won the Formula 1 drivers’ championship, but he triumphed in a rich man’s sport where the size of your team’s wallet more or less decides where you finish in a race. And seeing as he’s already decamped to Monaco because he was tired of being “pestered” (by the Inland Revenue, mainly), that to my mind disqualifies him from any kind of official recognition.

THE STUPIDITY of the general British public never ceases to amaze me. In the forefront of these plebeian poltroons are the idiots who phone 999 for ridiculous reasons.

There’s the priest who called the cops when staff at the WH Smith shop at Manchester Airport wouldn’t let him use their toilet, despite the availability of public conveniences all around. (I suspect he may have been communing with the Bishop of Southwark.)

Then there’s the woman who complained that she couldn’t get through to Strictly Come Dancing to cast her vote, the man who phoned up because staff at a takeaway had put mushrooms on his pizza and, sadly, former Page 3 girl Linda Lusardi – her of the goosebump diddies – who dialled 999 for permission to use the hard shoulder to get to her pantomime in time when stuck in a traffic jam. Listen, love, it’s not all about you. We drunks who fall downstairs have 999 needs as well, you know.

NEW YEAR’S EVE was somewhat muted in the Beelzebub household after a stand-up row over Israel’s decision to bomb the Gaza Strip into submission. (Yes, I know, but we’d run out of the usual arguments over Christmas.)

Mrs Beelzebub, an old school Leftie, can’t see beyond solidarity with the poor Arabs. I take the view that if someone was firing 100 rockets a day into my country, the time might well come when I’d like to put a stop to it.

Either way, it wasn’t the most propitious of starts to a new era. The twiglets went uneaten, the champagne went flat. The dogs hid in their bed and the man next door got a right roasting for setting off his Roman Candles after the good lady had taken to her bed.

Ah, well. A Happy New Year to you all.

So tell me who's the real clown?

2008-12-28T02:54:00.000-08:00

TELL ME this. If you were a terrorist intending to hijack or blow up a plane, how would you go about getting through security?

Well, you would probably do your best to fit in, to make yourself look unremarkable and quite normal. What you probably wouldn’t do is wear a flashing police helmet, a red nose and size 48 shoes (unless it was a ridiculously clever double bluff).

That is how Dave Vaughan, also known as children’s entertainer PC Konk, was attired when he turned up at Birmingham International Airport, booked by the Variety Club to perform for disadvantaged children on a one-hour, circular Search for Santa flight. This clearly troubled the appalling jobsworths at security who (obviously suspecting a ridiculously clever double bluff) strip-searched the clown just in case and then confiscated … his plastic handcuffs.

“I couldn’t believe it when they told me to get undressed so they could search me,” said PC Konk. “'I showed them my police clown identity card, which had my picture next to my credentials as a member of the Criminal Insane Department, but I don’t think that really helped.”

No, I bet it didn’t. Sadly, we are rapidly turning into a country where arrogance and ignorance infests every aspect of life and where those with a little bit of power seem to take a perverse delight in routinely bullying the rest of us.

From the checkout assistant who refused to sell crackers to a woman she thought might be under 21, to the council clipboard-wielders who fine people for dropping a peanut, to the internet bank drone who couldn’t see why I might need some cash two days before Christmas … we’re under the heel of an army of unreasonableness. Of course, I blame NuLabour.

WHILE we’re talking about out-of-control tools of the state, I see that the BBC has been fined £95,000 in yet another faked phone-in scandal. The latest offences came in pre-recorded shows featuring Dermot O’Leary and Tony Blackburn, when the programmes were later broadcast “as live” and listeners were encouraged to call in and enter competitions they couldn’t possibly win.

(Never mind calling Ofcom; I’d call the police. That’s blatant fraud, surely?)

This means that the BBC has now paid out over half a million quid in fines in the past 18 months for fiddling competitions and lying to viewers and listeners. Of course, when I say “fined”, no-one at the BBC will actually lose any money. No producers will be sacked and no presenters will have to put their hands in their bulging pockets.

No, remarkably the people who will have to cough up for the fines are you and me – the poor bloody licence fee-payers. What’s the point in that then? It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

I’ll tell you what. Seeing as my dosh – currently in the possession of a hard-faced harridan at an internet bank – is subsidising widespread dishonesty at the Beeb, I want something back in return. How about a seat at the table amongst Nigella’s “friends”, when the well-upholstered, simpering, slobbering cook serves up her creations?

You know the ones I mean: the supercilious, middle-class twit in his M&S knitwear, the pretty, but not-too-pretty women, the trendy, bald North London gay, the actress Maria McErlane, the … yes, the actress Maria McErlane. Because these aren’t really Nigella’s friends at all. They’re from Rent-a-Crowd. And that’s not Nigella’s Kensington kitchen, either. It’s actually a mock-up on an industrial estate in South London.

It’s all a big con, and it’s called ‘television’, stoopid.

I SUPPOSE it’s a faintly festive thought, but more than 2,000 lives could be saved every year by the introduction of bowel cancer testing kits. In simple terms, you poo in a test tube and send it off to a lab, getting the results back two weeks later.

As ever, the Porridge Wogs are taking the other bodily fluid. While the test will only be available in England to those aged 60 to 75, in Scotland it will be freely available to over 50s. So that extra benefit for those north of the border joins free eye tests, free prescriptions (coming shortly), free hospital parking, free nursing care for the elderly and free life-prolonging drugs for Alzheimer’s sufferers and cancer patients.

The reason for this generosity is that the McMafia in Westminster continue to give the Scotch much more money to spend per capita than they do down here. I know all the women up there smell of fish and look like Jimmy Krankies, but this is getting beyond a joke.

DETERMINED TO avoid the nightmare scenario that happens when an over-ripe Christmas Stilton takes over your fridge well into Spring, making the baby mozzarella cry and reducing the Stinking Bishop to a nervous wreck, I battle my way into the Seventh Circle of Hell that is the cheese aisle at Waitrose intent on buying just a small piece this year.

I snatch a handy lump from the claws of a desperate pensioner and I’m about to stick it in my trolley when I notice the price sticker: £6.66 – the number of the beast. This is clearly a sign from old Satan himself, so I repent my recidivist ways and do the decent thing. I buy a big old wheel of Cropwell Bishop, which I swear I can hear purring on the way back to the car. By the time you read this, we’ll be engaged in hand-to-hand battle.

Stow me the way to go home

2008-12-21T02:45:00.000-08:00

THIS IS how our legal system works … or doesn’t. Moroccan Rashid Ali (30) turned up in Britain in 2004 claiming to be an Algerian asylum seeker. His application was rejected and he ended up squatting in an abandoned grain warehouse at Avonmouth Docks, near Bristol. (Why he wasn’t sent home at this point is beyond me, as you’ll see.)

Ali then decided that he wanted to go home, with his preferred mode of transport being a ship. He was booted off the first one he stowed away on at Milford Haven in Wales. He then kept on trying and after being caught for the fifth time was hauled before the courts and sentenced to three years in a detention centre … at a cost to the taxpayer of around £250,000.

Two days after his release (and we pause again to ask why he hadn’t then been sent home) he was caught hiding on yet another boat. Back to the courts again where a frustrated Judge finally asks the question as to why a man who so clearly wants to return to his homeland is constantly prevented from doing so by a judicial system that makes the Three Stooges look like potential Cabinet members.

So I had a quick look on t’internet this morning and a flight from Bristol to Marrakech comes in at £83.27. Might I suggest that that’s a cheaper option for HMG than banging the poor bugger up for another three years at a cost of a quarter of a million? Or am I missing something here?

IT’S NOT much to ask for your local supermarket to decorate your three-year-old child’s birthday cake with his name, especially when you’re willing to pay. Unfortunately for Heath Campbell, from New Jersey, USA, his local store for some reason refused to ice the words ‘Adolf Hitler Campbell’ onto a Victoria sponge. Things are also looking a bit grim for the toddler’s two-year-old sister, Joycelynn Aryan Nation Campbell (pictured above).

It’s all entirely innocent, of course. Heath Campbell said he gave his son the name because he liked it and that “no one else in the world would have that name”. On the other hand, he could just be a notorious neo-Nazi who perhaps ought to go to Wal-Mart next time. Because they did the icing, no problem.

BACK IN 2005, we were told that the legacy of hosting the 2012 Olympics would mean millions of Britain’s obese couch potatoes waddling off to shiny new sports facilities where they’d combat the effects of a diet of Findus Crispy Pancakes and Stella. Well now a secret government report has concluded that there will be few long-term benefits in terms of facilities and that while the Olympics is a good excuse for a party, little else will come from it.

When you put that in context of the escalating cost, estimated at £9 billion at the moment (but if it’s quadrupled in the last four years, what will it do in the next four years) and the admission by Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell that we would never have bid for the Games “if we had known what we know now”, then perhaps it’s time to make a strategic withdrawal.

Let’s face it: we can’t afford it and we’re bound to cock it up anyway. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we just hand the Games back to China? They’ve got the facilities, and they’ve proved they can stage it, and stage it well. Let them have it again. Welcome to Beijing, the new Athens. Only with fewer ruins.

THESE PUBLIC sector workers who’ve been overpaid on their pensions … some from as far back as the 1970s. I read today that Gordon Brown is being urged to “soften the blow” when it comes to reducing their payments.

Well just hang on a minute. Apart from a few former judges, the average reduction in payment is reckoned to be just £220 a year, or £4.20 a week. These people aren’t being asked to pay back anything; is it therefore too much to ask that they might simply swallow this grievous loss, even if they are ex-civil servants? It’s hardly going to put them on the breadline, is it?

WE ARE told that the credit crunch has hit corporate shoot days, with fat bankers in funny trousers notably absent from our woods this season. If my experience of last week is anything to go by, it’s far worse than that.

Invited to what is usually a splendid day’s sport, I turned up to find that the beaters were a bunch of Poles who couldn’t afford the coach fare home, the dogs were two pit bulls off the local council estate and an arthritic poodle, lunch was sell-by-date Aldi sausage rolls accompanied by a fine Lidl port, and the shoot dinner was taken in a nearby Harvester.

The bag was three pheasant, a squirrel and a brace of badgers. Hard times, indeed.

THE HOUSES used as a film set for the soap Brookside have been sold. At first sight they might seem a bargain – 13 houses in the close for just £750,000, but beware. We already know that one has dodgy light fittings that are liable to electrocute the new owner, what lies under the patio of another is best not discussed, and living there is likely to turn your wife into a lesbian. Caveat emptor, indeed.

I BOUGHT an Advent calendar from Woolworths in their sale last week. It was rubbish. All the windows were boarded up and there was nothing inside.

Through a glass, darkly

2008-12-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

SO I turn on the television and there’s a middle aged man in sensible shoes standing on his patio saying: “Just remember - an anagram of ‘garden’ is ‘danger’.” He then goes on to demonstrate how plant-supporting canes can be lethal if you are stupid enough to bend down and ram your eye onto one. What a prat.

This was Channel 4’s documentary about the people who work in our burgeoning Health and Safety industry – a special breed who tiptoe through life as if every manhole cover was a land mine. Step on a crack and you lose a leg. As you might imagine, five minutes in and I’m already frothing at the mouth. I was just about to get up to go and run around the kitchen while holding a pair of scissors when ‘pouff’ – the light bulb in the drawing room goes kaput. And that’s another thing.

Rummaging in the boot room cupboard, I can’t find any normal bulbs. All we seem to have is packet after packet of these new-fangled low-energy things, most of them given away free by supermarkets or, for some strange reason, by the Gas Board. So I stick one in, turn it on … and nothing happens. So I turn it off and turn it on again. Nothing happens. After a couple of minutes of this I give up in exasperation and go to walk away when, as if by magic, it comes on. It appears that there is some kind of time lag between you turning it on and the bulb actually illuminating. Well, that’s progress, especially if you’re standing at the top of the stairs half asleep.

And what a grim, grey, mean light it is. I’m immediately transported back to my days in Kruschev’s Soviet Union, or somewhere in Wales on a winter Sunday afternoon. Reading the newspaper is impossible; groping your way around the room is just about possible if you wear one of those head-torches popular with cyclists, pot-holers and midnight gardeners.

The next morning I’m off down to the hardware shop in search of good, old-fashioned, 100 watt bayonet bulbs. And that’s when I come up against the might of the European Union. The man in the brown coat behind the counter informs me that 150w bulbs have long been regarded as worse than crack cocaine while, as from the end of this year, normal 100w light bulbs will also be banned by the EU. We must all now use the energy-saving version, like it or lump it.

He then starts winking at me, in a passable impression of Ronny Barker’s Arkwright. I finally catch on and, 10 minutes later, leave the shop clutching a box of Number 3 self-tapping wood screws, a magnetic device for cleaning one’s outside windows from the inside, four bottles of Cillit Bang and, crucially, a brown paper-wrapped package containing half a dozen illicit 100w clear glass, bayonet-ended light bulbs.

I go home, draw the curtains, replace the idiot bulbs with the proper thing and then flick the switch. I’m like a junkie who’s just hit a vein; happiness floods through me as bright, white, coal-burning, carbon-unfriendly, dolphin-killing, polar bear-murdering light floods the house. I bask like a Page 3 girl on a Barbados beach.

But why should it have to be like this? As far as I can establish, the alleged ‘ban’ on proper light bulbs is merely voluntary. So why have most of our shopkeepers rolled over and given in to the iron fist of Europe?

And don’t be fooled. These environmentally-friendly bulbs are nothing of the sort. They contain mercury for a start. If you break one, you’re supposed to evacuate everyone from your home, seal up all the windows from outside, take out your dedicated ‘light bulb’ brush and dustpan, clean up the mess and then ship it in a nuclear-safe container to the nearest dedicated dump where men in chemical suits will carefully take it from you before sealing it up in a lead-lined rocket and firing it to the moon. Except you won’t. You’ll just chuck it in the bin with everything else.

And what’s the biggest argument against them? Well, they’re so dim that you’ll need twice as many bulbs to yield the same amount of light. And doesn’t that somewhat defeat the object?

AFTER MY comments of a couple of weeks ago about the impact (or non-impact) of a 2.5 per cent cut in VAT on our spending habits, a reader called Charles Courtney writes in the following terms:

“Just a small point on your wine price calculation: the VAT reduction of 2.5 per cent is actually less than a 2.5 per cent reduction in retail prices. It is 2.5/117.5 i.e. 2.13 per cent. Therefore your £6.99 bottle of wine would not drop to £6.81 but would be £6.99/1.175) x 1.15 = £6.84.”
Anyone care to bet that Mr Courtney owns a leather Radio Times binder and wears string-backed driving gloves?

THE LATEST BBC trailer asks where you were when certain newsworthy events happened, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of Elvis Presley, and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa.

Well I certainly know where I was in the case of the latter. I was on the phone to the BBC complaining bitterly that they’d gone and cancelled the bloody Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday evening.

Never mind the credit crunch, here's what really matters

2008-12-07T03:30:00.000-08:00

IN THE midst of a constitutional crisis, with the police wandering in and out of Parliament willy nilly seeking to stifle Opposition MPs who’ve been embarrassing the government, it’s always good to know that Wee Gordie Broon has got his priorities right. So what’s he been up to (apart from turning a blind eye to the excesses of the Met)? He’s been writing letters to X Factor finalists. No, really.

It turns out that our Prime Minister has found time amongst two major wars and the worst financial meltdown since the 1930s to pen personal notes to all 12 wannabe wasters polluting our Saturday night telly. Why on earth would he want to do that?

We know that Princess Tony would do anything to enhance his image – remember Cool Britannia, anyone? – but I thought the stern Scot was made of tougher stuff than that. And even if he was such a big fan, why would he then allow the news of the correspondence to leak? Is this some pitiful attempt to soften the image? Frankly it beggars belief.

Mr Brown has a reputation for going missing whenever the brown stuff hits the fan. He might well think that placing touchy-feely stories like this in Her Majesty’s Press deflects attention from the fact that the police, clearly at the behest of NuLabour, are now using anti-terrorism legislation to gag their opponents – as they have been doing to some journalists for the past couple of years. Banana Republic, anyone?

THE COPS have clearly been busy elsewhere as well. The organiser of the local bonfire in Elwick, Cleveland, was rather taken aback when police turned up on his doorstep two days after the event, arrested him, held him at the nick for 20 hours, took his fingerprints and DNA and then charged him with arson, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Seems a trifle harsh for co-ordinating sparklers on the village green.

Lorry driver Brett Duxfield, for it is he, had apparently incurred the wrath of the parish council, which had banned the village green bonfire back in 1994 after rowdy behaviour. The fact that it had been held peaceably for the past four years, with organisers even replacing charred turf, doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone.

As ever, the police revert to that jobsworth monotone: “We are duty bound to follow through a complaint,” says Inspector Tony Green of Cleveland Police.

Well, no, you’re not really, are you? You could just say “Go away and don’t be silly” the next time someone makes an entirely facetious and stupid complaint. Instead we end up with a village at war, Mr Duxfield on bail, and the law of the land being portrayed as a complete and utter ass.

I SEE that furniture company DFS – home of the ever-present sale – has been reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority for using special effects to enhance the size of its sofas in television adverts. In simple terms, the huge leather monstrosity you saw in the ad was somewhat smaller when you turned up in the store to buy it. Either that or they used midgets to represent those happy cuddly couples who only ever exist in TV Land.

I am assured by an insider that this isn’t the only instance of such malpractice. Rumour has it that the next advertiser in the dock will be a certain hotel chain which is thought to have built an entire set representing a larger than life room to accommodate its larger than life comedian star in relative comfort. Watch this ever-expanding space.

STILL IN these difficult times for the retail market, it’s good to see that our big High Street stores are doing their bit.

Take Habitat, for instance. A friend recently went in to buy a piece of furniture and asked how much it would cost to have it delivered to his home. “£65”, he was told.

“But the table I’ve bought only cost £50. How can it then cost £65 to have it delivered?” he reasonably asked.

The callow youth behind the counter yawned and said those immortal words: “Flat rate charge. Company policy.” End of sale.

IKEA is even worse. For years they didn’t even offer a delivery service, so you’d be stuck there after the checkout with a bed, a wardrobe and several Billy bookcases staring glumly at your Fiat Panda and wishing that Paul Daniels would appear out of nowhere and make it all fit in. I will confess to having abandoned my wife and child in their car park before now while making shuttle runs to home and back.

Then they did offer delivery, but you had to pay up front and if they didn’t turn up – a distressingly common occurrence – then you had to trail back to the shop and claim your money back. (Mind you, you were probably already there trying to get hold of the missing parts.)

ONE CUSTOMER service sector that has been reformed is that of prostitution, with Jacqui Smith’s new laws suggesting that the men who pay for sex from a ‘trafficked’ woman should be liable to prosecution. Now I must say straight away that this will not inconvenience me in any way: I am not a customer, nor a lorry driver.

But the practical problem for those who feel the need to avail themselves of this service is obvious – how do you know if your lady of the night is home-grown or a recent import?

I suggest some kind of kite mark tattooed on their backsides – maybe something like that little tractor they put on British food. What? What? It’s only a suggestion …

How to waste £12 billion in the blink of an eye

2008-12-02T08:28:00.000-08:00

IT’S THOSE weasel words again folks: “Lessons must be learned.”

This time around the “lessons that must be learned” surround the appalling case of the 56-year-old man from Sheffield who has been jailed for life (aka 19 years) after raping his two daughters over a period of many years. The attacks resulted in 19 pregnancies and nine surviving children, some of who are severely disabled or terminally ill due to the genetic complications. It really does beggar belief.

And by whom must those “lessons be learned”? Why, it’s the usual suspects – the same agencies who must bear the blame and the guilt over the death of Baby P.

Let’s think about this again, however painful it might be. We are told that the attacks began when the children were pre-pubescent, so presumably continued throughout their schooldays. Did no-one at those schools notice anything out of the ordinary? Why not?

Then there were the doctors and the hospital staff who must have come into contact with the girls during their 19 pregnancies. Did no-one think to raise an eyebrow over the repeated miscarriages and stillbirths, or the children born with debilitating conditions? Was that all considered coincidence?

Were the police sniffing around at any stage? And we have to assume that at some point social services got involved – and if they weren’t at any stage, that’s almost as big a scandal than if they were.

We are told that the father avoided suspicion falling upon his family by moving around small rural villages in Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire, and that information that might have alerted the authorities wasn’t shared across county boundaries. Shades of Soham, anyone? And surely your medical records follow you where ever you go?

But never mind. I’m sure “lessons will be learned”.

SO HOW do you waste £12 billion in the blink of an eye? Simple - reduce VAT by 2.5 per cent in the ridiculous belief that it might kick-start the economy.

I’ve never heard of anything so daft. The big stores are already offering 20 per cent and 40 per cent discounts in pre-Christmas sales. Why does the government seem to think that another 2.5 per cent, which might or might not get passed on, is going to make any difference to people’s shopping habits?

When did you last hear someone say: “Ooh, that’s a nice bottle of wine, but it’s a bit expensive at £6.99. If only it was £6.81 I’d snap it up. Probably buy two.”

And then there’s the cost to those stores who do pass on the saving having to re-programme their computers or keep the staff up all night banging away with a price gun, estimated at £20 million.

In fact, the only part of the economy that will benefit from this is the signwriters, who will have to go around the country changing the name of Poundshops to 97.5PenceShops

It’s not all bad news. As the BBC reported this week, 25 JobCentres have been saved from closure and another 6,000 staff are being taken on to deal with the massed ranks of the soon-to-be unemployed. So that’s all right then.

BUT THAT’S no real surprise, is it? The ranks of the Turkey Army have been boosted to such an extent that there are now 5.8 million public sector workers, each enjoying a generous final salary, index-linked pension scheme with a retirement age of 60 or even lower. Mind you, they don’t seem too happy about their gold-plated jobs, spending more than 100 times as many days on strike as private sector workers and being 25 per cent more likely to go on the sick.

There are now estimated to be over 800 people working in local government who earn more than £100,000 a year and the gravy train shows no sign of stopping. The Centre for Economic and Business research is predicting that as redundancy rates rise rapidly in the private sector, the state is going to hire another 50,000 people over the next year.

Clamber on board while you can, folks. And don’t worry about the fare – the rest of us will pay.

I SEE that the Cake Police have been in action again. A hospital in Cumbria has banned the local League of Friends from baking cakes to raise money for equipment the NHS cannot afford, as they have been for years.

A man called Alan Davidson, who holds the magnificent Turkey Army title of Director of Estates and Facilities, insists that the home-made sponge cakes and tea loaves contravene Food Standards Agency guidelines and therefore cannot be sold on hospital premises. He drones on, in the tones of Blakey from On The Buses: “All food should be packaged appropriately, date-stamped and ingredients listed. This is in the interest of maintaining and protecting the health of the public.”

As ever, when you dig a bit deeper on these things, all is not what it seems. The Food Standards Agency, in an astonishing attack of common sense, responds: “There is nothing in our guidelines that prevents the sale of home-made cakes at fund-raising events.” Crumbs.

So it turns out, as so often in these cases, that it isn’t the legislation that’s at fault but the hi-visibility jacket-wearing numptie who chooses to interpret that legislation in a manner that justifies his own existence. And job, salary and pension.

Pass that bottle of £6.81 wine. In fact, pass two.

Who will save me from a Nazi plumber?

2008-11-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

I NEVER thought that when defending freedom of speech, thought and action, it would be the fascists I would be sticking up for.

I don’t know how many people spent Wednesday searching that leaked BNP membership list for people they knew or who lived locally. I certainly did, and was massively disappointed to find my plumber on there. Do you know how difficult it is to find a good plumber these days? What do I do now? Find someone else or live with the knowledge that the man rhythmically thrusting his plunger up and down my toilet bowl is probably humming Send The Buggers Back to keep time?

