Hillary: a Texas take.......

Your article from The American Thinker was fun to read and reflects much of my thinking. Many people believe Hillary will run for President, but I do not as it would be very difficult for her to win the nomination. Nor am I sure she wants to run as she looks burnt out. The author claims she enjoys very high ratings. I don't see them. Nor do I pay much attention to ratings as they are highly subject to bias and fluctuate from day to day. My take is that Hillary is in hiding as Secretary of State. She has not captured much air time and when she does, it is often because she screwed up.

 One of the flaws of democracy is that of tyranny against minorities. We see it big time in the so called democratic states in the third world where majority tribes win elections

Doomsday, anybody?

Armageddon is upon us. Earthquakes, floods, droughts and now the hurricane of the century. Then again, we may be living in quite normal times while victimized by the media and everyone who uses it.

I do believe that before long, and according to the media, you can help us out as the US is but a step away from poverty. Perhaps as a member of the third world, we could benefit from foreign aid and possibly even migrate somewhere. I hear the UK is accepting outsiders.

  

The shelves are bare in our east coast produce stores as residents have hoarded water, food, batteries, generators and related survival kit. Wal-Mart and others are claiming record sales. Just what we need for a speedy economic recovery. I suppose that after Irene our population will have been so decimated that there will be jobs enough for everybody including illegal immigrants from Mexico and legal ones from Somalia.

Needless to say, everyone is glued to the TV or radio in anticipation of real time reports on the devastation predicted from Irene. One of our notorious talk show hosts, Sean Hannity, asked one climatologist for an assessment of how New York's skyscrapers will fare during the storm and to what extent will bricks begin to fall from them. Unbelievable! Sean appears on 'fair and balanced' Fox News for which we have Mr. Murdoch to thank.

One bright ray of hope is that O decided to terminate his much publicized holiday a day early in order to be on hand to coordinate military and civilian relief efforts. One might also suspect that he wanted to leave early in order to land Air Force 1 before the Washington airports closed.  Speaking of which, a national debate is occurring as I write over the condition of the Washington Monument. You may recall this tall white obelisk towering over the area surrounding the White House.

The recent earthquake in Virginia is said to have caused the Monument to crack in one, or a few or several places depending on which expert one listens to. We may well dedicate next year's foreign aid budget to having it repaired. If so, we might conclude that a) development in the third world will accelerate beyond measure and b) the Washington Monument as the beneficiary of so much aid will rot and decay.

The Central Texas prairie is told to expect temperatures of 108F tomorrow.

The DT today contains no news at all of any importance or relevance. It mirrors our media caution about Irene and features some no-name editorialists going on about no-brain subjects. It is now certain that the assassin of PC Yevonne Fletcher may be known. This is according to an eye witness who may have recognized a young diplomat firing a machine gun from a window in the Libyan Embassy.  Perhaps the SAS can pick him up along with the freed Pan Am bomber. It would not surprise me if both were granted visas.

If doomsday is not here, most of us are in a doomsday mood as you can well see from the tone of this. We really need something to pick us up from the economic and political doldrums in which we find ourselves.

Fast buck.....

I wrote a piece for the DT in 1989. This was election time. I was returning  officer for the Parliamentary Elections, and the DT phoned me at home early one morning and asked if I would write a piece called ‘My Election’ for the op-ed page. They wanted 1000 words and they wanted it in the next 20 minutes! They said I could dictate it to a copy-taker. So I duly obliged.

The guts of my piece concerned my small but beautifully formed friend, Arthur, who was also a Returning Officer. Arthur’s main interest in life was racing. We were both at a meeting in Mayfair but as it dragged on I noticed that he was getting very agitated. When I asked what was up, he said that he had the 3 candidates’ £500 cash deposits in his brief case and he was on to an 8 to 1 certainty in the 1 o’clock at Fakenham races.

Incredulous, I said ‘Arthur, surely to God you are not going to put £1,500 of the candidates’ money on a nag?’

At a few minutes to 1 o’clock the meeting  broke up and we dashed across the road to the ‘Horse and Groom’ pub opposite to get the result from the Irish landlord who was also a turf addict. Too late! And the bloody horse won!

The question I later posed was if Arthur had managed to lay his bet who should have collected – him or the candidates?

The candidates had not gambled, so how could they be entitled to the winnings? The money Arthur put at risk was not his, so how could he be entitled to profit?

What would Albert Haddock made of it?

Actually the real winner was me. A few days later I got a cheque from the DT for £600, the fastest buck I have ever made!