Already similar ramifications are spreading. At the time of writing, a serving Merseyside police officer is under investigation after his name appeared on the list and a TalkSport radio DJ has been effectively sacked. No doubt more will fall by the wayside in the days to come.

And here’s my problem. The BNP is a legal political party. Anyone who wants to be a member can be, without fear of prosecution - never mind persecution. And that’s the way it should be in a democracy. Yes, you’d have to worry if your children’s teacher was on there, and we already know that the police are banned from being members for fear of accusations of racial discrimination. But what about soldiers, and prison officers, and social workers? Since when have they been disenfranchised?

What about this chap: “Retired teacher. Diploma in Education. Commission in Territorial Army (Infantry). Adjutant of regiment's Old Comrades Association. Member of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Hobbies: landscape painting, gardening.”

Yes, you probably wouldn’t want to sit next to him at a dinner party, but then we all know people like that.

Then there’s this lady: “Nurse (District. Sister). State registered nurse. Orthopaedic nursing Cert. & Diploma in Nursing. Hobbies: walking, caravanning, cross-stitch & knitting, helping people in need.”

Helping people in need of sending back where they came from, no doubt, but who are we to say that she shouldn’t keep her job?

Coming on top of the moral witch-hunt sparked by the Brand/Ross affair, I fear that we’re now facing a full-scale outbreak of McCarthyism. We are living in a control freak society, and it’s not going to get any better any time soon. Fear your kids, say nothing to your neighbours, guard your thoughts, because you never know when the six o’clock knock is going to come (apart from it being at six o’clock, of course).

LIKE DRUNKS scuffling for tab ends in the gutter, the big department stores have launched into their Christmas advertising offensives, and offensive is the word. We’re still the best part of five weeks off and yet if I hear It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas once more, I swear I’ll put my foot through the 42-inch plasma. Neither do I want to see Take That pretending to enjoy a country house celebration with Twiggy and that bird in a bikini off last year’s I’m A Celebrity. Richard Hammond? Stay in the Arctic, you supercilious little toe-rag.

And meanwhile the third most important news of the day on the BBC’s Six O’Clock bulletin, ahead of the BNP story, was the fact that an ageing political reporter had stepped down from a reality dance show. What have we become?

THE ONE thing worth watching on television at the moment – IACGMOOH apart - is the advert for those personalised stamps featuring the dancing cat. Very funny and technically excellent.

But one thing occurs to me: ever the subversive, I’d quite like to get a picture of the Queen’s head and use that as my personal Christmas greeting.

THE PROBLEM is, the way things are going we might only be left with commercial channels to watch. The poor old BBC, through its inept handling of the Brand/Ross affair, has opened a Pandora’s box which may eventually fundamentally change the way it is funded.

Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, has been complaining bitterly for months in the pages of The Spectator about how the TV licensing storm-troopers, employed by that model of common sense, Capita, refuse to believe that he doesn’t have a television at his London flat. He’s regularly in receipt of threatening letters with dire warnings that detectors vans will catch him at it (even though they now contain nothing more technical than a man turning a bent coat hanger pushed through the roof).

Now, spurred by Manuelgate, he’s now refusing to pay his licence fee at his country home (the posh git) while Jonathan Ross is employed by the BBC. Unfortunately for the Beeb, he’s had letters from hundreds of other viewers who have similarly held back their telly tax – seemingly without the fear of prosecution. This ended up as a full page in the Daily Mail, and that’s when you know it’s getting serious.

The theory is that Capita, aka the BBC, is afraid to prosecute big-name conscientious objectors, fearful of making them martyrs, but is instead happy to persecute impoverished council estate scrotes with impunity. So what would happen if the middle England readers of the Mail refused en masse to cough up? The jails certainly couldn’t hold them, even if the political will was there to further criminalise the voting classes.

This could get very, very interesting. Watch this space.

I never again want to hear that 'lessons will be learned',

2008-11-16T04:12:00.000-08:00

YOU WOULD think that there would be so many levels of Turkey Army bureaucracy infesting our public services that mistakes would almost be impossible to make; that somewhere in the warren-like system, someone, somewhere would inevitably say “Hang on a minute – this isn’t right”.

After this week’s events involving Haringey Council at the Old Bailey, the answer has to be clearly not - although I suspect, with its £100 million a year budget, it’s through utter ineptitude rather than any laughable notion of under-staffing.

The case of 17-month-old Baby P, who despite being on the council’s at risk register, despite being seen 60 times by social workers in just eight months (that’s once every three days), and despite being the subject of two police investigations, was left to die in agony in a blood-stained cot with a broken back and multiple injuries after being tortured for months by his parents almost beggars belief. It has made me very sad and very, very angry. I actually couldn’t bring myself to read the long list of injuries published in the newspapers. The detail of how they were inflicted – “he was punched so hard in the mouth he swallowed a bottom tooth” – makes me feel faint.

And that’s where the anger overcomes the terrible sorrow, because Haringey Council has previous for this sort of thing, being the same social services department that was to blame for the death of little Victoria Climbie eight years ago. You would think that if any public authority had learned how to protect its children, it would be this one. But no.

We have the social worker who visited repeatedly and yet failed to spot the injuries caused by months of torture and, just four days before his death, was fooled by the boy’s mother smearing chocolate and nappy cream over his wounds.

We have the team leader who agreed that the baby should continually be returned to his home, despite two police investigations and the warnings of hospital staff.

We have the ‘chair’ of something called the Haringey Local Safeguarding Children Board who has shifted the blame quicker than an incontinent puppy, claiming that “The council didn’t kill Baby P; his parents did.”

And we have the doctor, the paediatrician who examined Baby P two days before his death and failed to spot that he was paralysed with a broken spine and also had several broken ribs and multiple other injuries. (Read that sentence back again and consider what it means. I bet you’re shaking your head, aren’t you?) She blamed this gross negligence on being unable to carry out a full examination because Baby P was “miserable and cranky”. Yes, I bet he was.

Still, heads will roll, won’t they? The people who allowed this horrific abuse to continue unabated will be sacked, won’t they?

Err ... no. At the time of writing, three written warnings have been issued and it has been made very clear that no-one will lose their job and no-one will be resigning. (I suspect that may have changed by the time you read this.)

And then, to top it off, we have that aforementioned ‘chair’ turning up on the TV news telling us, in that patronising tone the Guardian-reading classes use when they’re talking down to the rest of us, that “Lessons will be learned”.

I tell you what. I never want to hear a public servant using the phrase “Lessons will be learned” ever again. Because they’re clearly not, are they?

DODGY VICARS have been a staple of the Sunday tabloids for years, but they’re usually male. Now, since the ordination of women, we’re getting dodgy female vicars coming unstuck – and, I would suggest, in proportionately higher numbers.

The latest example is a motorbiking mother from Daventry, Northants, who has been banned from the clergy for 12 years by a Church of England disciplinary hearing after turning up drunk for services and also boasting to fellow clergy that she and her husband went on swinger’s holidays and that she was a keen contributor to some dodgy websites. Hardly the Vicar of Dibley, is it?

The best bit about the newspaper story I read was right down the bottom: “It is thought she has now trained as a teacher.” Well, that’s all right then.

DID YOU see that TV programme on Prince Charles the other night? The one celebrating his 60th birthday today? What do you reckon?

Spoilt and tetchy? Of course – it goes with the territory. If I was a multi-millionaire heir to the throne, I’d be a right pain in the backside as well. I wouldn’t have porky male valets squeezing my toothpaste from the tube. It would be half-naked 23-year-old pole dancers. Or even half-naked 23-year-old Pole dancers. I’m not fussy.

But honest and well-meaning? I think so. Whatever the baggage he drags with him, and whatever the peculiar characteristics his upbringing has instilled, I think he’s definitely a good man who recognises his public duties and tries to carry them out to the benefit of us all. If only he was in charge of Haringey’s Local Safeguarding Children Board. There’d be fewer tortured babies out there, that’s for sure.

TOP TIP this week comes not from Viz, but from the front page of the Daily Telegraph (yes, the front page).

If you’re feeding the birds this winter and your bird table keeps getting mugged by squirrels, just sprinkle a bit of chilli powder on your nuts. Apparently the birds don’t mind it, but the squirrels hate it. Probably keeps you warm as well. Pip pip!

The perils of wearing a trilby while driving

2008-11-08T03:31:00.000-08:00

THE GOOD weather of a couple of weekends ago brought out the Sunday drivers en masse around our way. Unfortunately they all seemed to be elderly men wearing hats.

Now something happens to a man when he takes that major lifestyle decision to start wearing a hat while inside a motor vehicle. Why this should be necessary is something of a mystery. They’re not going to get wet, are they? And those thinning locks are hardly going to need an expensive hairdo should they be disturbed by the breeze. But this is a democratic country, and if a trilby is deemed de rigueur for driving, then so be it.

It’s what happens to the brain of the hat-wearer that troubles me. There must be some scientific evidence that the resultant constriction of the forehead, or perhaps cranial overheating, causes everything around them to start moving very fast – a bit like the ‘interesting’ morning I suffered after picking mushrooms for breakfast from the field at the back of the house. I know this because the hat-wearer then begins to compensate by doing everything really, really slowly – including making painful progress along the Queen’s highway. Spatial awareness is also obviously impaired, leading them to settle in the middle of the road ad nauseam, effectively blocking any overtaking attempt.

Or perhaps it’s just because these people are clearly very old, and probably shouldn’t be driving anything more dangerous than a mobility scooter in the first place.

I don’t know if 86-year-old Allan Skoyles was wearing a hat when he ploughed into three pedestrians outside a church in Norfolk, maiming one and – according to a judge – contributing to the eventual death of another. But I do know that Mr Skoyles, who is registered deaf, has undergone eight heart operations and suffered a stroke which leaves him barely mobile, shouldn’t have been driving anything more dangerous than a mobility scooter in the first place. Are we quite mad, allowing nonsense like this?

MORE CLASS warfare. Bournemouth Council has banned staff from using Latin words because they are “elitist and discriminatory”.

I’m not talking about full-blown extracts from Homer here, or even the phrase Pulchritudo et Salubritas, which adorns the crest of … err … Bournemouth Council, but everyday additions to our language of which most people understand the meaning even if they don’t know the literal translation, eg (sorry) bona fide, status quo, vice versa and et cetera.

(There are a couple of examples up above for you as well, albeit not Latin ones per se.)

If this had been done to make council missives clearer and more understandable, I would have some sympathy, but it’s not: the word “elitist” gives the game away. Latin is being banned because only ‘toffs’ have been taught it; the common herd of hooded chavs lurking around the gates of our comprehensives struggle with English, never mind anything more testing.

Funnily enough, I don’t recall them banning words like bungalow, jodphurs or even thugs, all words of equally foreign origin. And Pulchritudo et Salubritas? Beauty and health, if you were educated after they disbanded grammar schools.

I BET that when the forces of the liberal Left suddenly realised that they’d have to stand up to the Daily Mail’s new self-appointed role of national moral guardian, they didn’t think they’d be defending Jeremy Clarkson.

It’s a delicious irony that the motor-mouthed petrol-head, scourge of cyclists, lentil-eaters and yoghurt-knitters everywhere, finds himself next on the hit list after a slightly dodgy comment about lorry drivers having a predilection for murdering prostitutes. (Dodgy, perhaps, but undeniably true – see Peter Sutcliffe and the Suffolk Strangler, both one-time HGV merchants.)

In the wake of the Brand/Ross affair, the cross the BBC now has to bear is the launch of an immediate lynch mob the second anyone steps out of line. An iffy joke, a slightly off-colour comment, and the complaining classes will come pouring out of the bingo halls screaming ‘Burn the witch’ and calling for Alan Titchmarsh to be made Chief Government Censor. It’s an end to innovation and risk-taking. Welcome to the New Puritanism.

Of course, as plenty of other writers have pointed out this week, if we’d been living under that stifling yoke for the past 30-odd years, there would have been no Monty Python, no Fawlty Towers (and therefore, with splendid synchronicity, no Andrew Sachs), no Till Death Us Do Part, no Blackadder, no The Day Today, no The Thick Of It … the list is endless: all special programmes that raised the bar in one way or another which would have been smothered at birth by the Daily Mail’s puritanical pillow.

And why risk offending anyone at all? As Charlie Brooker suggested in The Guardian: “Perhaps it’s time to put a ‘Complain to Ofcom’ button right there on the remote control: if enough viewers press it, the show gets yanked immediately, like a bad variety act being pulled off stage by a shepherd’s crook.”

On the other hand, we could just acquire a sense of perspective about the whole thing. So 30,000 people complained about that evil slur on the innocent young stripper, dominatrix and porn star Georgina Baillie? So what? That’s at least 49,245,000 of the adult population who didn’t and that, I would suggest, is a far better guide to the national conscience.

DRIVING PAST one of those small business parks yesterday, I saw four tow-trucks lined up in menacing fashion outside one of the buildings. A prima facie case of a small company about to have its reps’ cars repossessed. The bank calling in overdrafts or the finance company playing hard ball? Either way, a worrying sight indeed. Caveat emptor.

The sad case of the silly boys and the Satanic Slut

2008-11-01T02:19:00.000-07:00

ONLY A week ago I was begging for a story, any story, to knock the self-pitying credit crunch misery off the front pages and from our news bulletins. Listening to Radio 4 had become rather like having a permanent window on a Bridgend teenager’s bedroom. The TV news had you reaching for the loaded revolver. But I didn’t think it would be two pathetic, giggling, overgrown schoolboys and a tasteless, tawdry joke on the wireless that would grab forests of newsprint and acres of TV screen.

But unfortunately, since Sunday, there’s been no escape from Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand and the subsequent media maelstrom their antics have produced. The feeding frenzy has been bizarre; the proportionality of the coverage completely out of well, proportion. But let’s look at a few facts.

After the misguided broadcast on October 18th, there were two complaints about the comments left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone about his grand-daughter, Georgina Baillie. That’s just two complaints. Perhaps only a few thousand people even heard the offensive comments, although the show is reckoned to have an audience of some two million. After someone at the BBC (and we’ll return to that in a moment) tipped off the Mail on Sunday which then splashed the story on its front page, the world went mad, with 27,000 complaints logged at the time of writing, including one from a certain Mr Gordon Brown of Westminster, who you might think has more important things to worry about.

So what happened? Where did the momentum come from? We must first turn to Mr Ross’s well-publicised salary of £18 million of public money over three years and his comments, when the deal was criticised by news staff, that he was “worth 1,000 BBC journalists”. There is no doubt whatsoever that there is an element of revenge at work here. You might also wonder who alerted the Mail on Sunday to the broadcast more than a week after it took place. Then there’s the public envy and dislike of a performer who is not to everyone’s taste but who is pocketing the entire licence fees of a town the size of Bournemouth, population 166,000. (Good God, even that loathsome porker and well-known paragon of virtue Piers Morgan had a pop at him.)

The BBC’s abject failure to kill the story stone dead with an immediate apology and the sacking of the numptie producer who allowed the programme to go out unedited has also left this once-great institution under siege. Commercial rivals and most national newspapers rarely forgo the chance to pillory the Beeb, regarding it as out-of-touch, politically biased, wasteful and lazy. And they’re probably right. The hyping-up of Manuelgate is too good to miss. (There’s a thought. I wonder how many complaints were received about Mr Sachs’s depiction of a blundering Spaniard?)

And then what about the young lady so viciously maligned in the telephone message? Well, ‘maligned’ is clearly the wrong word, because it suggests an element of untruth. As we now know, courtesy of her deal with Max Clifford and her decision to sell her exclusive story to The Sun, she was indeed a self-confessed conquest of the priapic Mr Brand. Furthermore, she’s a wannabe singer/model/Page 3 girl who is a member of a burlesque troupe called the Satanic Sluts and whose website is adorned with pictures of her posing in basque and suspenders or even less. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, but I would suggest that perhaps an ambitious young lady who’s quite happy to get her baps out for public display might not be entirely averse to being splashed all over the newspapers.

What a shame she’s had to cut short her tour with the Satanic Sluts to take maximum advantage of all the publicity … err … sorry, “comfort her grandfather”.

EDIT: Since writing this, the shy and retiring Georgina Baillie, who is mortally offended by details of her sex life being made public, has turned up in a porn film, being not at all shy and retiring. I'd link to it but you'd get in trouble at work or with your wife.

TWO ITALIAN football fans who started fighting on a Ryanair flight bringing them to this country have appeared in court near Stansted charged with affray, had their passports confiscated and been ordered to stay in Newport, Gwent, until December 19.

Newport, Gwent? What’s going on here? Whatever happened to the principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty’? Why this ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, outlawed until now by our 400-year-old Bill of Rights.

Are the CIA involved? This is like extraordinary rendition - take the suspects to some backwater country outside the view of the modern western world and hope to extract confessions from them. Where’s that Shami Chakrabarti when you need her?

I SUPPOSE it shouldn’t beggar belief these days, but I’m still left gob-smacked by the news that plans for an outdoor Christmas ice rink in the genteel city of Bath have been scuppered over fears that it could be used by paedophiles to groom children. Have you ever heard such tosh in your life?

The plan was withdrawn by organisers because of doubts raised by a local primary school near the proposed site about “child protection issues”. Quite what these “issues” are it’s hard to understand, particularly as the rink would have been near a leisure centre, rugby club and cricket club which presumably are already sites where children gather.

The boss of the ice rink company doesn’t mince his words: “It comes as a great shame when something as fun and innocent as an ice rink can be thwarted due to unfounded suggestions by a minority with a misguided agenda.”

And so say all of us. Perhaps the Headmaster was worried that BBC radio presenters might start phoning up his pupils …

The real scandal behind those charity accounts

2008-10-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

ISN’T IT scandalous about all those charities losing the money they deposited in Icelandic banks? Well, not really. What is scandalous is the amount of money they were sitting on in the first place.
The National Council of Voluntary Organisations says at least £120 million of charitable funds has been frozen and may be lost. One well-known cancer charity (off the record it’s Christies in Manchester, but don’t tell anyone) is thought to have had £4.5 million on deposit – around 20 per cent of its reserves.

Those of us who have lost friends and relatives to cancer (and that’s all of us) might wonder why over £22 million is sitting in the bank when it could spent on treating patients or on research and equipment, but we’ll let it slide. The really horrifying tale concerns another charity close the hearts of the British people.

The Cats Protection League has emerged as the biggest victim with £11.2 million of deposits now at risk. I’ll say that again: £11.2 million of deposits now at risk.

Now one might question what a cats’ charity is doing with £11.2 million in the bank in the first place, but that’s not all. The charity says the potential shortfall won’t affect its work because its income is actually £35million a year, mainly from the wills of mad old ladies.

But even that’s not all. That steady £35 million a year has now built up to the point that the £11.2 million at risk turns out to be just 16 per cent of the charity’s reserves. Stand back while I do the maths. A charity which looks after animals regarded by many people as only one step up from vermin has actually got £70 million stashed away. SEVENTY MILLION POUNDS. Now that really is enough to make a cat laugh.

According to the Pet Food Manufacturers Association, which should know about these things, there are 7.2 million cats in Britain. The money that the Cats Protection League is merely sitting on – not spending on day-to-day care – works out to around a tenner for each and every one of the blighters. I think we should buy them all a six-pack of Kit-e-Kat and a selection box each and persuade them to defecate in someone else’s garden in future.

And if the Cats Protection League has got £70 million, imagine how much dosh is in the bank of that immensely rich donkey sanctuary in Devon, the one where the inmates have gold-plated hooves and are fed lobster and champagne while reclining on cashmere bedding? The mind boggles.

MORE CHARITY nonsense. Princes William and Harry are nearing the end of a week-long 1,500km motorcycle ride to raise money for UNICEF, the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. We are told that the 80 riders taking part have each donated a minimum of £1,500 to take part in the event and that volunteers have raised more than £300,000 in total.

I have an alternative suggestion to this Royal jaunt. Given the cost of transporting two such important people, and all the security that must have gone with them, wouldn’t it have been simpler just to cough up the £1,500 and then stay at home? Who knows, they might even have donated the money they would have spent buying donkey-quality champers at that Jubblies nightclub they keep staggering out of. Or even chuck in the eight grand Harry is about to spend on his own motorbike. Just a thought.

WHAT IS it about charity that seems to convince previously normal, middle-aged, middle class people that I’d be really keen to help pay for their belated gap year? You know the kind of thing: “Lucinda and I are trekking to Machu Picchu in aid of the Golden Hooves Donkey Sanctuary and we need to raise three grand apiece to pay for it. I’m sure we can count on your support. Here’s the website address. You can use PayPal.”

Well no thanks, pal. Why should I fund your mid-life crisis adventure? Pay for it yourself if you want to go that much. And the same goes for any parachuting grannies, costumed marathon runners or lycra-clad unicyclists en route from Land’s End to John O’Groats. I’m giving my money to the Cats Protection League, where I know it’ll be safe.

WELL, WE knew it was coming, but after the Powers That Be managed to turn smokers into non-citizens they immediately turned their attention to alcohol, and now the hysteria over our alleged drink-dependency reaches ever greater heights on a daily basis.

The latest stage of this ruthlessly organised campaign is to make shoppers face a ‘walk of shame’ to a dedicated checkout counter in the supermarket. This would supposedly deter shoppers from making excessive purchases by putting them under the scrutiny of fellow shoppers.

Have they gone mad? Why should I care what other people think just because I’ve got three bottles of Chardonnay and a six-pack of Peroni in my trolley? The woman behind me is wheeling along a selection of Findus Crispy Pancakes and four tubes of pile cream, yet I’m supposed to feel embarrassed? It’s nonsense. And I’m sure the bloke who hangs around our local Co-op waiting to buy his two-litre bottle of cheap cider at 10 in the morning doesn’t care either.

And all this from the government that for some perverse reason introduced 24-hour drinking. You have to wonder sometimes if they have a clue what they’re doing.

Cookery? It's a piece of cake

2008-10-18T05:30:00.000-07:00

WE ARE informed by a multi-million pound quango called the Potato Council that four out of 10 young adults can’t cook a baked potato. That’s the notoriously difficult task of rolling a large potato in oil and salt and then baking it for 90 minutes in a hot oven. Difficult, it ain’t.

Neither, it appears, can they cook shepherd’s pie or fish cakes. When we look at this lack of culinary skills, we should go straight back to our schools, where what was once called domestic science or home economics is now relegated to .. well … nothingness. Let’s face it – knocking out a quick Shepherd’s Pie is hardly onerous, but remains a life skill which will stand you in good stead for many years. Especially if gravy is provided. And you’ve got a hot date on the go.

It gets worse. Children in schools in Wales have been told that they can no longer enjoy the delights of Marmite or tomato ketchup with their school meals. Apparently both contain levels of salt which will turn your children into statues of Lot overnight. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the land of swarthy thieves and benefits claimants, even sugar has been banned. Kids at Tonypandy Community College in Rhondda, South Wales, are barred from putting sugar in their tea or coffee, on instruction of the Welsh Assembly.

I will only say this. Tell a teenager that they can’t have sugar in their coffee and before you know what’s happening, they’ll be shovelling it in there like no-one’s business. Diabetes levels will be going through the roof. Seventeen-year-olds will be bouncing off the ceiling like Christopher Biggins at a Lionel Blair reunion.

WHILE WE’RE on the subject of food, a reader writes taking me to task over my assertion, of many moons ago, that a proper English breakfast can’t include toast and fried bread.

The issue arose, if I remember correctly, when Coronation Street’s Roy Cropper, of the famous Roy’s Rolls cafe, served up such an abundance of bread products on the same plate. And, to compound his failure, some mushrooms were noticeably absent from his fry-up offering.

My man writes: “As any connoisseur of English breakfasts will know, the fried bread is there to soak up the tomato juices, whereas one round of the obligatory two rounds of toast lives under the egg or eggs (fried on one side with runny yolks, obviously, none of that American ‘over easy’ nonsense).

“The other round is used to mop the plate once all other comestibles have been dispatched, but before the mug or pot of tea is finished. Of course, both rounds of toast must be copiously coated with large quantities of butter and, ideally, everything except the toast and tea (and possibly the tomatoes) should have been fried in well-used lard, or beef dripping.”

Well, I’m not sure about this. I think there’s a slight problem of physics there. Can a round of fried bread, already loaded with oil or fat, retain the capability to soak up watery tomato juice? I think not. It just won’t mix. Opposites repel.

It makes far more sense to use the toast, in particular the unbuttered underside, to perform soaking duties. Perhaps we need a scientist to clarify the situation.

MUCH IS made of the way so-called England fans booed a player called Ashley Cole after he gave the ball away and set up a goal for the opposition at Wembley last week. The nation’s football writers seem confused: either this is a vile calumny against an honest professional, or a deserved rant against a man who represents all that is wrong with the modern game.

Mr Cole, it should be remembered, is the chap who said in his autobiography (incidentally one of the worst-selling sports books of recent years) that he nearly drove off the road and crashed his car on learning that his employers were only prepared to offer him the pittance of £55,000 a week – yes, a week - on his new contract.

I suspect that when the England fans booed Mr Cole, they weren’t just booing a player who’d played a crap ball cross his own box, they were booing a player who they seriously disliked, and that to whom any opportunity to give a verbal kicking was good enough.

THE REAL problem of the current banking crisis is not that all our savings in Iceland’s Christmas club have gone all Ashley Cole; it’s that the capitulation of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS, the twin pillars of the Scottish economy, have had to be bailed out by the English parliament. This means that the Porridge Wogs have suffered a devastating blow to any notion that they might once stand alone “and be a nation again” as the song goes.

I take no pleasure in this. As far as I’m concerned, the quicker we cut them loose and let them drift off into the North Sea the better. Unfortunately, even the most rabid claymore-wielding Jock now knows which side his shortbread is buttered. Expect a dignified silence while they come to terms with the uncomfortable truth.

WE COME quickly to three loony toons of the Nanny State. In Bromsgrove, a man has been banned from fencing in his allotment with barbed wire in case he injures a passing thief. In Penzance, Cornwall, a gardener was hauled before the courts for having the temerity to have an old-fashioned scythe in his van. Meanwhile in Hackney, London, a market stall holder was fined £5,000 for selling fruit and veg in pounds and ounces even though the EU has long admitted that it isn’t remotely interested in imposing a ban on imperial measures. So under which law has she been fined?

You think it, he'll ink it.

2008-10-12T02:22:00.000-07:00

THE MOST charismatic clergyman I’ve ever met was a Priest I sat next to at a wedding in Ireland. For the entirety of the meal we talked non-stop: about fox hunting, drinking, fishing, game shooting, dogs, drinking and women. He indulged in all but the latter. And we spoke about the state of the world and, of course, briefly about religion. If it wasn’t for all that Latin, I’d have converted to Catholicism on the spot.

Having said that, the rector of St Michael’s Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City of London, the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, seems like the kind of vicar you wouldn’t mind having a pint with – a God-botherer about as far away from the lank-haired, dungaree-wearing, whiny-voiced female clergy who now infest the Church as it’s possible to be.

We know this because he writes an internet blog, and on that blog this week he ventured that homosexuality was “clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections, and because it is a cause of fatal disease”.

Further to that, he also suggested that it should be “obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH”. Well, they do something similar to cigarette smokers, so why not?

Predictably the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, called the remarks “highly offensive” and threatened the Rev Mullen with disciplinary action. Other clergy have queued up to join in the condemnation. Peter Tatchell, of gay rights group OutRage! said he should resign.

Why so? Even if Rev Mullen meant the remarks as a joke, which he now claims, so what? Is no-one allowed a bit of fun any more? In fact, I’d be more impressed if he actually meant what he said and had at least had the courage to say it.

As I’ve said before, I have no problem with homosexuals as long as they don’t do it in the street and scare the horses. But I do have a problem with knee-jerk witch-hunts of honest, if misguided, men.

Perhaps it’s the fear of having to bare their backsides for the tattooist’s needle that has spooked so many of his clergy colleagues …

I DON’T think I’ve ever seen our pubs work so hard, particularly in rural areas. You can hardly walk past them for the blackboards blocking the pavements advertising quiz nights, football, live music, meat raffles, wine tasting, new menus and so on. The only investors smiling at the moment are those who bought shares in coloured chalk. Some landlords have even learned to smile at complete strangers, probably as a result of an intensive CAMRA training course.

I even saw one at lunchtime today with a sign outside saying: “Wanted – Football, Pool and Darts Teams. Food provided. Fees paid.” Astonishing stuff.

I do so desperately hope that they succeed, but I fear that for many this might be nothing more than re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The smoking ban, the price of petrol, rising food and fuel prices and the decision of supermarkets to sell loss leading cans of lager at 23 pence each – less than half the cost of bottled water – has left many clinging on for dear life. And that’s before the banks start getting snotty about overdrafts.

A bad festive season and the 36 pubs already closing in this country every week will seem like small beer, and that will be very sad.

WHILE WE’RE on about pubs, I was delighted to see that a Japanese company has made an airbag designed to stop elderly people injuring themselves by falling over.
The device is strapped around the body and inflates in 0.1 seconds if it detects it is accelerating towards the ground, the manufacturers say.

Never mind old people – with the Christmas party season just around the corner, this is surely a boon for any binge drinker. The only small problem is that it provides no protection should you fall forwards. This need not be a fatal fault, as long as you don’t mind going out on the pull wearing a crash helmet and with a cushion stuffed up your jumper.

CONSIDERING THE £2million paid out to school pupils in compensation last year, perhaps we should consider fitting such devices to our children. Or maybe we should do something about the sickening, life-sapping compo culture we’ve created.

When I were a lad, playground accidents were part of the fabric of life. Broken noses, grazed knees, minor knife wounds and the occasional gunshot injury were all part of growing up. Now we’ve bred such a generation wusses – or, more to the point, a generation of greedy, needy parents – that these days getting pushed over in a Birmingham playground can bring in a cool £17,901.

Landing awkwardly while playing basketball is worth £9,750 in East London; slipping on tinsel in the dining room yields a cheque for £15,500 in Sheffield; falling out of bed on a field trip earns you £9,000 in Lewisham; while falling off a Space Hopper in Derby only brings in a derisory £500.

Still, there could be worse things happening to our kids at school than a few minor injuries. According to teachers’ union leader Chris Keates, her members shouldn’t face jail and a lifetime on the sex offenders’ register if they get caught having sex with pupils who are over the age of consent because it’s “an error of judgment” rather than a criminal offence.

Perhaps we should all have a warning message tattooed on our children’s backsides.

So why does Postman Pat need a helicopter?

2008-10-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

IF YOUR local post office has been closed down lately, you might be interested to find out where the money supposedly saved has gone – on Postman Pat’s helicopter, that’s where.

Yes, the big-nosed Greendale postie who never once stole a tenner from a child’s birthday card and was seemingly content with the company of Jess, his black and white cat, and the occasional bunk-up with Mrs Goggins has suffered the fate of too many children’s characters. He’s been ‘updated’.

The new Pat, due on a TV screen near you around now, has had his little van replaced by a fleet of new vehicles including a helicopter, a ‘stunt bike’ with a sidecar for Jess, a forklift truck, and a large eco-van, whatever one of those is. And alas, Greendale is no more, and Pat now patrols a new ‘bustling’ town populated by a working mum, a Chinese shopkeeper and, inevitably, a wheelchair-user. It seems no programme is complete these days without the token cripple, even children’s cartoons.

I’m not sure he’s going to be happy in his new role. And if the stresses of modern-day city life take their expected toll, don’t be surprised to see Pat ‘going postal’ and laying waste to the sorting office with a 12-bore.

And meanwhile Bob the Builder has been laid off because of the credit crunch and spends his days drinking cheap cider on a bench outside the off licence while shouting obscenities at passers-by.

YOU’LL NO doubt be relieved to know that while the world’s financial markets have been in turmoil, the petty, selfish, nitpicking whining of the nation’s jobsworths has continued unabated.

We must go to Hull, where the parents of newborn twins are to be sued by a midwife who tripped over a folded buggy at the foot of their stairs during a home visit. Yes, this signed-up member of the Turkey Army is not content with just holding down a public sector job-for-life with a gilt edged pension, but now wants to take advantage of the sickening compo culture bleeding our local authorities dry. Where there’s a claim, there’s blame. And guess who pays in the end, suckers?

Did you think that the Bin Wars that have replaced a single, simple service from your local council with a mad, blinkered creed that seems intent on criminalising half the population had reached its zenith? Think again. Waste minister Joan Ruddock has just announced that people who throw their litter into the wrong street bin risk on-the-spot fines as part of the government’s recycle-as-you-go scheme.

Yep, there you are with your Gregg’s steak and onion pasty wrapper and, as an honourable citizen, you have decided to put it in a bin rather than just discarding it in the gutter like a common scrote. But wait, instead of one litter bin there are now four. That cellophane wrapper: is it recyclable plastic? Are you sure? And that cardboard tray: is it ‘cardboard’ or is it ‘waxed cardboard’? These things matter.

Nervously, you make your choice, and before the cellophane has hit the bottom of the bin, one of the government’s High Street Stazi has leapt from behind his illegally-parked van and hit you with a £110 fine – which is more than you’d get if you’d been caught shoplifting. I tell you, when the masses rise up against the State in this country, it won’t be because of political idealism; it’ll be because some poor old bloke has been a bit cavalier with his potato peelings.

Next stop is Bristol, where the city council has told allotment holders that they shouldn’t padlock their sheds because if they do, thieves will only go and kick their way in through doors or walls causing expensive damage which must then be repaired from the public purse.

Presumably the next step is to order council tenants not to lock their front doors in case they further inconvenience burglars. It’s enough to make Postman Pat’s cat laugh.

BUT IT’S not all bad news. In the High Court this week Mr Justice Blake ruled in a test case that five Gurkhas who had fought for this country should be allowed to live here in perpetuity. This means that another 2,000 Nepalese, including two Victoria Cross holders, can also take up official residence. And about time too.

The right result then, but you have to ask yourself which Home Office nincompoop decided in the first place that loyal soldiers who had fought with immense bravery on our part “did not have sufficient connection” with this country. Jacqui Smith might now be promising new rules and a review of all cases by the end of the year, but surely the person responsible for such stupidity – plus all the anguish and the massive legal costs – should pay the price? Fat chance.

A READER writes: “Travelling back from Jakarta, I bought a bottle of gin in Kuala Lumpur only to have it confiscated in Amsterdam.

“OK, those are the rules. But why is it safe for me to carry a bottle of gin from KL to Schipol in an approved security plastic bag, but not for me to carry it from Schipol to Durham Tees Valley? Who makes up these rules and how do we stop them from doing it?

“Not to mention that if I were a terrorist, I would possibly be the first English, fat, 64-year-old terrorist ever.”

And you can’t argue with that.

Bring on the snake oil salesmen

2008-09-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

AN OFFICIAL-looking envelope drops through the letterbox at Beelzebub Mansions. It is from an American company offering me a “total health scan” covering various cardiac conditions, cancer detection, cholesterol tests etc “from just £139”. (Note that “from”.)

Furthermore, if they detect anything wrong with me they will alert my GP, who they name, and have him speed me towards the nearest consultant. All I need to do is phone up and make an appointment for their next session at the Market Hall next Friday.

For that money, it seems might it might be a sensible investment, but then we get to the small print. That £139 just covers the sort of spit-and-a-lick inspection your mother would give you on the doorstep before your first appearance in court. Anything more complex – like taking your temperature or asking you to cough – incurred further charges. By the time you were into blood tests and ECGs, you may as well have booked yourself into a BUPA hospital for a year.

It is the medical equivalent of the garage mechanic or emergency plumber who sucks his teeth and says, menacingly “Who did that for you then?” at which point you know that you’re trapped in a steepling spiral of expenditure, necessary or not. Once you’ve put a foot in the door, they’ve got you, literally, by the balls.

But that’s not the thing that annoys me the most. What annoys me most is that my doctor has obviously sold my name and address to these travelling snake oil salesmen. Who gave him the right to do that?

And anyway, if he thinks a gentleman of my age and substance requires these checks, why isn’t the NHS offering me the service? What have I paid for all these years? Apart from free nicotine patches for fat scrotes, that is?

THE FRENCH have bought up our nuclear power stations; the Spanish own most of our airports; Russians, oil-rich Sheikhs and opportunist Americans own our football clubs; and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Asian businessmen start buying up our local papers any time soon. So am I right to be worried?

It seems a bit obvious to me that as we approach an economic era where energy will equal power, we should do our best to hang onto control of our own means of supply. The Russians have already got us over an empty barrel when it comes to gas supplies (allowing them to bully any dissident neighbouring state they fancy) and now we entrust our electricity to a nation who, despite the modern entente cordial, remain our oldest enemies? It’s enough to make un chat laugh.

What happens when Europe starts suffering brownouts as supplies run low? Do you really think you’ll be able to watch Strictly Come Property Factor in comfort if a French peasant wants your wattage instead to bake some songbirds in his hovel? Of course not. There’ll be a flick of the switch and Britain will descend into darkness. And the same will happen to all those thousands of admin and office jobs currently in this country. The French unions, used to getting their own way even if it means burning a few sheep, will make sure that those jobs go back across the Channel tout de suite. It’ll be a clear case of “I’m all right Jacques”.

This is what it has come to – a broken, empty shell of a once great nation selling itself to the highest bidder like a street corner harlot. A quick buck instead of a quick … fumble. No wonder Ruth Kelly has jacked it in, especially after what this government did to her father, Dr David Kelly.

I’M NOT at all keen on that Foxy Bingo fellow on those incessant TV adverts. There’s something not right there, something sinister. He’s like a cross between Chucky and Basil Bush. A Pied Piper of the Lambrini-addled obese.

Still, the Hunt is out cubbing at the moment, so once the season proper gets underway there’ll be no hiding place for a six-foot fox in a purple velvet suit who goes round shouting “Clickety-click” at complete strangers.

LONGSTANDING READERS will know that I’m no great fan of the Paralympics – not because I don’t recognise the bravery and achievement of many of the competitors, but because I think the rules are so slack that most of the people you see running in the real thing could qualify if they had a bit of a sniffle. I mean, how can a “blind” athlete run around a 400 oval track without guidance? Yet most seemed to manage it. Footballers were sent home for being too good at football, a German wheelchair basketball player was found to be an amateur ballroom dancer and one of the sprinters was disqualified after testing positive for WD40.

And try it the other way around. One of our cyclists, Sarah Storey, who has a bit of a Beadle thing going on with her left hand, posted times that would have qualified her for the regular team. And, seeing as she uses a specially modified bike to compensate for having a left arm slightly shorter than her right, would in theory have an even bigger advantage on an anti-clockwise track.

LAST FRIDAY was apparently Talk Like A Pirate day – an internet invention - which meant that every geek in our IT department wandered round in eye patches and with stuffed parrots on their shoulders going “Arr, me hearty” and “Yo ho ho”. To enter into the spirit of things, I brought a sword to work and stabbed one of them.

Mea Culpa

2008-09-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

I have suddenly realised that since upgrading my PC, I haven't been back to check my Beelzebub email basket.

I upgraded my PC in January, so anyone mailing since then will not have had a reply. This is unforgiveable rudeness, so I shall spend the weekend working my way through the neglected inbox reading your messages.

Beware the Nazis lurking in the privets

2008-09-20T07:38:00.000-07:00

IT’S WITH a weary sigh that we read news of plans to fine drivers who fail to turn off their engines while waiting at a level crossing or in a traffic jam. Apparently traffic wardens in West Sussex, where a trial will take place, will be empowered to leap from the bushes and slap a ticket on your windscreen costing you £40, or just £20 if you pay up straightaway without griping.

The justification for this further tax on motorists is, of course, ‘global warming’. As if it would be anything else. Mind you, it comes as no surprise to learn that this ‘problem’ arises in an area governed by a council that has just appointed two Air Quality Managers, salary unknown but probably not shy of £40,000.

Let’s think about this sensibly. Anyone who has driven down a motorway in recent months knows that there is a national obsession with saving on fuel costs. Five mile-long convoys of vehicles trundle along at 55mph in the middle lane many of them, remarkably, driven by people under 70 who aren’t wearing a Trilby. Swerving to avoid them are the rest of us, rolling along at a compromise 75mph. The outside lane is only occupied by white van men and company car drivers, usually reps in cheap shiny suits with Ginsters pasty crumbs all over their laps. They don’t pay for their petrol so they don’t care.

So I think it’s fair to say that most of us would take the opportunity to save a few bob without the interference of the fine-flinging Nanny State.

Now I have no problem with turning off my 3-litre Turbo Nutter 4x4 at a level crossing. I know that I’m going to be there for some time and therefore it makes sense. But how do you judge how long you’ll be delayed in a traffic jam? It could be one minute; it could be 10 minutes. Sometimes traffic crawls; sometimes it stops and starts and then stops again. It’s completely unfair to expect us to second-guess the ticket-happy traffic Nazi lurking in the privets.

And what about this? The AA reckons that running an engine for a minute produces fewer emissions than turning it off and turning it on again, so where’s the gain? Their spokesman, Paul Watters, says: “We hope councils will not adopt a heavy-handed attitude with this. There is a huge difference between running the engine for less than a minute at the traffic lights and idling for a quarter of an hour.”

If Mr Watters expects the Powers That Be to be in any way reasonable, I suspect that he hasn’t been out much lately.

OF COURSE, we’re all getting hysterical about the imposition of stupid law after stupid law. It’s all media over-reaction, isn’t it?

Well let’s whizz down to Whitstable in Kent, where Daniel Cope, 13, put up posters on walls and lampposts near his home appealing for help when his beloved tortoiseshell cat Millie went missing.

The response was immediate. Within three days his mother, Heather, received a visit from a ‘community warden’ who informed her that the posters breached a ban on fly-posting under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act and that she would attract an £80 fixed penalty fine unless they were removed.

Daniel has now taken down the posters. His pet cat is still missing.

Is this the Britain you want to live in? It’s certainly not a country of which I can be proud.

WHICH BRINGS us to Lymm Services on the M6 in Cheshire. Emma Faulkner, a cruise ship waitress, was driving home from London to Lancashire just after midnight when she began to feel tired. Obeying the tiresome and usually useless messages on the overhead displays, she pulled into the services and had a kip. She awoke at 4.30am and continued her journey safely.

Weeks later, she received a letter demanding £50 because she had outstayed the service station’s two-hour parking limit and been photographed by an advanced number plate recognition system and automatically fined.

A spokesman for the car park operators, Parking Eye (and isn’t that a sinister name?) says: “The signage within the motorway service station is very clear, stating that if a motorist wishes to park for longer than two hours there is a fee.”

So that’s all right then. Never mind road safety, never mind the risk of dropping off and piling head-on into a people carrier full of children. As long as the signage is clear, the people who run Lymm Services can wash their hands of any kind of public responsibility with a clear conscience.

Is this the Britain you want to live in? It’s certainly not a country of which I can be proud.

THERE APPEARS to be much outrage in the national press because Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, when quizzed on television about the value of the State pension, said: “I think it’s about thirty quid now, isn't it?”

No, Nick, it isn’t. The basic pension is now £90.70 a week for a single person and £145.45 for a couple.

So what do we deduce from this? Either Mr Clegg thinks that a pensioner can heat and eat on an utter pittance, or that Mr Clegg, ex-public school, ex-Oxbridge, million-pound home-owner, and a man who has never had a proper job, is so removed from reality that he simply doesn’t know that “about thirty quid” is what I spend on fags and booze every day, rather than what we expect the people who have served us all our lives to live on in their final days.

Is this the Britain you want to live in? It’s certainly not a country of which I can be proud.

Sticks and stones may break my bones ...

2008-09-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

HOWEVER BLASÉ we may be, deep down we all care what people think about us. Forget that ‘sticks and stones’ thing – we all want to be loved, admired and respected, if not necessarily in that order.

The choices we make during our daily lives are influenced by how we think people will perceive us. I wouldn’t be caught dead food shopping in Lidl, wearing a BHS suit or driving a Kia car – not because there is anything wrong with any of that, but because it doesn’t suit the image I have constructed for myself.

But sometimes this image management can go too far. Take NuLabour, for instance. The tactics that finally got them elected was to convince voters that they were no longer a bunch of nasty Trots who would squander the nation’s wealth on meaningless public sector jobs. Of course, once they were in, that’s exactly what they did, but they managed to fool enough of the people for enough of the time.

Since then, the party machine has gone into overdrive, burying bad news, smearing critics and generally lying to all and sundry. It’s not so much style over substance as spin over substance. And the habit has spread to virtually all public sector organisations, from parish councils to billion-pound quangos.

Which brings us to NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (and never has there been a more inappropriate acronym). NICE is the organisation that decides which drugs can be prescribed by GPs and hospital doctors after assessing them for cost and effectiveness. It is regularly criticised for denying life-prolonging treatments to cancer sufferers and is often referred to as the health ‘rationing’ watchdog.

It now transpires that NICE spent £4.5million last year on “communications” … otherwise know as spin. Amazingly, this is £1million more than the organisation actually spent on assessing new drugs, its very reason for being. The figure includes money spent on press officers, marketing executives and consultants and includes £25,000 paid to a public relations company for defending the decision to ban certain Alzheimer’s drugs.

Let’s just say it again: this is a publicly-funded government body that spends 25 per cent more money on challenging criticism of its actions than it does on doing its job in the first place. If such behaviour wasn’t so breathtakingly arrogant, it really would make a cat laugh.

IN A similar vein – or should that be “vain”? – our Foreign Secretary in Short Pants, a little lad called David Miliband, has been caught jetting off around the world using the Queen’s Flight 16 times in the past year … which is more than twice as often as The Queen herself.

More annoyingly, many of the jaunts were to short-haul European destinations like Paris or Berlin, already served by dozens of commercial flights every day. Cabinet rules say that Ministers should use the Queen’s Flight only when there is no scheduled service available.

Let’s take just one example. In July of last year, Master Miliband went to Paris and Berlin, with a two-day trip to Brussels the following week. On each occasion he used Royal jets at the cost of around £2,000 an hour plus the cost of aviation fuel. A cursory internet search shows that there are at least 25 commercial flights a day from London Heathrow to Paris, 20 to Brussels and 15 to Berlin. A business class ticket to Paris would cost just £210 next week.

So what are we to make of this disgraceful profligacy? Is the boy thick? Does he just not care? Or perhaps he’s just the kind of person who wouldn’t be caught dead food shopping in Lidl, wearing a BHS suit or driving a Kia car.

A SALES executive is in line for a payout of more than £200,000 after claiming she was sacked for having two children in just over a year.

Alison Prowse-Piper was a successful double glazing saleswoman. After having her first child, Oliver, in 1999, she returned to work in a matter of weeks. Within five years she was promoted to become the national manager of tele-canvassing on a salary of £72,500 for a three-day week. Nice work if you can get it.

In 2005, Mrs Prowse-Piper told her bosses that she was pregnant again. She claims that one responded: “Oh, my God, you're not, are you? I suppose I should offer you my congratulations.”

To be honest, you can’t blame him. Here was one of the company’s key employees about to disappear again for the best part of a year.

Soon after returning to work, Mrs Prowse-Piper announced that she was pregnant again, and went on to have her third child 14 months after the second. Again, maternity leave kicked in and the company was once more denied the services of its star saleswoman.

When she finally returned to work, the poor woman claims that she was demoted to a job on half of her previous salary, suffered sex discrimination, sexual harassment and constructive dismissal. An industrial tribunal agreed, and now she awaits a lottery win-style compo payment.

I’m not going to mess about here. This woman is clearly taking the piss. I think we’d all just about agree that an employer should support a valuable member of staff through one pregnancy, but one after another, like some kind of human sausage machine, simply isn’t fair.

Yes, a big conglomerate with hundreds of staff might be able to cope with the loss, but what about a small company employing a dozen people or less? How are they supposed to manage?

Meanwhile, I fully expect the tribunal that made this decision to be hiring a PR company as we speak.

Let's start the riot right here

2008-09-07T15:27:00.000-07:00

AN ELDERLY couple who live in Barnet are withholding the £33 levy imposed on Londoners in the form of council tax to pay for the 2012 Olympics.

Tom and Rita Glenister say the charge is unfair and have withheld a portion of their £2,320 council tax bill, saying that they’ll go to jail rather than pay it. They argue that all Britons should contributing to the £9.3billion budget, not just Londoners.

They’ve got a point, although I’m sure we’ll all find ourselves coughing up one way or another. But whatever the rights and wrongs of their argument, I’m just glad to see someone putting up a fight against our increasingly authoritarian rulers, even if they are a pair of pensioners in their 70s.

Because what we need is more civil disobedience. We’re being bullied, harried and taxed to death. We’ve got a Home Secretary who thinks it’s OK to give car park attendants and park-keepers the right to hand out spot fines, demand our names and addresses and take our photographs. We’ve got health and safety legislation that says builders can’t use ladders unless they keep three parts of their body in contact with the ladder – so tell me this, Mr Hi-Visibility Jacket: how on earth do you hammer in a nail while keeping one hand on the top rung? Do you bang it in with your forehead in a fit of frustration with officialdom?

If you do, then please don’t make any noise while you do it. Even musicians performing in the Proms have been told to quieten it down a bit in case someone’s ears are offended. Oh, and you can now get fined two grand for deliberately discarding a cigarette end or accidentally dropping a crisp.

It really is getting beyond a joke. The residents of China must look at us and think: “Phew, but for the grace of God …” Or Mao. Or whatever.

It’s time we rose up against this Turkey Army of clipboard-carriers. Remember the Poll Tax Riots? Well, I’m quite looking forward to next year’s Wheelie Bin Riots – the event that will go down in history as the day that the belittled, belaboured, white, middle-aged, middle classes of this country threw off the yoke of Joe Jobsworth and burned traffic wardens outside the town hall – in memory of Joan of Park, perhaps.

AND IF you’re not already angry enough, try getting poorly. Not only will you be denied the life-saving drugs freely available to patients in Scotland and Wales, but you’ll also have to pay through the nose for the privilege of dying a premature death. And that’s because while our Celtic brethren have banished car park charges from their impressively funded hospitals, NHS Trusts in this country continue to leech off the vulnerable and infirm to the tune of £100million a year.

And why can they afford to do this while we poor English must suffer? Well it’s because they receive more central funding per capita than God’s own people. Not only that, they also take more out of the system than we do. I could spend a lot of time getting the figures together, but frankly I can’t be arsed, but trust me: all the Welsh are on the sick and all the Jocks – at least those who have jobs – work in the public sector. And meanwhile you’re getting wheel-clamped while visiting your dying mother. What a disgraceful state of affairs.

OF COURSE, when the Powers That Be aren’t bullying us or fining us, they’re busy losing computers and memory sticks containing our personal financial details which then inevitably end up in the hands of Nigerian internet scammers.

Now it’s a funny thing, but I don’t recall Captain Mainwaring ever losing all the account details of his customers while visiting the tea shop, and he had more to worry about than a supposed credit crunch. For all he knew, Fritz was going to come storming up the beach of Warmington-on-Sea at any minute.

Actually, that analogy holds firm across many other situation comedies. Who amongst us would doubt that our jails wouldn’t be better off if Senior Prison Officer Mackay was in charge? Who doesn’t think that Blakey could run our buses properly? John Alderton, aka Mr Hedges, would make sure that the Fenn Street Gang would at least know how to read and write before leaving school, foot and mouth wouldn’t dare break out on Siegfried Farnon’s patch, and I’m certain the bushy-bearded James Robertson Justice would have little time for MRSA outbreaks or car park charges at hospitals.

In fact, the only point at which this argument breaks down is when we come to the wrongly-sexed Vicar of Dibley. Still, you can’t have everything.

I’M CONFUSED. I bought a DVD from Tesco the other day – the best of Love Your Neighbour, since you ask – and before I could get to the hilarious jokes I had to sit through hours of tedious warnings about video piracy.

Now forgive me if I’m being stupid here, but why am I being menaced by the authorities on a legitimate, paid-for official DVD? They know I’ve paid full whack for it; why do they feel the need to put the frighteners on me? Wouldn’t they be better off insisting that the video pirates stick the warning on the front of their shaky, hand-shot, cinema seat-based productions?

God bless you, Major Abacha Tunde

2008-08-30T05:26:00.000-07:00

AS WITH everything in life, from frozen peas to rampant sex, there comes a point where perfection is reached and from then on it’s all downhill. Depressing, I know, but true.

In football, it was watching George Best. In clothing, it was buying your first Cromby coat. In seafood, it’s eating pan-fried scallops (although what else you’d fry them in I don’t know.)

And now we have the ultimate con trick – the day the Nigerian email scammers jumped the shark.

Now I’m sure we’ve all been targeted by these ever-optimistic entrepreneurs. Usually you find a message in your inbox informing you that you’ve won $35 million in an internet lottery that you hadn’t even entered. Either that or your assistance is required in extracting £637 million from the bank account of a deceased businessman and whose complicated legacy can only be resolved with your help.

Either way, you’ll find at some point that you’ll be asked to send off your bank details, usually with an ‘administration payment’ of anything up to several thousands of pounds, at which point ‘the lottery’ will cease to exist and the ‘deceased businessman’ will rise, Lazarus-like, from the grave, and run off to buy a new goat or a BMW with the contents of your savings account.

Amazingly, some people still fall for this sort of thing, mostly old ladies who live alone and for whom the postman’s visit is a reason for pleasure, not penury, and for whom a hand-written letter still carries more weight than a misspelt email. So eager are some of these mad old bats to empty their bank accounts that they often have several scammers bleeding them dry at any one time, and are consequently doomed to a life of huddling in front of a one-bar electric fire and eating cat food.

Other people, tired of the constant appeals for assistance from Mrs Celestina Tombola (still my favourite scammer name) actually engage with the enemy with the intent of having them perform increasingly stupid acts. Have a look at the hilarious website http://www.419eater.com/ and you’ll see what I mean.

But all good things must come to an end. This week I received the scam email to end all scam emails. In abbreviated and uncorrected form, it read as follows:“I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979. He was on a later Soviet spaceflight to the secret Soviet military space station Salyut 8T in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. His other Soviet crew members returned to earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, but his place was taken up by return cargo.“There have been occasional supply flights to keep him going since that time. He is in good humor, but wants to come home.“In the 14-years since he has been on the station, he has accumulated flight pay and interest amounting to almost $15,000,000 American Dollars. This is held in a trust at the Lagos National Savings and Trust Association. If we can obtain access to this money, we can place a down payment with the Russian Space Authorities for a Soyuz return flight to bring him back to Earth.“I am told this will cost $3,000,000 American Dollars. In order to access the trust fund we need your assistance …”

I think you know where it goes from here.

So there we have it – a top secret African astronaut, stranded in space, condemned to circle the Earth for ever unless I stump up three grand (in exchange for 20 per cent of the trust fund, of course). I have to admit that I laughed until I cried.

So God bless you, Abacha Tunde. You will be forever in my thoughts. Altogether now: “Ground Control to Major Con …”

I HAVEN’T indulged in mind-altering drugs for … ooh … at least two decades. But when I suddenly woke up from a post-lunch snooze in front of the television on Sunday I thought I’d been back on the LSD.

All I could see was that London bus blown up by terrorists only with privet hedge replacing mangled bodies, dancing scrotes, a punk in a wheelchair, lots of umbrellas and bowler hats, all performed to a jazzed-up soundtrack of Greensleeves and Jerusalem - it was like watching Mary Poppins on acid.

And then a reality TV show winner and a wrinkly, pony-tailed rocker appeared from nowhere and David bloody Beckham knocked a Korean pole-vaulter over by kicking a football at him. I tell you what - if anti-drugs campaigners made impressionable teenagers sit watching that on a loop, they’d never touch anything stronger than Lemsip for the rest of their lives.

It was only when Boris came on, bumbling for Britain, hands in his pockets and his shirt tail no doubt flapping beneath his unbuttoned jacket, that I realised I was watching the Beijing 2008 closing ceremony. I suppose at least he didn’t have anyone’s eye out when he was waving the flag.

So was our embarrassing eight-minute slot a welcome antidote to the relentlessly and ruthlessly organised Chinese? Or a forewarning of the further humiliation to come? I’m hoping for the best, but I’m fearing the worst.

And what are the foreigners good at? Running away ...

2008-08-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

SO I’M sitting in the snug of The Shivering Whippet and there are two blokes perched on stools at the bar. They’re your usual lower middle class geezers – car boot sales and barbecues, caravan holidays and Cotton Traders polo shirts. And they’re discussing, in some detail, the art of the épée.

Now the épée, for those who don’t know, is one of the three Olympic fencing disciplines, the others being foil and sabre. And it’s fair to say that such a subtle, delicate sport wouldn’t normally be required viewing for men who owned their own power tools.

“Of course,” says one, “The épée might be similar to the foil, but it has a stiffer blade that is V-shaped in cross-section, a larger bell guard, and is heavier.”

“Yes,” said the other, taking the top off his Carlsberg, “and the technique is somewhat different, as there are no rules regarding priority and right-of-way. In addition, the entire body area is a valid target area.”

And that’s what I love about the Olympics – everyone is suddenly an expert. In the past fortnight I’ve heard tea-ladies discussing the need for pommel horse performers to keep their hands parallel at all times and listened to a kebab shop owner holding forth on the finer points of dressage. It’s brilliant. And with chilli sauce as well.

AND IT’S hard to be churlish about many aspects of these Games. Yes, the IOC has proved more slippery than a bar of soap when it comes to dodging difficult questions from Her Majesty’s Press. And yes, someone blundered big-time by sending out a highly-rated boxer who had the services of sports scientists, trainers and nutritionists and still turned up too fat to fight.

But that opening ceremony, although the lavish product of a free-spending totalitarian state, was still a bit special. I have to ask, is there anything the Chinese aren’t good at? Apart from cockle-picking, of course.

There’s also been a reassuring sniff of the Empire in Britain’s outstanding performance. Ask yourself, which sports do we usually excel at? Shooting, riding, cycling, sailing … all skills required to take civilisation to those parts of the world not already coloured pink, and mostly involving sitting down. And what do the foreigners do well? Running away, that’s what.

IF I WAS one of Gordon Brown’s spin doctors, I’d be desperately trying to find ways of shoring up his plummeting reputation by linking him with our unexpected success, much the way Harold Wilson exploited our 1966 World Cup win. Unfortunately, when you trace back the reasons for this record medal haul, you end up with the much-vilified figure of former Prime Minister John Major. For it was Major who launched the National Lottery back in 1994, and it is the Lottery which has pumped huge funding into British sport, resulting in those star performances from our cyclists and swimmers.

One small point: the fact that we’re now paying a whole plethora of athletes £12,000 a year just to play games means that these people are now civil servants, accountable to the public for their performance. That’s why the only bum note in a brilliant fortnight has been the presence of too many plucky losers.

“I’m just so glad to be here,” they bleat. “Whatever happens now doesn’t matter.”

Well excuse me, but it does. I am now paying for you so I expect a bit of effort for my money. This is not a free holiday or a publicly-funded gap year. This is serious stuff.

I would therefore propose that any Olympic athlete who’s pocketed Lottery cash for several years should have to pay back a proportion of that money if they fail to deliver a personal best performance. It’s not much to ask, is it? They’ve had at least four years to prepare. Barring injury or mishap, then I want value for money. They don’t have to win, or even ‘medal’ (and what a hateful abuse of a beautiful language that expression is); they just have to perform better than they ever have done before.

What I don’t want to see is big pussies like boxer Bradley Saunders whining that he was happy to be eliminated from the competition because he was homesick. No, really. The light-welterweight, a supposed medal contender, was beaten by a Frenchman and then said he was relieved to be leaving Peking because “It’s a weight off my shoulders now I know I haven't got a medal. Now I can live a normal boy’s life for a while.”

Well yes, and hopefully that means getting a job, you lardy-arsed waster. You’ve trousered £140,000 of our money in the past few years. The least you could do was go and have a proper go. And as for being homesick, wasn’t that your mum and dad and several members of your family I could see at ringside? Thought so.

LOVED THE uncomplicated post-race interviews with Dame Rebecca Adlington of Mansfield, a simple girl who just wanted to celebrate with a pair of new shoes. The only problem was, I kept thinking I’d tuned into a Victoria Wood sketch by mistake.

FINALLY, WHAT are we going to do about ‘Brave’ Paula Radcliffe? The mad, old, mdeal-free hag embodies selfishness in the extreme. Her self-serving decision to ‘run’ in the Marathon, even though she had no chance of ‘medalling’ and not much hope of finishing, denied a place in the race to a keen, young understudy.

In the light of her 23rd place, perhaps the woman who’s made herself a millionaire out of the sport might consider paying for some of the Lottery-funded assistance that she’s been receiving? Oh yes, you didn’t know that, did you?

Juggling ironmongery like Crackerjack cabbages

2008-08-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

I RECENTLY acquired a whippet puppy to keep the rescue lurcher company. On Tuesday night I took him outside for a pee in the driving rain. He lifted his leg, and was promptly blown over by the gale-force wind.

When I’d finished laughing and rescued him from the ditch, my mood was darkened by the thought that this was an August evening at the height of the English summer. And yet the supposedly gentle breeze is sufficient to blow a whippet over. It’s outrageous.

At this point the glib columnist writes something like: “Whatever happened to global warming? I nearly started building an ark …” And to be honest, you can’t really blame them.

The Met Office might be insisting that there is nothing abnormal about this summer’s weather (even though three weeks worth of rain fell in just 24 hours on Tuesday) and that our expectations have been raised by the scorcher of 2006, but on rolls the global warming bandwagon, manifesting itself in hundreds of ways, all of which seem to cost us money.

It’s plastic carrier bags that have been winding me up of late – or rather, the lack of them.

In B&Q last week I was queuing at the checkout behind a bloke who had dozens of small packets – nails, screws, hinges, drill bits and so on. He asked for a bag and was abruptly told that they didn’t do them anymore. He was left to juggle his way across the car park shedding ironmongery like a cabbage-laden Crackerjack contestant. (Kids, ask your parents.)

The National Trust this week proudly announced that sales of bags were down 95 per cent in the first 100 days since they started charging five pence for them. Whoopee! What a cause for celebration, but who is the winner in this situation? Certainly not the customer, who has to stagger back out into the force nine summer gales clutching two jars of pickle, seven postcards, a tea cosy, a large tin of butterscotch travel sweets and an Emily Bronte tea towel.

And then there’s Marks and Spencer, now charging 5p for a bag that might cost … ooh … 0.1p. How altruistic is that? Not only are they saving untold hundreds of thousands on having to provide free bags but they’re now also making an obscene profit on those they do sell.

If they sorted out their unnecessary plastic packaging first, I might be more impressed. (Let us not forget, this was the store that recently offered up individually plastic-wrapped apples to lunchtime snackers.)

Since we’ve been under the jackboot heel of a council obsessed with recycling, it’s the amount of packaging we assemble that has surprised me: a bag full of cardboard, a bag full of tin cans, a huge amount of unrecyclable plastic in various forms. Most of this stuff is unnecessary; why, for instance, do vegetables that have to be washed and peeled need a plastic coating?

Am I such an idiot that I have to be force fed a ready-packed kilo of carrots when I could just as easily pick up the three loose ones I need? No, but then I’d only pay for the three and not for the kilo. As ever, profit comes before good practice.

I do believe that the Women’s Institute are campaigning along the same lines. I may have to join.

IT’S OFFICIAL – according to a right-wing think tank, northern cities like Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland are “beyond revival” and should be abandoned to the benefits-claiming scrotes while inhabitants seeking a normal life should head south to places like Oxford and Cambridge.

(I’m not sure what the current residents of those host cities must be thinking about this plan. If thousands of Scousers are going to be heading for Oxford, the council might be wise to resurrect Inspector Morse as a matter of urgency.)

The reason those three cities have been singled out (can you single out three?) is because they’re ‘piggy-backing’ neighbouring, bigger conurbations and, by leeching off investment and grants, are holding them back. It’s an extreme argument, but one with more than a kernel of sense about it.

What could Manchester do with the millions of pounds being poured down the drain in the so-called City of Culture down the East Lancs Road? What could Leeds build with the millions wasted on silly schemes in Bradford? How many more bridges could Newcastle erect if Sunderland wasn’t a drain on the regional economy?

And it’s not as if it’s not already happened on a smaller scale. Let’s face it, The Beatles, Cilla Black, Jimmy Tarbuck and Anne Robinson didn’t hang around their hometown for long once they’d made a few bob, did they?

CONSUMER GROUPS have identified a trend of manufacturers reducing food and drink products in size while still charging the same for them. Strongbow cider now comes in cases of 15 cans, not 18. Cadbury’s chocolate bars are down from 250g to 230g and Waitrose mince is now sold in 500g packs instead of the previous 550g. And, in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, there are now only 10 Rolos in a packet, not 11. Would you give anyone your last Rolo? Not any more, pal.

This isn’t new. Wagon Wheels have been shrinking for years. The ones I used to buy along with my cup of scalding hot Bovril at the football were the size of manhole covers. Nowadays they’re little bigger than a digestive biscuit. And size matters …

Pass the henbane, mother, and some more of those spotty mushrooms

2008-08-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

NATURAL SELECTION is a wonderful thing. Thanks to the forces of nature, the strong survive and the weak don’t, and right always triumphs over wrong.

Which brings us to celebrity chef Anthony Worrall Thompson. Writing in something called Healthy and Organic Living magazine, a top-shelf title if ever I’ve seen one, the little bearded gimp recommended a weed called henbane as “a great addition to salads”.

One small problem: henbane, which is related to deadly nightshade, is a classified poison that can cause hallucinations, convulsions and a rapid heart rate. Indeed, dear old Dr Crippen used henbane to make the poison with which to kill his wife.

Poor Anthony has since been reviled in the national press for his homicidal carelessness. I, however, regard him as a hero. For all we know, AWT could be a double agent: a man devoted to the cause of allowing the yoghurt-knitting bunny-huggers who read dangerous propaganda like Healthy and Organic Living magazine to exterminate themselves by eating such delicious dishes as ragwort trifle and red-and-white spotted mushroom risotto. And that’s natural selection.

Want more evidence? Scientists have announced that vegetarian men who eat even a small amount of soya-based products (e.g. Linda McCartney’s sausages) have a lower sperm count than that of meat-eating men.

There is only one possible outcome to this – nutters will be less successful at breeding than normal people and will eventually, inevitably, die out, like the dodo and the dinosaur. Truly, God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

I’LL TELL you another group heading for the great Mausoleum in the Sky – men with beards. (I was going to write ‘people with beards’ there but I didn’t want to upset the non-shaving, sensible shoe-wearers in dungarees who worship at the shrine of K.D. Lang.)

Think about it: what do Radovan Karadzic, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Peter Sutcliffe have in common? Yep, they all have or have had beards.

The aforementioned, wife-murdering Dr Crippen? Growing a beard on a transAtlantic liner when he was apprehended. The pensioner-topping, public services-saving Dr Harold Shipman? Reassuring, leave-me-your-money, whiskers. Dr Rowan Williams, advocate of homosexual priests, female bishops, and the introduction of Sharia law to our legal system? A full set that would put W. G. Grace to shame. Evil, the lot of them.

(Actually, I’ve just noticed another link there. They’re all doctors, of one sort or another. Although you wouldn’t really want any of them to make a house call. Especially the God-botherer.)

LORD NELSON performed many duties for his country, not least putting the fear of Dr Rowan Williams up the Frogs and the fuzzy-wuzzies, therefore keeping the sea lanes clear for our prosperous slave trade. And he never grew a beard.

But now it appears that he might have done us the greatest service ever, fully 200 years after his death. Scientists (presumably the same men who have pointed out the scrotal deficiencies of vegetarians) have been studying the ships’ logs of Nelson and Captain Cook and can now reveal that global warming is not so unusual after all.

The Met Office, an organisation so normally so timid that it forecasts “sunshine and showers with spells of heavy rain and sleet … and hail … and snow” on a daily basis (and then gets blamed for no-one choosing to take their summer hols in the still-smouldering Weston-super-Mare), has stuck its metaphorical head into the hornet’s nest of political correctness and announced that after studying the weather conditions recorded in more than 6,000 naval logs dating back to 1600, we actually went through a similar period of global warming during the 1730s as to that which we’re experiencing today.

Now forgive my historical ignorance, but I think I’m on safe ground when I say that 4x4 vehicles were thin on the ground in the 1730s. So were coal-fired or nuclear power stations, cheap flights to the continent, plasma televisions and Marks and Spencer carrier bags. Yet still polar bears were chucking themselves off crumbling glaciers and a mad Prince, heir to the throne, wibbled on about the impact of carthorse emissions on the environment to any plant in his garden prepared to listen.

(Excuse me a moment … I’ve just realised that I’ve learnt more about history from four series of Blackadder than I have from 13 years of assorted schoolteachers.)

So, as I keep telling you, we’re being conned. Your car isn’t being taxed to extinction and your bins aren’t being emptied to stop global warming. It’s always happened and it always will. These things go in cycles, and our own influence on our own environment is tiny and ineffectual in the grander scale of things.

Still, as long as it gives the EU the chance to bully us and our own government an excuse to tax us to the hilt, then no-one in authority is going to let the real story have any credence. Think about that the next time you’re stood in front of a Dalek-like row of multi-coloured recycling bins trying to decide if a cornflakes packet is ‘waxed cardboard’, ‘treated cardboard’, or just plain ‘cardboard cardboard’, knowing that a £110 fine will be winging your way if you get it wrong.

SOME HOSPITALS have had to call in pest controllers over 50 times in the past year to combat infestations of rats, fleas and cockroaches.

Forgive me, but I would have been more worried if they HADN’T called in pest controllers …

How the smoking Nazis have killed our pub culture

2008-08-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

SOME PEOPLE think that the traditional English pub was doomed the day they let women through the door; others put it down to the demise of the snug, where at least The Wife could sit and gossip over her milk stout with Minnie Caldwell and Ena Sharples. The buxom barmaid behind the bar, the bikini-clad totty on the card behind the peanuts, and the Sunday lunchtime stripper who came round with a pint pot before her ‘special encore’ were tolerated, but that was it.

For me, the rot set in after the lunatic idea to let children onto licensed premises. What was wrong with them sitting in the car park with a bag of crisps (with salt in a twist of blue paper) and a bottle of dandelion and burdock with a straw? Because once kids invaded the boozer, food wouldn’t be far behind. And once a pub starts doing food (proper food; not just ham rolls and pickled eggs) then its days as a venue for drinkers are over.

The pub in my village is a case in point. It’s a bog standard local – or should be. But in a fit of the Gordon Ramsays, the nutter behind the bar has decided to lay cutlery out on 90 per cent of his tables. It matters not that diners never arrive in those numbers; he serves food and therefore must always be ready for an unexpected rush. The consequence is that we bar-room drinkers are corralled into an area the size of a garden shed to one side of the lounge. Frankly, you just don’t feel comfortable in there.

I wouldn’t mind so much if the food was actually any good, but it’s not. The menu is suspiciously long; far too long for a pub of this standing. That means that the slow-cooked lamb shanks are actually fast-cooked boil in the bag fare. If you turned the awful piped music off, your pint of flat bitter would be accompanied by the hum of the freezer and the ping of the microwave.

The only time the place turns a shilling is on Sunday lunchtime, when a £3.99 carvery brings in the Big Plate merchants in people carriers and elasticated trousers from neighbouring estates. I don’t go in there any more, having been revolted by these obese benefits thieves loading their platters with Blackpool Towers of food in an Irish Sea of gravy. And God only knows what “free range meat” they serve at that price. Badger, probably.

And then there was the smoking ban. An utter disaster, particularly in poor urban areas where people, well, smoke. In a bid to duck responsibility for the 40 pubs a week going out of business, the health Nazis now point to the availability of cheap supermarket beer as the reason. Well, it’s chicken and egg, my friend.

Because more people are staying at home rather than spending a damp evening smoking on a pub doorstep, the supermarkets have responded by selling them vast quantities of cheap tinned lager. Let’s face it, no-one in their right mind would stay at home with the aforementioned Wife instead of having a laugh with their mates in a convivial atmosphere if they could light up while they relaxed. The cost of booze isn’t the cause of the crisis in our pubs; it’s a consequence.

So now our pubs are selling 1.6 million fewer pints a day than they were a year ago. Many are heading inexorably for extinction. All that will be left will be the monstrous high street, happy hour, thong and tattoo-filled alcopop warehouses and the odd country pub with a passing golfing clientele, hunting scenes on the placemats and a risqué picture of a 1920s pin-up girl in the gents.

Cheers. Mine’s a double.

WHILE WE’RE on the subject of drink, I can’t resist bringing you the story of our local alcoholic, who turns up at the village shop at 8am every morning without fail to buy his two-litre bottle of cheap cider. He then goes and sits on the bench on the green and enjoys his breakfast. He’s a harmless chap, and has earned himself the nickname of ‘The Bishop of Southwark’.

Well last Saturday he must have come into some money, because instead of cider he’d bought himself a bottle of Chilean chardonnay and was clearly as happy as a happy thing. The only problem was, he couldn’t get the bottle open, even though it was a screw-top.

Now he’d mithered a few passing pensioners without luck, and I was just about to wander over and help him myself, when a white pick-up truck pulled up outside the shop. The Bishop tapped on the driver’s window, the window was wound down, a hand reached out, grabbed the bottle and whoosh … the pick-up accelerated away in a cloud of dust.

The Bishop looked stunned for a moment, then sat down on the kerb and started crying. And that’s why, dear friends, at 8.10 on Saturday morning, I could be spotted in the village shop buying a two-litre bottle of cheap cider …

I’LL TELL you the other thing that confuses me. This government, which is wailing and moaning about the vomit-flecked binge-drinking culture that infests our society, appears to be the same government that did away with licensing restrictions and created the 24-hour pub. So how does that work then?

Burn their kilts and stamp on their shortbread

2008-07-27T02:15:00.000-07:00

A TOURIST attraction in Scotland banned visitors from south of the border on one day last week and instead spent the time destroying ‘English’ items such as bone china and important books.

The Edinburgh Dungeon said that the one-day ban was in revenge for the Battle of Falkirk, fought 710 years ago, in which the Porridge Wogs got their usual battering at the hands of God’s Own People. In this case, six thousand of William Wallace’s idiots came up against half a dozen of Edward I’s archers. The result? Longbows, 6,000; face-painted, skirt-wearing Nancy Boys, 0.

This seems to have displeased the Jocks to the point that they thought that they’d ‘celebrate’ another miserable defeat by scoring some cheap publicity for their crappy museum.

The obvious point here is what would happen if an English museum decided that they’d have a day of burning kilts and stamping on shortbread. I think we know – the Thought Police would be around sharpish, clubbing the curator and spraying CS gas in the face of the old lady serving lemon drizzle cake and cups of tea.

As it happens, some sad bugger actually complained to the Lothian and Borders police about the event, and much time was therefore wasted investigating a perceived slight. I can only think that it was someone from Carlisle. No-one else could care less.

THE PONCY middle-class columnists of the national press have been hurtling into print to condemn Boots the Chemist for getting a security guard to ‘arrest’ a 12-year-old girl and then summoning three policemen to interrogate her over the alleged theft of a pot of nail varnish.

Well I’m sorry, but I don’t see what they’re complaining about. This kid wandered into the store, unwrapped the £7 nail varnish and painted one of her nails. It wasn’t what Mrs Beelzebub tells me is called a tester; it was a valuable product.

What if I wandered into an off licence and popped the top of a can of wife-beater before deciding whether to buy it or not? I’d be banged up quicker than an English museum curator who’d been burning kilts.

To be fair, the store didn’t actually help itself with its moronic NuLabour-speak comments after the incident: “During the recent event at our Folkestone store, we worked with Miss Gilbert [the accused] and subsequent local law enforcement to ensure an effective resolution was met.”

What does that mean? Why can’t they just speak English? And burn a few kilts?

I MUST admit that I occasionally get tired of trying to defend Margaret Thatcher. I know that her policies caused much hurt, particularly in the former coalfields, but when you survey her body of work in the context of British history, 1975-2008, then I honestly believe without her input we’d all still be driving Morris Marinas and living in run-down, pebble-dashed council houses, while rubbish lay uncollected in the streets and inflation ran at unheard of levels. (Hang on, scratch the last two points.)

I think what annoys me most is the lazy, left-wing abuse of a frail, 82-year-old woman. Only last week I had a barney in snug bar of The Shivering Whippet with a spikey-haired, wannabe Trotskyist who was railing at the assembled stoodents about the plans for a State Funeral for the Blessed Margaret.

She did this, she did that, she was responsible for gassing miners and introducing compulsory euthanasia for pensioners. On and on he went. In the end I had to pull him up.

“So how old are you?” I asked.

“23,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “So you were five years old when she stepped down. You didn’t actually experience a single minute of her rule, yet you’re happily bragging about how you’ll dance on her grave. Frankly, sonny, you’re just a fraud.”

And that’s the problem. A whole generation of Guardianistas has grown up with this image of the Bogey Woman lodged in their lentil-fed brains. If they were there, like I was, and had to get on their bike to find work, like I did, then I’d listen to their opinions. Instead casual venom is the order of the day; in my case it was two winters on oil supply boats off Shetland and a summer on the door of a night club in Gibraltar.

As expected, the letters pages of The Guardian have been frothing at the mouth. Here’s a few choice comments: “The country owes her a 19-gun salute. Yeah, but she can have a blindfold as well.” “A State funeral would be a farce. But how about nationwide street parties or perhaps auctioning coffin nails? I’d pay good money to hammer the lid down.” “Give her a nice marble tomb – in the shape of a public toilet.” “A State funeral? A televised public execution would be far, far too good for her.”

Well, I guess we can all see the intelligent comment and careful thought behind those comments.

OF COURSE, what really hurts the Lefties is that it’s Gordon Brown’s government which has given the nod to a suitable celebration. But, to be honest, they’ll do anything now. It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire.

Why do you think that so many Labour MPs voted against the reform of their expenses? It’s because they know that within two years they’ll be out of a job. Let’s get our snouts in the trough while we’ve still got a chance. After that, it’ll be back to lecturing scrotes at the local polytechnic. And dancing on the grave of an 82-year-old woman.

Twixt Iceland and the fried chicken takeaway lies scrote Nirvana

2008-07-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

I OCCASIONALLY have to travel through what are best described as Scrote Estates. (Apparently we’re not allowed to use the word ‘chav’ anymore because if we do then we’re no better than fascists. Don’t ask me – some bloke in The Guardian said it.)

You know the kind of place: flat-roofed pub with a pair of Rottweilers leaning over the guttering, hoodies on mountain bikes riding on the pavement, the cross of St George hanging in bedroom windows long after we were expelled from Euro 2008. You lock the car doors on the way in and check that the carefully pre-damaged baseball bat is close at hand. (It’s for playing with the dog, officer. Look at the teeth marks on it.)

But I’ve now gathered enough evidence to put forward another theory. Presumably these people are officially poor, despite the overwhelming presence of the Magic Tin Leg of Money denoting another dodgy disability claimant. They can’t have much in the way of disposable income after the fags, the alcopops, the scratchcards and the Findus Crispy Pancakes have been paid for. So why, in every horrible, concrete, 1970s shopping precinct, usually in between the local branch of Iceland and a fried chicken takeaway, is there a tanning salon?

Why do poor people feel the need to look … well … orange? Do they think that they’ll be mistaken for Hollywood superstars who’ve just returned from a month on the Riviera? Do they think it’ll protect them from the indigenous scrote diseases of cancer and rickets?

Let’s face it: it’s not as if the tramp-stamped, thong-baring women need any help pulling after closing time at The Shivering Whippet. Their biggest problem is not spilling their chips while being serviced in the car park by a lad off the Waltzers at the local fair. Being bright orange isn’t going to help, beyond making it easier for the local Casanovas to find them in the dark.

Maybe it’s this WAG thing, whereby all teenage girls have only one ambition in life, and that’s to entrap a footballer of sorts and then appear in Hello! magazine at £250,000 a pop. The sad reality – for them - is that they instead fall pregnant to a nice Asian lad from the kebab shop and then spend the rest of their lives pretending to hobble round on the Magic Tin Leg of Money while buying fags, alcopops, scratchcards and Findus Crispy Pancakes. Still, at least the ‘brahn’ baby won’t need to avail itself of the tanning salon.

OUT HERE in the countryside, with Bastille Day gone, the combines have moved into the fields and a lemming-like tidal wave of rats, mice, voles and squirrels is heading for my garage where they’ll shred everything made of cloth, paper or plastic over the next month before giving birth to new legions of vermin in the debris.

I’ve tried shooting them as they advance, but the barrels of the Beretta soon glow red. The lurcher, having slaughtered more wildlife than a forest fire, a veritable canine Attila the Hun, has collapsed exhausted in front of the Aga licking his blood-stained jowls and refuses to set foot outside until there’s a hard frost.

So I went and bought a whippet. It was an accident really. I sat next to a bloke at the polo whose bitch had just had a litter, we went to look at them and that was that. Bring on another set of vets’ fees and damp patches in the hall.

He’s a game little thing, though. I took him to Pets ‘R’ Us to buy him a Barbour for winter and he was stood in front of the glass cases of bunny rabbits doing that twisty-head thing clever dogs do when this woman sauntered up.

“Oh, isn’t he lovely,” she said. “Are you buying him a friend?”

“No, love,” I said. “It’s an educational trip because I think it’s important that he sees where his food is going to come from.”

She stared at me for a full three seconds before running off. On the way out of the car park, I expected the armed response unit to descend upon me at any minute.

OUR PRIME Minister, who doesn’t even have a driving licence and who is chauffeured in luxury limo from banquet to beano, has decreed that we must all drive electric cars by the year 2020. How wonderful.

Now his pal Hilary Benn, the ridiculously vegetarian Minister in charge of the nation’s meat production, has weighed in by saying that rising fuel prices are A Good Thing because the cost of motoring will keep people off the roads, and that those rascals who own second-hand cars should be punished even further.

What planet are these people from? We don’t all live in Islington and work in Westminster. I have a 56-mile return journey to work. Many people commute even further. We do this because there is no suitable public transport solution unless we want to rock up at the office at 10.15am and leave again at 4pm. Three days a week.

And those evil buggers who are killing polar bears with their pollution-spewing second-hand cars? Guess why they’re driving a 1989 Ford Sierra? It’s because they’re poor and can’t afford a brand new £20,000 Toyota Prius milk float, stoopid.

And if they did have that money they’d blow it on a used convertible BMW Turbo Nutter Bastard anyway (plus extra trips to the tanning salon) because that’s human nature.

Sometimes I wish I was locked up in the Big Brother House, away from all this madness.

The wobbling white triangle of terror

2008-07-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

ZIMBABWE IS crisis. Iraq is still a mess. Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Our roads system is approaching gridlock. Our filthy hospitals are killing patients. Most school-leavers can’t read or write. House prices have collapsed. The economy is in meltdown. Banks are being propped up by state money. And what does Wee Gordie Broon do? He breaks off from an 18-course banquet in Japan to give us a lecture on the evils of throwing away some three-day-old Brussels sprouts.

It really does beggar belief. The poor bloke has lost the plot to the extent that you wouldn’t be surprised to see the men in white coats sneaking up to the door of Number 10 with a straightjacket.

He was even at it again the next day, insisting that all cars in Britain should be battery-powered by 2020. And even more offensively, smirked that this revolution would be brought about by the pain of rising fuel prices. Has he really thought this through? This is, after all, a man who doesn’t drive and doesn’t even have a licence.

According to a list of electric cars in the Daily Telegraph – and in The Sun, which had scaled down its UFO coverage for the day – the average range of an electric car is between 40 and 60 miles. Well I don’t know about you, but that would get me to work but not get me back again. I’d be condemned to living in a Travelodge on a distant dual-carriageway, a bit like Alan Partridge but without the Big Plate.

And another thing. As Top Gear and the great man Clarkson recently proved, some electric cars produce more carbon emissions and are less economical than some modern diesels. And finally, what about people who live in the countryside? They need their cars just to get through everyday life. Public transport is a joke: my village gets two buses a week.

So it’s alright for some smug townie to gloat over rising fuel prices, but out here it’s a very serious matter. Take away my motor and I’m going to really struggle to get to the next virgin sacrifice, I tell you.

NOW I’M second to no-one in my demands that the defence budget should be more than adequate to keep our soldiers, sailors and pilots as safe as is possible, particularly when they’re off fighting silly wars on behalf of silly politicians.

So you would think that I would be pleased that we’d just signed up for two new aircraft carriers at a cost of a mere £4 billion. (We’ll set aside the fact that we can’t afford the planes to use them. After all, better to be safe than sorry and you never know when the Germans are likely to get stroppy again. You might also think that this money might be better spent on army vehicles which offer more protection that a Citroen 2CV to roadside bombs, but that’s another matter.)

So well done, our Scottish Prime Minister, and our Scottish Chancellor, and our part-time Scottish Defence Secretary, for awarding these job-preserving contracts to shipyards in … err … Scotland. True, some work will go to Barrow-in-Furness (John Hutton, Labour) and some to Portsmouth (Sarah McCarthy-Fry, Labour), but the bulk of the work will stay north of the border. How expedient.

WHILE WE’RE talking about political expedience, can anyone explain to me the government’s cowardly ducking of the undoubtedly uncomfortable decision to cull badgers to stem the spread of bovine TB?

Now anyone who has ever seen badgers at play in the late evening will acknowledge their ‘teddy bear’ factor, but sometimes hard decisions have to be taken.

While steeling myself for a full-on assault from the bunny-huggers, I will rehearse the facts as we know them: a parliamentary select committee has recommended a cull; the government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir David King, has recommended a cull; so why did Hilary Benn (the alarmingly vegetarian Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) choose to ignore this advice?

A cynic would suggest that this Labour administration receives funding from animal rights groups and, given its precipitous financial situation, is loath to lose that support. Furthermore, one might reasonably expect Labour votes to be thin on the ground in rural England come the next election, while a flicker of hope might still remain amongst badger-loving urban voters who view the countryside through rose-tinted blinkers, rather than as Tennyson’s “red in tooth and claw” environment.

This is not an X Factor for cuddly animals; this is about the livelihoods of thousands of dairy farmers who have already seen almost 20,000 cattle slaughtered in the past year alone. It might be a difficult decision, it might upset nature lovers; but isn’t that what our MPs are there for? Cheap popularity contests should always come second to doing what is obviously right. Sadly, they clearly don’t.

TO THE dreaded country show at the weekend. Now as you’ll see from the above, I like wildlife as much as the next man, but I have to admit that if I never see another flapping falcon failing to return on cue to its mouse-waving master, then it won’t be too soon.

And then they bring on the Royal Corps of Signals White Helmets motorcycle team. If someone could explain to me how a pyramid of white-helmeted berks perched on motorbikes fits into the training of the modern army then I’d be much obliged. Perhaps it strikes mortal fear into the fuzzie-wuzzies when this fragile assembly of semaphore-flagging clerks comes wobbling across the plains of Kandahar. I somehow doubt it.

Jumping the shark

2008-07-06T03:08:00.000-07:00

LAST YEAR it was a shark off the Cornwall coast that saw The Sun through the silly season; this year it’s little green men in flying saucers over Shropshire. Both stories, of course, are utter tosh. Still, anything is better than the diet of relentless misery being peddled by the other national newspapers.

As I’ve said before, yes, things are a bit tight at the moment, but that’s no reason to panic and start eating your pets. Indeed, no greater authority than the Joseph Rowntree Foundation declared this week that a single person needs no more than £13,400 a year to have an acceptable, if basic, standard of living. (That obviously doesn’t include such essentials as fags, wine and Johnny Cash CDs.)

What makes me slightly suspect of the Foundation’s figures is the further assertion that adding a wife and two children to that happy and carefree single man would mean that he’d only need another £13,400 to cope. Do they know the cost of trainers and Wiis, not to mention an extensive wardrobe for the wife? I think Mrs Beelzebub probably spent more than that on the damn garden this year. Every time she comes home from one of her garden centre raiding parties, it looks like she’s re-enacting The Day of the Triffids in the back of her car.

Anyway, let’s get to the point. It seems that the good, old-fashioned fish and chip shop is also having it hard after a wet start to the year damaged potato and mushy pea crops and pushed up prices. Cod, as we know, has been steadily going up in price for the past few years.

I now need to salvage a fiver from the wreckage of my wallet before I can head happily off for a dose of solid Northern protein (although I have yet to convince the Bubble and Squeak who runs the place to fry in beef dripping rather than oil). But it’s still a definite treat.

But even this simple pleasure is under threat after the Health Nazis in Gateshead decided that locals were putting too much salt on their fish and chips and decided that the best way to tackle the so-called problem was to re-design the classic chippy salt-shaker with just five holes instead of the standard 17. No, really. They then toured chip shops and takeaways “advising” proprietors to adopt the new “healthy” shakers – I suspect with a hint of menace conveyed by a finger wiped along the top of a door frame.

According to the perverse thinking of the busy-bodies, this cunning plan would cut salt consumption by up to 60 per cent while giving a “visually acceptable sprinkling” that would satisfy the customer. Of course, it didn’t work. As anyone with half a brain will know, you just shake and shake until you’re happy with the amount of salt on your chips. Some bon viveurs even unscrewed the top of the shaker to satisfy their cravings.

I think what annoys me most about this story isn’t the stupidity of the council involved, or the complete and utter waste of money (£2,000 since you ask, plus hours and hours of officers’ time). It’s the sheer arrogance of some committee somewhere deciding that salt consumption should have a “daily allowance”.

By all means tell me that I might be damaging my heart by eating too many bags of crisps. Thank you for the information. I will consider it carefully and then make a value judgement as to my future behaviour. But the minute you mention “allowances” or rationing or control, then I’m going to be face down in a sack of Saxa before you can say “blocked artery”.

If I die, I die – although the chances of fish and chips killing me before the fags, wine and Johnny Cash CDs get to me are remote, to say the least.

YOU MAY recall a recent column which mentioned Detective Sergeant Gurpal Virdi, who has brought three successful claims against his employers, the Metropolitan Police, and pocketed in excess of £300,000 in compo – with a fourth claim pending. It appears that he is not the only Asian policeman who has allegedly been discriminated against.

Next up is Commander Shabir Hussain, who is demanding “substantially more than £500,000” after claiming that he was unfairly denied promotion by Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. And now Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur is considering his position after the National Black Police Association told him he had also been discriminated against. Expect a call to Victims ‘R’ Us any day now.

Now these are all very senior policemen, occupying posts to which most white coppers can only aspire. It seems strange then that so many would choose to bite the hand that has fed them. Consider this: if this trend continues, then the Met won’t be able to afford to pursue its unspoken policy of positive discrimination which gives black and Asian officers an advantage over their colleagues. There just won’t be enough money around to fund the compo budget. And I suppose that won’t be an altogether bad thing.

IT’S A strange thing, nationality – particularly in the melting pot that is modern Britain.

Take tennis player Andy Murray. On Wednesday morning, during the build-up to his quarter final tie with Spaniard Rafael Nadal, he was brave and British.

By supper time he’d gone back to being a gobby Scotch bottler. Ain’t life grand!

The madness of the modern wedding

2008-07-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

WE’RE AT the height of the wedding season and, having done four already this summer, I don’t think I can take any more.

It’s not so much the occasion – don’t we all just love those family reunions – but it’s all the crap that comes with it. I tell you what, if there’s a credit crunch going on out there, then it’s not affecting the bridal trade.

First there’s the ‘Save the Date’ card, which arrives anything up to a year in advance, so making it extremely difficult to come up with a convincing excuse to give the event a swerve unless it’s a sudden heart attack the night before.

Then the invitation proper arrives, papyrus made from larks’ tongues bound in silk ribbons. By now they’ve already spent the equivalent of the Zimbabwe’s disabled parking budget. And with the invitation comes to wedding list – or not, as now so often is the case.

You see our devoted couple have already been co-habiting for several years. They’ve got the White Company bed linen and the Jamie Oliver china. Their IKEA kitchen cupboards heave with Nigella bread bins and smoothie-makers endorsed by that little fat one with the daft facial hair. They have no need for the traditional canteen of cutlery, bought a teaspoon at a time by tightwad guests.

So instead they proudly announce that they’re off on a three-month world tour and would we mind contributing to that as a wedding gift? Well yes, actually we would mind. I have no objection to helping to set up a young couple in their first home, but I’m buggered if I’m going to buy their cocktails while they’re watching the sunset in Key West. Instead I’ll send a goat to an African village in their name (even though I suspect it will be promptly eaten).

And then comes the day itself. We have to haul ourselves halfway across the country (at £6 an effing gallon) having booked the King’s Suite at the local Travelodge at enormous cost. Mrs Beelzebub has already invested in a hugely expensive new outfit and Ascot hat so she can take part in the competitive dressing tournament, I’ve been made to buy a colour co-ordinated tie, and the dogs are languishing in kennels more expensive than the King’s Suite at the local Travelodge. We’re racking up expenditure like Cristiano Ronaldo in a knocking shop.

Now you know those precious daughters who start planning their fairytale wedding at the age of six? Yep, it’s one of those. The poor father of the bride has had to remortgage his home just weeks after finally paying it off just to fund this mad extravaganza. The dress is hand-woven by blind virgins on an island off the coast of Narnia, the tiara is modelled on Lady Di’s, the bouquet has been assembled by Monty Don and a team of woodland elves, and the male side of the event is decked out in Moss Bros’ finest (where it costs £18 just to hire a waistcoat for the weekend). And drop one of those top hats, sonny, and you’ll be hit with a collision damage waiver charge that would make an Italian car hire firm blush.

I’d like to say that the church service was an oasis of sense in a jungle of excess. Unfortunately, the vicar was a woman (is that really legal?) and looked more like a McDonald’s chip fryer than an officer of the church. She could have at least washed her hair. The bride, being an amateur dramatic, had rehearsed her vows to the point that she sounded like she was auditioning for Hollyoaks; various other luvvies were called upon to deliver saccharin readings; and the whole nonsense dragged on for the best part of 90 minutes. I could have watched a football match instead.

And then came the photographs. Ah, the photographs. For two whole hours we were staked out on a hotel lawn clutching rapidly diminishing glasses of Pimms while a desperate ballet of in-laws and outlaws was assembled and disassembled by a bloke with a squint who spends his evenings renting out his Thai bride to local pervs with no film in their cameras. On and on it went. It was a nightmare. I was almost tempted to ring Amnesty International.

And then, just as we’re pegging out like Tenko captives, we’re summoned to the wedding breakfast, via a greeting line of air kisses and false bonhomie. Smoked salmon, cold ham and sherry trifle served on tables of ten meaning that we’re crammed in like veal calves and can only eat by performing an elaborate elbow ballet.

The speeches were … well ... not great. Now I know that not everyone likes public speaking; it’s an ordeal even for the professionals amongst us, but if you’re going to choose a Best Man, it would seem sensible to find one who could at least string two sentences together. As for the father of the bride, yes, she’s beautiful and brilliant, but passing around pictures of her naked in the bath, aged seven, is liable to make a lot of people vaguely uncomfortable, and some people subject to signing the Sex Offenders’ Register.

We are then summoned to the dance floor to admire the First Dance. Sadly, as is the fashion these days, the happy couple had planned an elaborate, choreographed performance. Not for them the embarrassed shuffling most of us managed. It was Dirty Dancing done not very well.

Then the cheesy wedding disco kicked in. I’m going to stop here, because I’d managed by now to anaesthetise myself to the wobbling grannies and the kids sliding around in their socks by taking full advantage of the cheap French plonk the groom’s father had shipped home on a booze run.

So that’s Four Weddings and a Funeral. I just hope that the last do isn’t mine.

Cops, crabs, crap rugby players and Abu Qatada

2008-06-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

A HOME Office flunkey proudly announced this week that people charged with murder will no longer be allowed out on bail. The news was presented as some kind of positive step when, in fact, we should be outraged that it ever happened in the first place. At the same time, it was claimed that convicted killers would be made to serve more than half their sentences. Again, why aren’t they already?

But the real legal lunacy of the week came with the release from prison of Abu Qatada after the Home Secretary’s bid to deport him to Jordan was thrown out by the courts.

He’s now out on bail while the Home Office appeals to the House of Lords to try to get the judgement overturned, but it’s his bail conditions that really highlight the barminess of this ruling. He’s got to live in an MI5 safe house, he must stay indoors 22 hours a day, he can’t use a mobile phone, nobody can enter his home without the Home Secretary’s permission except his wife, his children, his lawyers or a doctor and – the most ridiculous of all – he’s not allowed to meet or contact Osama bin Laden. Well, that’s all right then.

In theory he is allowed to work, but I think we can give that one a miss, and the cost to the poor taxpayer of all this is estimated at between £500,000 and a million pounds a year … presumably for ever. It really is enough to make a cat laugh.

YOU’D THINK that after using a stepladder for 30 years, school caretaker Anthony Gower-Smith would know how to go about it. Sadly not.

While removing cards and staples from a gym wall at a primary school in Hampshire, Mr Gower-Smith fell off a six-foot stepladder, fractured his skull, broke a cheekbone split a kidney and spent time in intensive care. Now, to add insult to his injuries, he’s suing for £50,000 in damages because the county council failed to train him how to use the stepladder in the first place.

You might ask, how much training does one need to use a stepladder? It’s a fair point, especially when Mr Gower-Smith admitted in court that he’d had one of these lethal devices at home for at least the previous 30 years. He also admitted that he’d ticked the box on the induction training form saying that he’d received the necessary “ladder training” before starting the job.

So where do we go with this? Sadly, we must regard Mr Gower-Smith as a chancer on the make. Our current compensation culture makes it all too easy for prats like this to take us for a ride. The silly old fool should be ashamed of himself.

UNFORTUNATELY, HE’S not the only one taking the mickey. I’d just been into Lidl to buy tea – dolphin burgers, one week only – when I found this top secret report left on the seat on the train. It appears that the equivalent of two whole police forces are currently on the sick - and on full pay – while working as little as one hour a day.

More than 8,200 police officers are being paid a full salary while on “restrictive or recuperative duties” at a total cost of £284 million a year. And this is not officers off sick through work-related injury: this is those who have returned to work, presumably after being signed off by their doctors, who don’t quite feel up to a normal day’s graft. Well neither do I some days, but I still have to drag myself into work.

The sad truth is that there is a layer of public service employees who will take every opportunity to milk their cushy positions at the expense of the rest of us, the people who pay their wages. In the case of the police, it’s even more annoying that hard-working, front line officers are being denied the support they deserve by the slackers amongst their own ranks.

And why does the Home Office put up with this? Because it would cost too much to make every copper with an imaginary bad back redundant. So instead we limp along with a handicapped service, while toddlers stab each other to death at their nurseries. Ain’t life grand?

WHEN I were a lad, there was only one health and safety rule that mattered when you were catching crabs in rock pools – don’t let the little blighters bite you. These days, things are a little more complicated.

Around 10,000 leaflets were handed out last week to Norfolk holidaymakers by students from Cambridge University, who had taken it upon themselves to protect these poor crustaceans from the attentions of the nation’s children.

According to the bunny-huggers, overcrowding crabs in buckets could cause stress for the smaller ones and lead to vicious fights. Consequently, children are “advised” to only keep 10 crabs or fewer in a bucket at a time; to change the water in the bucket every hour; and to make sure that their bucket isn’t in direct sunlight.

It is uncertain what will happen to children who defy these rockpool rules. Perhaps they’ll be captured on CCTV and be subject to a fine from the Crab Police. It’s hard to tell these days.

I’m only glad that we weren’t subject to such strictures when we used to spray them with lighter fuel and send them running down the beach like eight-legged Buddhist monks. Well, we had to make our own entertainment in those days.

IT APPEARS that there have been some accusations made against our rugby union players currently touring New Zealand. A lady apparently alleges that some of them behaved inappropriately towards her.

To be honest, after watching them last Saturday morning, I find it hard to believe that they could actually catch someone, never mind hold them down. Although I’m not sure that counts as evidence.

Stop whining and tuck into the 2p sausages

2008-06-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

WILL YOU please stop whining at the back? Yes, your house might be worth five grand less than it was last week, but what does that matter unless you’re mad enough to want to move at the moment? And what about all those illusory £1,000 a month increases you’ve supposedly enjoyed for the past five years? You’re just gutted that you didn’t cash in when you had the chance.

But even then, the money was just paper money. Unless you were in the fortunate position of having got rid of your cash-leeching kids and were able to downsize from the four-bed suburban semi to that little cottage in the Dales, the new house you would have bought would have also gone up in price exponentially, so in the end no-one wins apart from the estate agents, the solicitors and the stamp duty thieves of central government.

That’s what makes me so mad about this current wave of economic panic sweeping the country. How much of it is real and how much of it is created by the scare-mongering media?

Yes, it makes your eyes water when you fill up your 4x4 at the garage. Yes, food prices are on the up – although an extra few pence on a packet of pasta or a loaf of bread is hardly going to result in widespread middle class starvation. Not when you can buy three cases of wife-beater for £20 or a pack of 2p sausages at Asda.

Of course it’s a bit tough if you’re just coming to end of a fixed-rate mortgage, but isn’t that the nature of fixed-rate mortgages? It’s swings and roundabouts: you’ve had the good times and now you’ll have to get real.

And yes, I do have some vague sympathy for those buffoons who took out 125 per cent mortgages with Northern Rock, but surely they realised that they would be in negative equity from day one?

I honestly think that we’re talking ourselves into a slump, instead of a momentary blip. I listened to a radio programme the other day where idiot after idiot called up to relate a horror story they’d heard from The Man Down The Pub.

“His mate was evicted after his mortgage payments went up 50 per cent.”

“His wife has to walk 13 miles to work because they can’t afford the petrol.”

“They’re now living in a cardboard box in t’middle of t’road.”

On and on it went, with the moronic presenter failing to extract a single fact to support these apocryphal tales of woe. No wonder people are selling their children and eating gravel. The economy of this country is no longer controlled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It’s The Man Down The Pub who is calling the shots.

We should invoke the spirit of Corporal Jones instead of frightening ourselves to monetary death. And if all else fails, there’s always those 2p Asda sausages.

SPEAKING OF which, a girl of 12 brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old.

Now doctors are under pressure to report the couple, from Glasgow, to police and social workers amid concerns that her health and welfare may have been neglected in pursuit of their beliefs.

The youngster, fed on a strict meat-free and dairy-free diet from birth, is being treated for a severe form of rickets and has a number of fractured bones. The condition is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which is needed to absorb calcium and is found in liver, oily fish and dairy produce.

I think you know my views on this. A far as I’m concerned, militant vegetarianism verges on a hate crime. Hitler was a vegetarian and he banned smoking. Look where that got us. Inflicting lentils on an innocent child is abuse of the worst possible kind.

Which brings us to a conversation overheard on a bus (not by me, I hasten to add).

“My daughter's a vegetarian now,” said one woman to her companion, “but I still put Oxo in all her dinners as I don't want her getting rickets.”

Now that’s what I call proper parenting.

SPEAKING OF overheard conversations, have this one, fresh from the meat counter at Waitrose.

“We’re not having any more kids.”

“Two’s enough then?”

“Oh no, but a psychic I went to in Blackpool said that I’d have a boy and a girl and we’ve got them now.”

You just know that nine months on this woman would be astonished to find herself pregnant again after not bothering with contraception because she didn’t think she’d need it. I blame school dinners for this abject stupidity - not enough meat.

AN OLD folks’ home in Germany has come up with a cunning plan to stem the tide of escaping pensioners – a fake bus stop outside the front door.

What happens is that the elderly residents, most of them suffering from that Old Timer’s Disease, get the urge to go walkabout, see the bus stop and wait for their getaway transport to arrive. Of course it never does and they eventually forget what they’re doing there and go back to their rooms.

It’s a stroke of genius from the people who brought you Colditz.

I said, of course it never does and they eventually forget what they’re doing there and go back to their rooms. Back to their rooms.

FORGIVE ME, but I thought that dolphins, like the 26 which died on mud flats in a Cornish river after running aground, were supposed to be intelligent? Not so smart now eh, you clacky-voiced show-offs?

Roll up for the frenzied Nazi spank orgy

2008-06-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

WITH ALL these toddlers stabbing each other to death in nurseries in London, you’d think that the Metropolitan Police would want to spend their money where it matters – in getting bobbies on the beat.

Instead they seem to have this weird obsession with paying one member of their own staff hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation on a fairly regular basis.

The chap concerned is Detective Sergeant Gurpal Virdi, who joined the Met as a constable in 1982. Since that date, he has thrice brought assorted claims against the force and has pocketed more than £300,000 in compo. Given his history of litigation, and my blood pressure problem, we should quickly point out that Mr Virdi has done nothing wrong at all and has at every point acted properly and within the law. The problem is not his; it is that of his employers.

The saga begins in August 2000 when Mr Virdi was awarded £150,000 by an employment tribunal for racial discrimination after he was unfairly dismissed after being accused of sending hate mail to black and Asian officers at his police station.

He was re-instated in February 2002 and awarded another £90,000 in an out-of-court settlement for “injury to his feelings”.

In 2005 Mr Virdi applied for promotion, but was turned down by a review panel despite having the backing of his senior officers. This week, that snub cost the Met another £70,400 after a tribunal decided that the promotion process was “shoddily operated”. As we speak, Mr Virdi still has two claims outstanding against the force; one claiming victimisation and another alleging bullying.

I understand that Mr Virdi is 49 years old. He can therefore retire in three years time. Is it too much to ask that his bosses might just bite the bullet and be nice to him until then? It might not only be the right thing to do, but it would certainly be cost effective as well.

WHILE WE’RE talking about employment matters, just what exactly does it take for you to get you sacked these days? I know you’re not allowed to grope the staff or tell dodgy jokes - or even, it seems, to ask them to actually do a bit of work - but since when was it permissible to organise a frenzied Nazi spank orgy (and that’s a phrase you’ll not often see in this newspaper) and still be allowed to clock on the next morning?

Yet Max Mosely, 68-year-old president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (the governing body of motorsport) and son of fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosely, remains in post after surviving a vote of confidence by the impressive margin of 103-55 despite being caught on video cavorting with a number of ‘escort girls’, some of whom were dressed in a manner which will shortly be the subject of a libel case.

Mr Mosely insists that such shenanigans were purely a private matter. But that begs the question of what kind of behaviour would tip the balance from private to public? Maybe if Max had worn a little Hitler moustache and sang the Horst Wessel song while being spanked, it might have swung the balance. Other than that, one can only imagine that engaging in foreplay with a farmyard animal in the pit lane five minutes before kick-off would get him the push.

I’VE WARNED you before that once the Nanny State stigmatised smoking, they would turn their unwelcome attentions to the supposed evils of drink. Now we are assailed on a daily basis with dire warnings that the odd glass of wine will condemn us to an early grave (at the same time as some scientists urge us all to enjoy a couple of glasses of red wine a day to help prolong our lives).

But what I find quite extraordinary is Public Health Minister Dawn Primarola’s decision to issue “advice” to each and every family in the country on how much their children should drink.

Well call me a sadomasochistic blackshirt, but from the birth of my first child, I kind of realised that it might not be a great idea to feed her alcopops instead of Farley’s rusks. She didn’t drink Guinness at primary school; she wasn’t necking cider during her GCSEs. (Well actually she might have been, but let’s not go there.)

She was allowed half a glass of wine with Sunday lunch from the age of 14. That seemed reasonable, sensible and suitable preparation for later life. Mind you, she still went out and got bladdered at the first opportunity, so maybe dear Dawn is right and I was wrong.

The other issue I have with the government’s latest anti-drink campaign are the ads in the national press. One shows an ice-cold pint of lager; another a bottle of fine wine; a third a tinkling glass of gin and tonic – each and every one of them sends me running to the fridge for a livener. They might want to think this through again.

SEEING THOSE pictures of the lost Amazonian tribe shooting at a passing plane with bows and arrows definitely reminded me of something, but I just couldn’t place it.

Then I remembered. I’d been in Cornwall the day the first Ryanair plane flew into Newquay Airport.

Let's hang councillors from the lampposts

2008-06-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

I KNOW I keep calling forlornly for it, but the revolt of the pesto peasants – the day the victimised middle classes of this country rise up against the government – can’t be far off.

In the end, I don’t think it will be the disgraceful hike in car tax or the eye-watering cost of filling your fuel tank that does for this discredited NuLabour administration. It’ll be the Gestapo-like tactics of the Bin Police who’ll see local councillors swinging from lampposts while the Town Hall burns.

Not a week passes without another series of aberrations: this week’s horrors included the council in Plymouth forcing families to nominate an adult member of their family who could be fined and given a criminal record in the event of any bin-related malpractice; the stunned pensioners of Skipton being told that they had to lift the heavy internal containers out of their wheelie bins themselves “to spare the binmens’ backs”; and the case of arch criminal single mother Zoe Watmough of Bolton, who was fined £265 for putting her bins out a few hours too early.

These are garbage gangland tactics that not even waste disposal supremo Tony Soprano would dare try.

Try to question your local council about this institutionalised bullying and they’ll claim that it’s all down to central government. Collar your local MP and he’ll blame the EU if he’s a Tory or drowning polar bears if he’s Labour. That’s if he’s a “he”, rather than one of those appalling harridans who shouts down all opposition while never having held down a proper job in her life.

The truth of the matter is that we are being tormented because much of the Netherlands lies below sea level. No, really. Dig a hole for landfill in Holland and the whole place turns into Hull. And, because the Dutch can’t bury their rubbish, they’ve led the way in forcing through legislation that stops the rest of us doing it as well – even though we have more than enough empty coal mines to accommodate the next 100 years’ worth of disposable nappies or Waitrose carrier bags.

Just think about that the next time you’re buying tulips, or Edam, or dope.

FROM THE Bin Police to the Balloon Police. Sixteen-year-old Max Twizell was attending a charity event in Newcastle city centre when the pink, helium-filled balloon he was carrying escaped his grasp and floated away. This prompted a litter warden to pounce and present him with a £50 fine for littering.

Max’s mum, Lorraine, is rightly indignant: “Will the council fine every charity that holds a balloon race £50 per balloon, or toddlers in prams who accidentally release helium balloons?”

Stephen Savage, director of regulatory services and public protection at the council (and there’s a Turkey Army job if ever I’ve heard one) is predictably pathetic: “To some people this may seem harsh but we believe that to create a cleaner, safer city we must send out a clear message that this will not be tolerated.”

Well, it’s good to know that the streets of Newcastle are free from discarded balloons (although I’m not sure you could say that about the back alleys around the Bigg Market). If only they could do the same for knives, we might be making progress.

AND THERE’S till time for the Paddling Pool Police to make their debut. The amusingly-named Lourdes Maxwell (a single grandmother, if that makes any sense) has been putting one of those inflatable paddling pools in the communal garden of her council flats for the past 24 years. In all that time the two-foot deep pool has been used by her children, grandchildren and the kids of neighbours without incident. But no more.

Portsmouth City Council has now decided that this plastic peril cannot be used in future without the presence of lifeguards and a hefty insurance policy. We defer to another Turkey Army apparatchik, Nigel Selley, neighbourhood manager, who says: “We did not have sufficient assurances that the risks associated with providing such a facility would be well-managed. We have since spoken to Ms Maxwell and she is aware of our concerns for child safety and the risks associated with drowning.”

Yes, well, I’m sure the prospect of a submerged toddler has never occurred to her before, but there we go. Let’s just hope that Ms Maxwell (47) can afford to hire a couple of red-trunked hunks to keep the council happy.

NOW EXPLAIN this to me. Prince Andrew’s Berkshire house, the much-derided Sunninghill Park, is on the market for a mere £12 million – even though it doesn’t even have an inflatable plastic paddling pool on the premises.

Now along comes a Kazakhstani billionaire who promptly agrees to pay £15 million for the pile. Totally incidentally, this is a chap with whom Andrew has been doing a bit of business back in the old country.

Now that’s not right, is it? Why would someone cough up £3 million over the odds – money that wasn’t even being asked for – if there wasn’t some ulterior motive?

You might ask why this matters. Well the house was paid for by Her Madge, which ultimately means us. And while I don’t begrudge in any way the 80p a year that the Royal Family costs me, I’d rather it didn’t involve enriching a lardy-arsed, golf-playing freebie merchant with a ginger ex-wife and two fat daughters.

IT APPEARS that we don’t have room to discuss the government’s latest IT project, a £120 million Department of Transport computer system that only speaks German. And you’d really let these people administer an identity card database?

The law catches up with a stalker

2008-05-25T02:16:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEK’S victim of the dreaded Bin Police is retired milkman Barry Freezer of Norwich (and there’s trend there) who dared to commit the capital crime of putting cabbage stalks in his garden waste bin.

I’ll say that again, shall I? He put cabbage stalks in his garden waste bin.

The 73-year-old (and why is it always our older people –war veterans and the like – who seem to be victimised by the town hall numpties?) apparently transgressed a rule which states that food which may have come into contact with meat can’t be mixed with composting waste to prevent outbreaks of diseases such as foot and mouth.

But in Barry’s case, the cabbage stalks hadn’t even been anywhere near the kitchen. They were dug up from his vegetable garden and went straight into the bin without even a nodding acquaintance with half a pound of mince.

The actions of the binmen are interesting here. Upon discovering the illegal cabbage stalks, they attached an immediate ‘red card’ to Barry’s bin, instead of the usual warning system of two yellows (no, I’m not making this up) and refused point blank to empty his bin. It should be pointed out that Barry already pays £35 a year just to have his green bin emptied although, as he says, he could burn the whole lot on a bonfire while shouting “bugger the environment”, but chooses not to.

The law which Barry apparently fell foul of is the Animal By-Products Order, imposed by the Department of Food and Rural Affairs following, in turn, a European Parliament directive which is part of an overall master plan to make all of us pay for every ounce of rubbish that we produce.

You may have heard Wee Gordie Broon declaring last week that this pay-as-you-throw system wouldn’t be introduced in Britain. Well trust me, he’s either lying or he’s deluded. It’s on its way, folks, and nothing can stop it.

THE MASSED ranks of NuLabour’s Turkey Army (“We’ll invent a job for you if you’ll vote for us”) must be getting nervous. The gravy train is heading for the buffers – appropriately enough via Crewe Junction – and the days of the government sinecure, plus gilt-edged pension, are numbered.

It’s only when you have a hard look at the government’s job creation scheme that you realise what a multi-billion pound disgrace it really is. A report this week from the Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed the astonishing number of unaccountable, unelected quangos still lurking in the shadows – 827 of them spending £101 billion of your money every year. Many of them have confused and wasteful roles with duplication rife.

Take the Carbon Trust (£85m a year) for example. Set up to advise businesses and government bodies on becoming carbon neutral, it does exactly the same job as another quango, Envirowise (£22m a year). And then there’s the Food Standards Agency extolling the benefits of a healthy diet while the Potato Council (£6m a year) launches National Chip Week.

So not only does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, it doesn’t really care as long as both hands get to dip into the taxpayers’ pockets.

AT LEAST one group of public sector workers is striving to protect and serve the public, with police in Brighton successfully preventing a planned mass custard pie fight on the prom because of … wait for it … health and safety fears.

Police pulled the plug after more than 1,200 people signed up to take part because of fears that they would not have enough manpower to be able to control the event and innocent passers-by could be targeted with the pies.

Society is also safe from flying feathers after a mass pillow fight in Leeds was cancelled, with police again stepping in to stop the gathering, organised on networking site Facebook.

Meanwhile another 73 teenagers were stabbed to death, another 27 ‘celebrities’ were caught snorting cocaine on video and a bloke down the road from me is still getting away with sneaking potato peelings into his discarded grass cuttings.

I’M RELUCTANT to join the chorus of dissenters accusing Cherie Blair of being a traitorous, money-grubbing hypocrite who pleaded privacy during her years in Number 10 only to dish the dirt on everyone and everything once she thought there might be a quick buck in it. Everyone else has had a pop, so what’s left for me?

(Particularly offensive is her overdue admission that little Leo did have his MMR jab – a revelation that could have saved hundreds of small lives – and her bizarre admission that she didn’t take her “contraceptive equipment” to Balmoral. Why do I imagine, with fingers over my eyes, some kind of weird Catholic contraption involving ropes and pullies?)

But I do find it repugnant that so many NuLabour foot soldiers, who have made their not inconsiderable fortunes out of the party, should now go for one last pay day at the expense of the poor saps left behind. Step forward, with a bucket in his hand, John Prescott, or even Tony Blair’s millionaire tennis partner Lord Levy.

Incidentally, Cherie’s book – which is damaging to Wee Gordie - was rushed out five months ahead of schedule. Perhaps the publishers don’t think he’ll still be around by the autumn. I certainly don’t.

Bashing the bishops

2008-05-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

I DON’T want to sound like a lentil-eating, Guardian-reading, yoghurt-knitting Leftie, but was it really necessary for Metropolitan police marksmen to shoot dead Mark Saunders, the troubled young lawyer who started taking potshots at no-one in particular from his £2 million Chelsea flat?

Now if he’d been a dangerous terrorist, or even a Brazilian electrician, you can understand why they might want to pump five bullets into him as soon as possible. But he was an alcoholic suffering depression who spent five hours under siege while he blasted away at passing pigeons with a 12-bore.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to kill anyone with a shotgun, but it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. You would really want to be within 10 yards – preferably five – before being confident of inflicting serious damage.

I know, I’ve peppered several beaters on various shoots in my time. They just brush the pellets out of their grizzled beards and look forward to the extra £50 blood money that they know will be winging their way at the end of the day.

So there was no need for the police to ever come within that lethal range. They’ve got all sorts of devastating weaponry that can pick people off from up to half a mile away, so why couldn’t they just sit tight and wait him out? Why was it deemed necessary to storm the flat and engineer a fatal confrontation?

There’s something very fishy about this whole affair. No doubt all will be revealed at the inquest and subsequent inquiries.

Yeah, right.

IT’S BACK to Crimewatch corner, where we name and shame the desperados dragging our society into the gutter.

Step up to the stocks if you will, Desert Rat veteran Lenny Woodward. Now Lenny didn’t stab anyone to death or keep his children in a cellar for 30 years, but in the view of the Powers That Be, his crime is no less serious.

You see Woodward committed the heinous offence of “Putting an Empty Tomato Sauce Bottle in the Wrong Bin”, contrary to the Recycle Or Be Shot Act 2008. There is no excuse: Woodward had been issued with the full complement of blue wheelie bin for cans and cardboard, a green box for glass and a black bin for other waste. Regardless of this, he blithely threw the ketchup bottle into the blue bin when – as eny fule nos – they should have gone into the green box.

Now I don’t want to hear that Woodward is 95 years old and therefore possibly confused, or even that he is almost blind and could hardly read the council’s orders; indeed, if he’d read the “yellow card” the binmen left him and publicly apologised on his knees on the steps of Norwich Town Hall, he wouldn’t have subsequently received the “red card” that denied him any further collections.

Rules is rules. And any man who can map-read his way across the war-torn deserts of North Africa while fighting for our freedom must surely be able to understand a simple, 12-page, small-print, council directive.

Officer, take him down!

AT LEAST the criminal Woodward managed to put his rubbish into a bin, albeit the wrong one. Keith Hirst didn’t even bother trying, allegedly discarding an apple core on the public pavement.

The 54-year-old plumber, who has had heart surgery, then has the temerity to complain when he’s surrounded by five police officers, is arrested, has his fingerprints and DNA taken, is locked up in a police cell for 18 hours and then is marched off to court in handcuffs.

Honestly, some people.

WITH THE notable exception of the saintly Dr John Sentamu, when did you actually see a bishop? You know, a proper one - big fella, pointy hat, lots of purple velvet? No, I thought not.

Admittedly the rip-roaring Rt Rev Tom Butler made the news a couple of years ago when he spent too long at a reception at the Irish Embassy and subsequently climbed into the back of a stranger’s car, threw his children’s toys out and roared: “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do!” But apart from that, you don’t see much of them, do you?

There’s that Weird Beard chap who wants to adopt a legal system whereby shoplifters get their hands chopped off (not altogether a bad thing) but would also have all the gays hung from lampposts (probably not a good thing). He also thinks that there should be a salary cap on the rich, which is a bit … err … rich coming from a bloke who costs the Church of England over £1,000,000 a year on his own.

Yes, that’s right, the 44 CoE bishops, their palaces, offices and support staff – including cooks, gardeners and chauffeurs - cost the church just under £20 million last year, double what they cost in 1997.

Now that’s an awful lot of money, especially when you think that whenever I roll up at my own village church (Christmas Eve, weddings and funerals if I’m honest) I’m immediately blackmailed into coughing up a few quid for the leaking roof or the disintegrating windows. And it’s not as if our Vicar is coining it; he’s never seen so much of his parishioners since we all got frightened by the credit crunch and fled Waitrose to join him down at Netto.

So forgive me if I cross to the other side of the road the next time the CoE pleads poverty, because it’s clearly not poor – it’s just spending its money in a profligate and perverse manner.

Nailing the nation's most wanted

2008-05-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

GOOD EVENING and welcome to Crimewatch, where the nation’s most dangerous criminals are named, shamed and subjected to general opprobrium.

First in the metaphorical stocks this week is that threat to society, Linda Jackson of Chaddesden, Derby, who was threatened with eviction from her council house of 17 years for the heinous crime of … not mowing the lawn. The fact that it had been raining constantly, that we’re not talking knee-high here, or that Linda, 42, usually mows the grass every two weeks, cut no ice with her city council landlords. Mow or go was the message. Tough on crime; tough on the causes of slightly long grass.

This is zero tolerance. Crack down on the little things and the big things won’t happen is the theory. And that’s why I don’t have any sympathy for Rachel McKenzie, 54, an archbishop’s secretary from London, who may end up with a criminal record after being caught under-paying her bus fare by 20 pence.

McKenzie wilfully boarded the Number 12 from East Dulwich to Southwark and swiped her pre-paid Oyster card over a reader next to the driver, not noticing that the machine had beeped to indicate that she had insufficient money on the card to pay the 90 pence fare. Sorry, love, but ignorance is no defence.

When an inspector checked her card and found it wanting, McKenzie offered to pay the difference in cash, but her offer was declined. A summons was duly issued and this dangerous criminal will now appear before Sutton magistrates on May 22.

Her legal adviser describes the case as “a scandalous abuse of the court system”. McKenzie herself says: “It reminds me of the days when people used to get transported to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread.”

Count your blessings, woman. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And this utter disregard for the law of the land rumbles on. Take 82-year-old Parkinson’s disease sufferer Jean Raine from Kendal, Cumbria. When she felt unwell during a shopping trip, she dozed off in her car which was legally parked in a disabled space.

Fortunately for the safety of us all, a sharp-eyed traffic warden noticed that her disabled parking badge was upside down and duly issued a £35 penalty charge notice, taking care not to wake the sleeping felon as he slapped it on the windscreen.

Was she grateful for this considerate attitude? Was she heck. “I cannot understand why the parking attendant didn’t wake me up,” she moaned. “He must have been on tiptoes – so quiet that he didn’t disturb me.”

Yes - softly, softly, catchee monkey.

Sadly, this crime wave continues, with what the Daily Telegraph calls “the respectable headmaster of a successful primary school” being caught fishing with an out-of-date licence. Sixty-year-old Bob Yeomans, from Walsall, now faces being banned from teaching after his conviction showed up on a government check designed to identify child abusers.

Mr Yeomans may have 38 impeccable years on his record as a teacher, but that cut no ice when he was caught fishing on the River Dove in Derbyshire after forgetting to renew his licence. A water bailiff duly nabbed him, he was prosecuted under the Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975 and fined £50 with £70 costs by magistrates.

Mr Yeomans then returned to his 355-pupil school, rated “good with some outstanding features” by Ofsted, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. A year later his chair of governors was notified that there was a problem with a Criminal Records Bureau check on staff and phoned Mr Yeomans to tell him.

“I said ‘Is it a member of staff’ and he said ‘No, it’s you’. He had to visit me and decide if I was fit to work with children.”

He is now waiting on a decision on his future, but has so far been allowed to keep his job.

Now this may seem like a petty intrusion on a capable man’s career, but ask yourself this: do we really want our young people to be casting off their hoodies and guns and to instead spend their spare time tickling trout without a licence? I think not. A crime is a crime. There are thousands of possible mugging victims out there but not very many brown trout. It’s a case of supply and demand.

And after all that, I really can’t be arsed bringing you the story about the man who hung a Jolly Roger flag outside his house to mark his daughter’s pirate-themed birthday party. I think you can guess what happened next.

OF COURSE, many of the above crimes against society could – and should - have been eradicated if the nation’s network of CCTV cameras actually worked. After all, we have an incredible 4.3 million of them – astonishingly a quarter of all the CCTV cameras in the world. No, really. That should, in theory, mean that Big Brother Britain is the safest country on earth. Sadly street robbery and violent crime (as well as illegal fishing, bus fare evasion, upside down parking and illicit grass growing) are at their highest levels ever.

The problem is that these much-vaunted cameras are crap. They might have cost billions of pounds, but the cops can’t be bothered reviewing them because it’s too much like hard work and even the Home Office admits that four out of every five images requested by the police are completely useless when it comes to identifying suspects. So we’re the most watched society in the world and it’s all a waste of time. Brilliant.

The real problem is that this false reliance on cameras – on our motorways as well as on our high streets – has allowed the police to abrogate responsibility for patrolling our neighbourhoods. And that means that old ladies are falling asleep in parked cars willy nilly and nobody is doing anything about it. It’s an absolute disgrace.

Welcome to the Banana Republic

2008-05-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

I HAVEN’T got anything against Paratrooper Stu Pearson’s right leg. The problem is, neither has he.

Sergeant Pearson, 31, had his left leg blown off by a landmine in Afghanistan 18 months ago. He’s now got a highly technical, hydraulics-aided prosthetic limb, although he still needs to use a wheelchair when the appendage becomes too painful.

But it seems that this leap forward has caused the Department of Work and Pensions to declare the Queen’s Gallantry Medal holder as “fully fit”. He therefore loses his £325 a month Disability Living Allowance but, more irritatingly for Stu, he also loses his blue disabled parking badge.

As he says: “I can’t get my leg out of the car without opening the door as wide as possible so have to park in disabled bays. They give blue badges to people just because they’re fat these days, but a guy gets his leg blown off for his country and doesn’t qualify.”

You can understand his anger. While Stu is struggling in from the far reaches of car parks at Tesco or Lidl, those lying benefits scroungers with a magical Tin Leg of Money dangling redundantly from their arms will be rolling into the prime places, smug smiles of feigned injury firmly in place. You can see them every day. They don’t even know how to walk with a crutch, never mind put any weight on it.

When I come across one now I honestly feel like kicking their magical Tin Leg of Money away while shouting: “It’s a miracle! This fat, anorak-wearing fraud can now walk!”

Of course, doing so would see me arrested, charged and probably imprisoned, where I’d have a rent-free room with a television, as many Class A drugs as I could manage to take and, if you believe the tabloids, a constant supply of hot and cold running prostitutes. The notion appeals all the more.

IF YOU want further evidence of the warped values of our sick society, you need look no further than the case of the two elderly sisters from Wiltshire who have had their fight to earn the same inheritance tax rights as gay couples thrown out by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Joyce and Sybil Burton (89 and 82) have lived together in the same home since birth. They have paid their taxes, cared for ageing parents until death without any help from the state, had brothers who fought in the Second World War and a sister who was a nurse throughout the Blitz.

Yet because of our shabby inheritance tax legislation, when one of the sisters dies, the other will have to sell the £875,000 house and move out to pay the £50,000 tax bill. Does that really seem fair to you? Who in their right mind could possibly think that this was a reasonable demand by a reasonable government?

As the sisters say: “If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world. But we are sisters, and it seems we have no rights at all.”

Perhaps the nation’s usually verbose feminist movement might want to take up the case of these horribly victimised old ladies? Because what’s going to happen to one of them is a hundred times worse than being shouted at in the street because you’ve got a moustache.

I ALWAYS laugh when I hear that Britain has dispatched electoral observers to some dim and distant shore to keep an eye on the voting habits of a bunch of former colonials. And that’s because our own electoral process is now as open to fraud as the worst kind of banana republic.

Oh, how we titter as the Americans end up electing the gibbering George Bush because of hanging chads in Florida. Oh, how we tut as Robert Mugabe makes a mockery of Zimbabwean democracy. Well before we laugh too much, we could do well with having a hard look at our own practices in places like Bolton and Burnley.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust is hugely critical of NuLabour’s introduction of postal voting on demand - i.e. that you don’t have to give any reason why you can’t turn up in person and vote in the normal way. This is because the system makes it possible for one person to control the ballot papers of every person in a multi-person dwelling. And let’s not beat about the bush here; we’re talking about houses containing large numbers of relatively recent immigrants who have brought with them a culture where women and junior members of the family do what they’re told by the household senior.

The Rowntree report is explicit: “Greater use of postal voting has made UK elections far more vulnerable to fraud.” Examples abound from the last General Election of the ballot papers of entire streets being collected up and handed over to one person, who then presumably voted the way he’d been persuaded or even bribed.

And it could have been even worse than that. So desperate are NuLabour to hold onto power (and we must assume that they think they are the party that stands to benefit from such practices) that they even thought about introducing voting by text message – a recipe for widespread fraud if ever I’ve seen one.

So please, spare me patronising smiles when some ex-colonial civil servant sets off with his pith helmet and malaria pills to cast an eye over the electoral process in Bongo-Bongo land. He’d do far more good if we sent him to Bradford.

YOU KNOW, I can’t help but feel that this bloke in Austria is getting a rough deal. Let’s face it, which one of us has never locked a young girl in the cellar for a few months?

Let him who is without sin …

It's April Fool's Day again

2008-04-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

DO YOU ever get the feeling that you’ve woken up in a parallel universe where it’s April Fool’s Day every day? It certainly seemed like that on Wednesday, St George’s Day, when I opened my super soaraway Sun to read that those irritating Europeans had snuck up on us overnight and unilaterally split the country into three Euro territories.

Actually, ‘unilaterally’ isn’t quite fair, because Wee Gordy Broon has long since sold our sovereignty down the river and we’re inexorably now part of a federal European super state. Why do you think he wouldn’t let us vote on it?

Still, it’s a bit of a shock to wake up in Huddersfield and find out that you’ve been forcibly twinned with Helsinki. (“Herring for breakfast again, Father?”) But that’s what’s happened, however extraordinary it may seem.

The entire eastern side of Britain has been annexed to parts of the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden in an arbitrary grouping called the North Sea Region. Similarly, a chunk of southern England has been linked to northern France and Belgium (the TransManche Region) while the west of Britain, from the tip of Scotland down to Land’s End, has been lumped in with Ireland and coastal areas of France, Spain and Portugal to form the Atlantic Region. It’s all quite barking.

The “stated strategic objectives” of this underhand integration are to “support the emergence of a common space of citizenship, a sense of belonging to a cross border area with a unique identity”. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t share a “common space of citizenship” with a fisherman in a Portugese village. I don’t even share a “common space of citizenship” with a Glaswegian Mars Bar-fryer, a Welsh benefits fiddler or a tarmac-laying tinker, and I have no wish to, thank you very much.

Of course, there’s a hefty element of bribery at work here. Each region has millions of Euros to spend on indoctrination, and grants will be available to organisations willing to stage a pro-EU publicity campaign and promise to fly the EU flag for at least a week.

Didn’t they used to call people who sold out their country for 30 pieces of silver “Quislings”?

WE THEN adjourned to Holyhead magistrates’ court where, presented before district judge Andrew Shaw, was a man who posed as Darth Vader to attack a Star Wars fan who had founded his own Jedi church. No, really.

Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27, from Holyhead, admitted assaulting Barney Jones and cousin Michael with a metal crutch. They suffered minor injuries. Hughes, who was drunk and dressed in a black bin bag, shouted “Darth Vader!”, jumped over a wall and attacked the cousins, who were filming themselves playing with light sabres in the garden, with a metal crutch. (I wondered how long it would be before the Magical Tin Leg of Money made an appearance in this story.)

Mr Hughes apparently has a chronic alcohol problem and had drunk the best part of a 10-litre box of wine. Further to that, the court was told, he could not remember the incident and only realised what had happened when he read about it in local newspapers. The judge warned Hughes that jail remained a possibility before adjourning for reports until 13 May.

So it’s alright to bandy light sabres about in public and to worship craven idols, but not alright for a man who’s had a swig of pop or two to remonstrate with the non-believers? The mind boggles.

WEDNESDAY didn’t get any better, with another daft story dropping out of the internet ether claiming that a toy manufacturer in the Ukraine has announced that it is to sell dolls of the former German dictator Adolf Hitler. The 16in figurine - complete with moveable arms to reproduce Hitler’s infamous salute - will first go on sale in the capital Kiev.

So again, we check the calendar, convinced that this is another hoax, only for a seemingly-convincing video report to turn up on the BBC website by mid-afternoon. So it must be true, surely?

It seems lucky owners will be able to choose to dress their mini-Fuhrer from a selection of outfits including ‘early days Adolf’ (brown shirts and jodhpurs) and ‘wartime Adolf’ (a grey double-breasted tunic, black trousers and simple Iron Cross medal).

The doll will also come with accessories like a miniature Blondi, Hitler's faithful Alsatian, whose loyalty was repaid with a cyanide capsule in the Berlin bunker.

The appearance of a plastic Adolph in the playroom raises some interesting issues. Barbie should be OK, being the sort of Aryan superdoll of which he approved, but those mixed race Bratz will be heading to the dungeons of the toy fort before you can say ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Fireman Sam will come in handy in case of another pesky blaze at the Reichstag and it will be interesting to see which side the Airfix air force comes down on. Anyhow, don’t be surprised if the Dolls’ Dictator annexes Legoland and then invades Balamory.

AND THE madness continues. Which is the next story of the day that’s too stupid to be true? The priest who floated off into the skies over Brazil attached to a thousand helium balloons? The trainers that can grow a full size at the turn of a button? The Bruce Oldfield designer uniforms for McDonald’s staff? Or the drought in Turkey that is causing a nationwide shortage of that tea break essential, the fig roll?

I just head back to bed, hoping that Thursday will be a better – and more sensible - day.

The magical Tin Leg of Money

2008-04-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

A FEW weeks ago I wrote about the plethora of so-called authorities now allowed to legally spy on us – all in the name of national security - by intercepting our post, reading our emails and tapping our phones.

While accepting that the security services and the cops should have such powers, as long as they were underwritten by a judge, I complained that it was dangerous in the extreme to give the jobsworths at our local councils spying rights on the basis that once they had them they were sure to abuse them.

Soon after publication I had two angry messages from local government bods. How dare I brand them Little Hitlers (although I had done no such thing) and that I ought to know that they could conceive of no situation that might cause them to invoke such Draconian measures.

Yeah, right.

Fast forward a month or so and the story breaks that a couple from Poole in Dorset had been under surveillance by their local council for two weeks for threatening national security by allegedly sneaking their three-year-old daughter into a local primary school when they didn’t live in the correct catchment area. (If only Osama had thought of that one, eh? Packing our schools with children from too many streets away? That would teach the infidel running dogs a lesson or two.)

When I say under surveillance, I mean the full James Bond monty: followed on school runs, tracked throughout the day by council officials, and watched at night to see where the family slept (they owned two homes, one of which was in the right catchment area).

It further transpires that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has also been used by local councils to spy on dog-owners suspected of not cleaning up after their pets and to place surveillance cameras in old baked bean tins in lay-bys to catch fly-tippers.

Now both of the above are clearly anti-social acts (although I reserve judgement on that terribly middle class ‘crime’ of school-blagging’), but do they really deserve to have powers intended to fight terrorism used against them? Why can’t our councils deploy one of their bin police or traffic wardens or one-legged, black, bicycling lesbian outreach workers to stand by the side of popular footpaths and shout: “Oi! Pick that up, mate!”

Isn’t that more cost effective than having two nerds from the planning department going out at night with infra-red goggles, those shoes with a compass in the heel and a cyanide capsule just to photograph Mrs Goggins from Number 32 letting her toy poodle Tony do a whoopsie on the footpath?

I HAVE noticed a new badge of honour on the scrote estates – the single, aluminium NHS crutch. You can see them in Lidl or stood smoking outside flat-roofed pubs; seemingly healthy members of the underclass with a crutch dangling ineffectually from one arm, supporting nothing more than a benefits claim.

And watch the papers for more evidence. Most of the stories about charity fraudsters, eBay conmen or thieving junior accountants feature a picture of the alleged miscreant, crutch wobbling harmlessly in the breeze. Only this week a “sicko from Scarborough” who conned Tom Cruise and John Travolta by posing as the grieving dad of dead actor Heath Ledger (yes, I know, weirder sentences you will never read) appeared outside the Crown Court, crutched-up and seemingly only a gasper away from an oxygen mask.

(This chap is a bit of a belter if we’re honest. He’s got 40 previous convictions for dishonesty and has a tattoo claiming that his mum died in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Unfortunately – or even happily, I think - she was alive and well and living in Doncaster on 9/11.)

The Daily Mail this week attempted to draw the family tree of Shannon Matthews’ dysfunctional family. It was Mission Impossible from the start; the chart, littered with multiple children by multiple fathers, ended up resembling the formula for DNA. Still, they helpfully highlighted those family members in jail or on bail for perverting the course of justice, benefits fraud or, in one case, serving life for murder. I can’t help but think that it might have been a greater public service if they’d flagged up the clan members who dangle the magical Tin Leg Of Money while queuing up to buy their scratchcards.

MUCH HAS been made of the impact of economic immigrants from eastern Europe on modern life. The lentil-eating Lefties claim that they make us all richer; the hard-pressed public services in places like Norfolk complain that their children are swamping schools to the point that it’s no longer necessary to employ covert surveillance of middle class parents because they’ve all moved away anyway. (Let’s face it; who wants little Hermione to come home speaking fluent Albanian?)

My own experience of the new migrants is overwhelmingly positive, to an embarrassing point. The Polish waitresses in my favourite gastropub are charm personified – a million miles from the surly, resentful, slack-jawed English dole scum who occasionally turn up for work. The organic farm shop where I buy my carrots, artfully smeared with mud, is manned by Lithuanian crop-pickers.

But the most impressive bunch of grafters are the Romanian gypsies who run the car-wash operation at my local Tesco. I often struggle to get my car back from them, such is the care they lavish upon it, and all for a tenner. And you know what? Not a single one of them has a magical Tin Leg of Money dangling from their arms.

Yoghurt Knitters 1, Chinese Thugs 0

2008-04-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

AFTER THE humiliation that was the much-vaunted opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, it took the debacle of the Olympic Torch procession to restore a bit of national pride. And didn’t we do it well?

As the blue-tracksuited Chinese thugs, who were according to the newspapers highly-trained killers from crack military special forces units, struggled to cope with a man with a fire extinguisher and a few barmy yoghurt-knitters, it did your heart proud to watch democracy in action.

Have some of this, Denise van Outen! Stitch that, former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq! It was fantastic; an utter farce from start to finish.

Of course, you might ask why the Beijing Olympic Games Sacred Flame Protection Force, as they are apparently known, were allowed to jog through the streets of Britain in the first place, manhandling Lord Coe and roughing up assorted Z-list celebrities as they went. After all, didn’t we have enough of our own paid heavies to cope with the demonstrators? I’m thinking of the cycle helmet-clad coppers in high-visibility jackets and the outer layer of riot police. Wasn’t that enough to guarantee safe passage?

I know that if I was a pro-Tibet protestor (and, truth be told, I’m rapidly heading that way) the sight of China’s finest coming the big man on the streets of the capital wouldn’t have put me off; rather, it would have inspired me to have a pop at them. Me and that Max Mosley.

Meanwhile our brave Prime Minister, Wee Gordie Broon, managed to “welcome” the Olympic Torch to Downing Street without actually touching it, so continuing his craven habit of distancing himself from anything that might look remotely negative including, it must be said, most of his own government’s policies. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

I’M PUZZLED about all this fuss surrounding property prices. According to the hysterical London media, we’re suffering from a massive financial crisis because house prices have dropped 10 per cent in the last three months. Well so what?

I sit here in Beelzebub Mansions, my country pile apparently worth £10,000 less than it was worth last week, and how have I been affected? Well, not at all, really. My mortgage payments, vast though they are, haven’t increased. There are no bailiffs banging on the door and, as yet, I can still afford to feed the family by shopping at Waitrose, rather than Lidl. So what’s all the fuss about?

The only people who might be affected are those whose fixed-term mortgages are coming to an end (and are you really going to tell me that they didn’t expect the rate to increase when they renewed?) and those people who are trying to move house. And even then, we must presume that the house they are looking to buy will have decreased in value by a similar amount to the house they are trying to sell.

It’s all a lot of fuss about nothing. The only thing any householder has to worry about is if Max Mosley moves in next door and there’s insufficient sound-proofing. As for the rest, it’s just London-based journalists sweating that the sale of their two-up, two-down terrace in Notting Hill won’t fund their exodus to a country pile where they can wear green wellies and moan about smelly cows.

SPEAKING OF which, expect some serious media condemnation of the Dewsbury Moor estate, where Shannon Matthews lived with her “extended family” until her alleged kidnap.

When this story broke there was much soul-searching about the way the Matthews and their ilk were portrayed by the press, particularly in comparison to those nice, middle-class McCanns. The red-top tabloids held their noses; the posh papers condemned the hypocrisy.

But now, with Karen Matthews charged with perverting the course of justice in connection with her daughter’s disappearance, all bets are off. The Sun, the paper you lot buy in greater numbers than any other than this one, were first out of the blocks comparing the estate to Beirut and whining about grown women making their way to the shops, in the rain, at midday, while still wearing pyjamas and slippers. (To be fair, they used to do that in the street where I grew up, on their way to buy a pint of ‘loose sherry’ from the off licence.)

Bailiffs abound, we are told, and residents happily show off their electronic tags as some sort of fashion item. The easy comparison is made with the fictional Chatsworth Estate, home of the TV series Shameless. Unfortunately that doesn’t quite stand up. Consider this: Karen Matthews has seven children by five different fathers. Two of those children she calls ‘The Twins’, not because they are twins, but because they have the same father. That’s close enough.

Now there’s not a TV scriptwriter on earth who could have come up with a line like that. Not even if they moved Max Mosley in next door.

NOW I know that they’re trying to show willing, but some of the madcap schemes that the Powers That Be come up with only go to show how far removed from reality they really are.

The latest embarrassment is the abandonment of the plan to make all paedophiles register their email addresses so that social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook could ban them from pretending to be attractive teenage boys when in fact they were 50-year-old lorry drivers from Tamworth.

One small point: it takes approximately five seconds to set up a new email address, something that clearly didn’t occur to the great brains who run this country. If the cat wasn’t laughing before, it is now.

Come back when your ovaries have dried up

2008-04-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

ACCORDING TO the front page of a so-called newspaper this week, a lady newsreader called Natasha Kerplunsky is three months pregnant. I bet her bosses are really pleased, seeing as she’s just five weeks into a million-pound contract and is now looking forward to a year off.

That cuddly old teddy bear Sir Alan Sugar got some serious flak a few weeks back for criticising the daft laws that stop employers asking prospective employees whether or not they intend to get pregnant. The fact that his new TV series was looming on the horizon must be acknowledged, but he was right.

Let’s be honest. If you are a small businessman employing three or four people, you’d have to be barking mad to take on a woman of child-bearing age. There you are, trying to be all progressive and modern, when suddenly the key sales manager you employed just three weeks earlier announces that she’s up the duff and will shortly be departing for a year on the couch scoffing Jaffa Cakes and watching Jeremy Kyle, and all at your expense.

Worse still, she knew she was pregnant when she took the job. So where’s the fairness in that? It’s only one step away from blatant fraud. I can’t believe that we’re prepared to put up with this nonsense.

No doubt the hairy-armpit brigade will already be composing their letters of complaint, but let’s turn it around. What if I, as a man, applied for and accepted a job and then announced a couple of months later that I had a bad back and would shortly be clearing off on the sick for a year or so? Yes, of course I knew I had the bad back when I came for an interview, but you weren’t allowed to ask me about it. So if you don’t mind, you can pay me for most of that time off as well. It’s madness.

The stupid thing is that legislation designed to promote the equality of women is now actively working against them. I was at a lodge meeting last week and conducted a quick survey amongst my fellow used car-dealers and near-bankrupt estate agents. Not a single one of them will now contemplate taking on a woman of child-bearing age. They’d rather employ a passing Pole or an itinerant Uzbekistani. Male, of course.

AND HERE we go again. New sex discrimination laws mean that landlords who allow drinkers to crack ‘sexist’ jokes or indulge in ‘racy’ banter can now be taken to a tribunal and sued for hundreds of thousands of pounds by their barmaids.

(I’m not sure what ‘sexist’ and ‘racy’ means in this context, but I’m sure there are legions of government-funded lawyers just gagging to argue the toss.)

And restaurant managers or hoteliers also risk action if staff object to backchat from customers asking for a date.

The frightening thing is that the burden of proof will be on the employer, not the employee. So the minimum-wage teenage scrote that you take on to shift alcopops to her fellow 17-year-olds can whisk you off to court claiming that a passing Darren looked at her breasts and said “You don’t get many of them to the pound” and you’ll have to prove that he didn’t. So where’s the justice in that?

It’s a bigger scam than getting pregnant.

RARELY DOES a day pass without some new health care surfacing in the national press – usually in the pages of the Daily Mail. And that so-called advice is so contradictory that it’s often difficult to make sense of it.

First of all you’re warned that even a sip of alcohol will result in your liver dissolving in a pit of acid; three days later you’re told that the occasional glass of red wine is actually good for your health. Similarly meat. Now we all know that a vegetarian diet is a recipe for disaster: constant sniffles, chronic wind and some dodgy bowel movements. And last week that prejudice was confirmed by research that suggested that a certain element of red meat in your diet was good for you.

Then what’s this? “Eating a single sausage can kill” bleat the headlines. Well, yes ... if you’ve bought it from a burger van outside Villa Park, maybe. (I only mention Villa Park because it was there that I bought a beefburger at the height of the BSE crisis from a van displaying the notice: “Guaranteed - our burgers contain 100 per cent no beef.”)

So there I sit in front of a plate of bacon, sausage, fried egg, fried bread, baked beans, mushrooms and tomatoes. I now know that just one mouthful might kill me stone dead. Do I care? Bring on the hash browns, the black pudding, the kedgeree. We’re all going to die anyway. We may as well go with tomato sauce dribbling down our chins.

BUT THEN, maybe not. The latest loony government initiative suggests that we should all have our own personal health care budgets, to be spent as we want. So if you’ve got a nasty case of piles, you can take yourself off to the nation’s best pile care clinic, which I suspect is somewhere in Wales. If you’re suffering from chronic wind, then the Geoffrey Boycott Clinic in Barnsley will be the place to go.

It all sounds very sensible, doesn’t it? But wait … what happens when you’ve spent your budget? That nasty bout of terminal cancer turned out to be not so serious after all, and the prospects of recovery are good, but you’ve spent all your health care cash - there’s no money left in the kitty for further treatment.

That’s it then mate. You’ve cashed in your chips. Kindly go way and die quietly in the corner.

Power to the pupils

2008-03-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

ACCORDING TO a survey carried out on behalf of the Mental Health Foundation, one in three of us have a close friend or family member who struggles to control their anger. Well I don’t know anyone like that, so I suspect that the chap they’re talking about could well be me.

And is it any surprise when so much of modern society seems designed to enrage even the mildest-mannered, middle class, middle-aged white bloke?

Only last night I found myself ranting and raving at the telly, like Heather Mills McCartney on the blob, when a throwback to the 1970s turned up in a news report from the National Union of Teachers’ annual conference. Paul McGarr is his name and he’s a teacher from east London.

Mr McGarr’s beef wasn’t pay and conditions, the state of our school buildings or his profession’s appalling dereliction of the simple duty of teaching children to read and write. No, what was getting up his nose was the fact that the Army distributed publicity material in schools. Shock horror.

Where do we begin with this? It seems to me to be eminently reasonable that the Army might seek to recruit school-leavers from the poorer areas of the country, not because these ill-educated youths are mere cannon fodder, but because six years in uniform will give them the basic life skills, self-discipline and sense of purpose that six years of state education has miserably failed to do. If you doubt me, ask one of them.

But this doesn’t seem apparent to Mr McGarr, who stamped his little feet at the podium and demanded what he called “realistic” publicity: “We would have material from the MoD saying ‘Join the Army and we will send you to carry out the imperialist occupation of other people's countries’

“Join the Army and we will send you to bomb, shoot and possibly torture fellow human beings in other countries.

“Join the Army and be sent, probably poorly equipped, into situations where people try and shoot you and kill you because you are occupying their countries.

“Join the Army and if you survive and come home, possibly injured and mentally damaged by the experience, you and your family will be shabbily treated.”

What a rotter. Now I’m sorry, but I thought we had the right to expect our children to receive a reasonable and well-balanced education – to be able to consider both sides of an argument and come to their own, reasoned conclusion.

With teachers like this, I worry that they’re being force fed a diet of left-wing propaganda, the likes of which I haven’t heard since the 70s. It’s an absolute disgrace. If those were right wing opinions that Mr McGarr was spouting, he’d be out of a job by the mid-morning break.

I don’t know what the schools in east London are like, but I suspect that they’re not very good. It’s a shame that Mr McGarr can’t channel his energies into raising the bar a bit, instead of outing himself as a political dinosaur who undermines his own profession at the same time as disrespecting the 6,000-plus men and women of the armed forces who are on active duty at the moment.

SO ALL this probably explains why I had an overwhelming urge to cosh the woman in front of me at the supermarket till because she seemed surprised that the cashier should ask her to pay for her shopping after she’d packed it away.

She stood there, apparently baffled, while her children, little Tia Maria and her sister Jay Cloth, gambolled around the aisles stealing sweets from the display. Then she slowly searched through her bag for her purse, then fumbled out a card, and then promptly forgot her PIN number (yes, I know that’s an oxymoron, the ‘N’ already standing for ‘number’. So do you want to make something of it?)

AND THEN there was the annual trek to IKEA the other week. Driving into the car park an hour after opening time, the joint already resembled a Bruegel painting. It was pouring with rain and a woman was screaming at her husband to hurry up and get the Billy bookcase into the car because the cardboard box was dissolving.

In the next parking bay, a young couple were trying to force a king-size mattress into a white Fiat Uno (one owner, Royal connections, scrape of black paint down one side). It was hopeless, the mattress occupying more spatial volume than the car.

At least, I thought, as I entered the one-way tunnel of hate, there’ll be cheap hotdogs or meatballs at the end of it. But even those never quite live up to expectations. Yes, IKEA might do the cheapest breakfasts in the world, but are you sure that is really bacon? And those meatballs – you order 25 with extra jam, chips and gravy and dig in only to find that you’re done after the first five. And why are you eating jam with meatballs in the first place? It’s just wrong.

After that, there’s little to compensate for the two-hour March of Hell. If you’re really lucky you might find a couple of gays having a row in the fabrics department, or a childless 50-year-old woman having a snivel in the kids’ department, but that’s it as far as entertainment is concerned.

It's no wonder professional miserablist Ingmar Bergman was Swedish. And that the founder of IKEA was an alcoholic.

And so we say goodbye to a TV icon ...

2008-03-21T09:54:00.000-07:00

IT’S BBC Radio Five Live at 3.22pm on Monday afternoon and it’s traffic news time.

The A40 near Oxford, a major trunk road, is closed because of an accident. So is the A13 east of London, the vital Thames Gateway route. And here comes the A17 in Lincolnshire, another major road closed. And then there’s the A50, a dual carriageway taking traffic cross-country from Stoke-on-Trent to the M1, also shut because of an accident.

What is going on? That’s four major trunk roads all closed at the same time on the same day because of so-called ‘accidents’. It’s beyond belief, beyond coincidence.

The answer is that none of those roads actually needed to be closed. The subsequently crippled transport network, that led to millions of lost hours worth millions of pounds as frustrated motorists sat in traffic jams didn’t have to happen at all. Blame it all on a combination of power-mad police chiefs and licensed jobsworths in the form of the Highways Agency.

It was a few years ago that the cops suddenly decided that every RTA, or road traffic accident, that might possibly eventually result in a death should be treated as a murder scene. Thus we have armies of boiler-suited policemen crawling along the carriageway looking for clues while a 20-mile tailback sits fuming behind them. And it gets worse.

Once the high visibility-jacketed muppets of the Highways Agency were recruited to take over many of the responsibilities of the low-visibility motorway police, the situation deteriorated into something resembling farce. Now, every time you set off on an important journey – perhaps to win a new order for your firm or negotiate a job-creating contract – the chances of you actually arriving at your destination within eight hours of the due time depend upon a sad group of men who live with their mothers, carry emergency Yorkies in their jacket pockets and who can recite clause number 72b (section C) of the 1995 Road Traffic Act verbatim.

You see, once you give this collection of social inadequates (and who else would want to be a pretend policeman?) the power to close major trunk roads and motorways, usually on the spurious grounds of health and safety, what are they going to do? Use it, of course. Otherwise there’d be no point to their pathetic existence.

Thus we have a slightly damaged Robin Reliant on the A66 near Scotch Corner resulting in the paralysis of north-east England. A milk tanker dribbling diesel outside Tamworth means that no-one can travel from the Midlands to the north. A caravan with a blow-out near Taunton means that families spend their Easter break on the M5, rather than at Centre Parcs. It is desperately unfair and it cannot be allowed to continue.

Instead of coning off vast tracts of our motorway network, those nerds in the black and yellow four-wheel-drive cars (and why fancy four-wheel-drive cars?) should instead be quipped with bulldozers. An accident happens, no-one dies, let’s get the road clear as soon as possible. Shift the debris quickly and brutally. It’s all going to be written off by the insurance company anyway, so why worry about any collateral damage?

The most important thing the jobsworths can do is get the traffic moving again as quickly as possible – not pratting about with their book of Health and Safety regulations in one hand and their spare Yorkie bar in the other.

ONE OF our greatest film and television personalities died this week. Not Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient; not Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey; not Carol Barnes, fetching blonde newscaster. No, the real loss to our cultural lives this week was the death of John Hewer, aged 86.

John Hewer played the jovial, white-bearded Captain Birds Eye for more than 30 years until his brutal axing in 1998. As sales then dried up, and a vast cod mountain built up in a field on the outskirts of Grimsby, panicking executives swiftly brought the character back, but with another actor impersonating the original.

To demonstrate this showbiz giant’s influence, in 1993 Captain Birds Eye was voted as the most recognised sea captain in the world after Captain Cook. That might also say something about the quality of our education, but fish is regarded as ‘brain food’ so we’re not beyond help.

Incidentally, discussing the delights of a fish finger sandwich on buttered sliced white bread with a colleague this week, I was horrified to discover that he favoured mayonnaise as the essential condiment, rather than the mandatory tomato sauce. There really should be some kind of State register for weirdos like that. If not, you could mistakenly end up letting one of these perverts babysit your kids.

HE’S SURVIVED being hunted with dogs for decades, having a plethora of strange men shove their hands up his bottom, and seen off nouveau rivals in every shape from rats to Teletubbies. But now Basil Brush has met his match, scuppered by the Thought Police.

An episode of The Basil Brush Show is being investigated after police received a complaint of racism. A member of the public (yeah, right – step forward a frontline soldier in job-preserving, publicly-funded Turkey Army) reported a scene which showed a Gypsy woman trying to sell Basil Brush heather and pegs.

(That capital letter is important, because if we don’t use it some woman starts emailing me and accusing me of Holocaust denial).

Northamptonshire Police – and I’m honestly not making this up – say: “The complaint was logged as an incident of a racist nature and our Hate Crimes Unit is investigating.” So that’s children’s TV puppet Basil Brush, being investigated by the Hate Crimes Unit. It really is enough to make a cat laugh.

Meanwhile Bridie Jones, of the England Romany, Gypsy and Irish Traveller Network, bleats: “People are not allowed to joke about blacks or Asians any more because they would be taken to court, but when it comes to Gypsies or the Irish travelling community they mock us - and to them it’s not racist.

“We are the last group of people in this country who you can openly mock and make racist jokes about - who else is there?”

Sorry, love, but it seems to me that the hard-working, tax-paying, English middle classes are the butt of most jokes around here. Even when it isn’t remotely funny.

Why wasn't Scarlett doing her GCSEs?

2008-03-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

FIRST WE had the McCanns and missing Maddy: nice, middle class professionals, a massive media campaign, and God knows how many millions flowing into the appeal fund.

Next up was little Shannon and her dysfunctional Dewsbury council estate family: a mother with seven children by five different fathers, a current partner who looks a bit scruffy and simple, and the kind of daily routine that didn’t ring alarm bells until the nine-year-old was four hours late home from school.

Now we have the appalling tragedy of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old raped and murdered in the so-called holiday paradise of Goa after being abandoned after an argument by her soap-dodging, pikey mother who left her in the care of a boyfriend 10 years older than her. Scarlett subsequently died horribly after staggering out of a bar and onto the beach at 4am, drugged up on LSD, ecstasy and cocaine.

Now in some areas of the media, Scarlett’s mother, Fiona MacKeown, has been made out to be something of a heroine for forcing a corrupt local police force to accept that her daughter had been murdered after they at first tried to sweep the incident under the carpet. Well not in this manor, squire.

Bleating to the liberal TV channels, whose judgement has been distorted by years of Leftie management, Mrs MacKeown gets away with claiming that “if police had taken more interest in previous suspicious deaths then Scarlett might not be dead now.”

Well forgive me, love, but if you hadn’t decided to cart your eight (repeat, eight) children off to India for a six-month holiday, and then left one of them to fend for herself while you cleared off with your partner and the other kids (exact number of fathers unknown, but at least four), then there’s an even better chance that Scarlett might not be dead now.

Frankly, the mind boggles. This woman lives on benefits on a caravan site in Devon. Her feral children, aged from five to 19, are the victims of a laid-back hippy upbringing that puts the whims of a self-indulgent adult before the needs of her own children.

And what are they doing in India in the first place? Are the social now handing out long-haul plane tickets along with the dole? Why aren’t the children at school? Why isn’t poor Scarlett sitting her GCSEs, instead of rotting in a mortuary on the other side of the world?

We are quick to moan when social services interfere in what we see as normal family lives; that shouldn’t stop us asking what they, and the education authorities, knew of the MacKeown clan and what they did – or didn’t – to stop a selfish mother driving a caravan through the rules and regulations.

I tell you what – it makes popping out for a plate of tapas and the odd crate of wine look positively normal.

WHILE WE’RE on the subject, why isn’t there a national scandal over the 3,000 (yes, 3,000) British Asian girls who have gone missing from school registers every year, believed to have been forced abroad into arranged marriages?

Local education authorities have a statutory duty to ensure that children attend school. If they don’t, the Turkey Army is supposed to spring into action and do something about it. Indeed, several white mothers of the scrote variety have been jailed for failing to make their feckless teenagers turn up for double geography on a regular basis (while axe-murderers get handed a pot of paint and pointed in the direction of an old lady’s fence).

So what of these 3,000 children? What are the authorities doing about the missing kids? Well, nothing really. And that’s because these cases are regarded as being “culturally sensitive”. I haven’t heard anything so pathetic in my whole life.

The massed ranks of Guardian-reading Lefties who infest the public sector simply can’t bring themselves to enforce the law when it comes to ethnic minorities. They’re scared of being accused of being racist; it’s just so much easier to turn a blind eye and instead persecute the helpless mother of a teenage Goth who won’t come out of his bedroom until Kurt Cobain is miraculously resurrected. So much for the concept of Britishness.

It really is shabby. And meanwhile vulnerable and frightened girls, some as young as 12 years old, are shipped out to become the sex slaves of ‘husbands’ they’ve never met. I wonder what the feminists amongst the NuLabour ranks really make of that?

ONE AFTERNOON last July I was driving home through torrential rain when I heard a reporter on local radio blithely blaming ‘global warming’ for the rising floodwater that was lapping around the top of his wellies.

I was so cross that I emailed the station when I got home and asked them what evidence they had that ‘global warming’ was to blame, rather than just a lot of rain on top of even more rain. The answer I got from an idiot producer was along the lines of “everyone knows that climate change is responsible for extremes in our weather”.

Well I’m sorry, but no they don’t. And this week the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology finally reported that the summer floods were “a freak event unrelated to global warming”. It appears that they were caused by lots of rain falling on top of even more rain. In fact, despite popular opinion amongst people who don’t drive 4x4s, our summers aren’t even getting wetter – there was more summer rain around during the 19th century than there is today.

So as I said last week, fire up the Quattro and let’s drown some more polar bears.

Better red than dead

2008-03-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

SO PRINCE Harry has been forced to come home and every carrot-topped, strawberry blond squaddie from here to Baghdad can breathe a sigh of relief.

Personally, it made me proud to see our gallant prince go off to fight the wily Pathan. Apparently Prince Michael of Kent offered to go along to play Chung to Harry’s Wolf of Kabul, but unfortunately they wouldn’t let him take his old bat.

I must say it would be nice to see a return to the days of yore when the monarch actually led our troops into battle. I can just see Her Madge, clad in Kevlar headscarf, sitting on top of a tank yelling “Chaaarge!” as Terry Taliban and his mates flee in terror across the wadis.

Meanwhile Princess Anne is clearing trenches armed only with a pearl-topped hat-pin and look, there’s Prince Philip alongside her, shouting “Let’s get the slanty-eyed buggers!” until a lackey tactfully whispers into his ear the fact that the Gurkhas are actually on our side.

Charles, meanwhile, would be talking to the poppy fields.

DID YOU see the picture of that vicious polar bear at Berlin Zoo trying to eat a small child through six inches of armoured glass? Surprisingly, that bear was not so long ago the cute little Knut, hand-reared by keepers after his mother died and the inspiration for millions of marks worth of merchandise.

Now, aged 14 months, he’s rather gone and given the game away. Remember those pictures of the allegedly drowning polar bears on rapidly diminishing ice floes? Shame, wasn’t it? Well save your pity. These ‘cute’ animals are nothing more than wild beasts that would tear your head off and spit down the hole given half a chance. Don’t waste your pity on them.

In fact, we probably ought to drown a few more, just to be on the safe side. Fire up the Quattro and let’s burn some ozone!

A WOMAN who made hoax 999 calls for 24 years has escaped yet another jail term because shock treatment to break her addiction has failed. Thelma Dennis, 50, from Mountain Ash, Cynon Valley – that’s in Wales, if you hadn’t guessed - has been prosecuted 60 times and agreed to electrode therapy which left her screaming in pain every time she dialled the third ‘9’ of 999.

(For some reason I’m laughing uncontrollably as I type this. Can you apply for a job like that? Electrocuting Welsh loonies at state expense? I’ll even do it for free.)

But a court heard that the treatment failed and Thelma cracked and rang the police claiming a bomb had been planted in her local supermarket. There’s nothing left to do with her except bang her up for life. So the judge let her go, without even a pot of black gloss and an order to paint an old lady’s gate.

Now I can see several options here if the emergency services of Mountain Ash (and I’m imagining Trumpton here) aren’t going to spend every evening racing to false alarms while innocent punters are mugged, burnet and drop dead of heart attacks in the street.

Firstly, why not just take Thelma’s phone away from her? Or even connect it up to a tape loop that just says: “Emergency services - fire, police or ambulance?”

Or how about this for a leap of imagination? Warn all the emergency operators that calls from Thelma’s number are to be simply ignored. Yes love, of course your house is on fire. I can smell the smoke. Now clear off.

It’s hardly rocket science, is it?

WHILE WE’RE on nutters, a man who planned to walk from Bristol to India without any money has quit after only getting as far as Calais.

Mark Boyle, 28, who set out four weeks ago with only T-shirts, a bandage and sandals, hoped to rely on the kindness of strangers for food and lodging.

But, because he could not speak French, people thought he was free-loading or an asylum seeker. Having seen a photograph of this feckless soap-dodger, I think their judgement generous.

Mr Boyle, a former organic food company boss, belongs to the Freeconomy movement which wants to get rid of money altogether. (Except for other people’s money, obviously.)
He now plans to walk around the coast of Britain instead, learning French as he goes, so he can try again next year. Because French is widely spoken in Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other Francophile countries he’d have to pass through en route to his destination, Gandhi’s birthplace.

SPEAKING OF which, morons in Leicester have objected to a council plan to erect a statue of Gandhi in a mainly Indian area of the city. Now they’ve set up a petition to have local football hero Gary Lineker honoured instead.

Now let’s see – sandal-wearing spiritual leader and man of peace versus jug-eared TV host and crisp salesman? Which one do you think is more worthy?

I KNOW we have to be alert in these difficult times, but a mate’s mother might be taking the War on Terror a little too far.

She phoned him last week and said: “I'm a bit worried about those Muslims next door.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I saw them going in the other day and they had a computer.”“And then what?”“Well, you never know what they'll be getting up to with it.”“Erm … what about email, shopping … the kids will probably use it for their homework …”“Ah,” she said, “but you can’t be too careful, so I’ve phoned MI5.”

Bless.