More relevant to our own times, I read in the Eye that the ‘rolling comment factory’, the DT Blogs which hosts Janet Daley, Norman Tebitt and other luminaries has introduced a ‘culling’ mechanism. The writers are judged not by the quality of their posts but by the number of hits that they get, which as we know has a very high proportion of people who are – shall we say – a little disturbed. Anyone who stays in the lowest 25% gets a warning and after another 3 months they get the boot. Hardly conducive to rational argument and much more likely to encourage sensational headlines and barmy rants. According to a DT source, Delingpole is always in top spot ‘because he really is batshit mad!’

Famine in Africa? Quelle surprise!

As I predicted a week or so ago, we are now getting the tear-jerking, withers-wringing appeal for aid to starving Somalis. There’s Angela Rippon on radio (remember her?) telling us with breathy urgency that unless we open our wallets now Amina’s starving waif will die of hunger, thirst, and general shortage of breath.

So what are the realities?

First, Somalia is not a country. It is a geographical concept. It has no government, no recognisable administration, no law and order, no public safety, nothing that comprises ‘the state’. It has been engaged in apocalyptic fighting between rival clans and between religious fanatics for almost ever. There are no goodies and baddies here; only baddies and baddies.

So who will administer the feeding programmes?

The locals? If so I would not rate highly the prospects of the food getting to the neediest.

The aid agencies? It is difficult to see how it would be wise or safe or even possible to deploy foreign aid workers in all the current circumstances, so distribution would have to be done by locals. See above.

And then Somalia is not short of money.  It has a highly profitable shipping industry in which foreign shipping companies pay huge sums of money to get their ships back. It is sitting on billions of dollars-worth of ships pending settlement with the owners. If it has to spend money on food it will have less to spend on terrorism and funding Al Qaeda.

Now I see that Wateraid has climbed on the bandwagon. Twenty-odd years ago I worked very closely with Wateraid on an EU-sponsored committee aimed at water development in poor countries. It was the charity of the water industry that makes vast profits, and the charity projects were funded entirely by the water companies. So what are they now doing by begging off the public?

Perhaps the needs of Somalis could be met by their co-religionists, as they conspicuously failed to do in the Pakistan flooding.

It would seem that there is not too much concern in neighbouring Ethiopia, where it hasn’t rained for 18 months. One million people are in need of water plus 100,000 Somali refugees.

The government is anxious to privatise the state breweries, the likely buyer being Heineken for $164 million. They use vast quantities of water and so have been given exclusive rights to the only efficient deep well in the region but the local population is rationed. The regime has also abrogated colonial-era treaties governing the water flow in the Nile and has embarked on a major programme of dam-building, not primarily for water supply but for power.

Egypt and Sudan are not best pleased.

The Thin Blue Line......

Reverting to the eternal debate on the effectiveness of policing in the UK which has reached a crescendo as a result of ‘the riots’ (and the reports that left me highly tickled that nobody except Sir Hugh Orde wants the top job at the Met but nobody wants Hugh Orde), there is a weekly TV show called ‘Police Interceptors’, the cream of the Essex Constabulary who are equipped with super-fast rally cars full of amazing electronics that can tell what you had for breakfast. Their task is to apprehend hard-case villains who also have fast motors.

So how are they doing?

Often they use several cars and a helicopter to catch criminals who have committed a string of serious offences – robbery with violence, burglary, car theft, etc. And what happens afterwards when the cases come to court? Why, community service orders, suspended 3-month prison sentences and the rest. Never any porridge.

This week they gave chase, in two cars, of a driver who was very dangerous, weaving from lane to lane on the motorway, exceeding 100 m.p.h in crowded traffic – the full monty. They eventually trapped him in the fast lane, about as dangerous as it gets. The driver was extremely violent and it took 4 cops to subdue him and handcuff him to the Armco barrier. On searching the car they found a large quantity of class A drugs. So quite a charge sheet there, you would think – dangerous driving, refusing to stop, resisting arrest, possession of illegal substances, for starters.

And what happened when they got him down the nick? Why, he got a police caution!

Other highlights included using a police helicopter at about £1000 an hour to chase a couple of youths joy-riding in a VW which they had ‘taken and driven away’, and an emergency call-out to a leaking tap in a flat (normally the role of a plumber who at least wouldn’t have smashed the door down with a police battering-ram) and to round-off an eventful night the Sergeant dropped his handcuffs down a drain.

How different in the old days. I keep a collection of press cuttings from long ago that amused me. Here is a sample.

‘Detective Sergeant Farr said ‘It is highly probable that my closed fists might have come into contact with his face’, but he denied deliberately punching Mr Rose’. 

‘PC Alcock denied using any violence. He said he could explain the fact that polish found on the zip of the accused’s trousers was identical to that on his shoe’.

‘A police officer kicked a man so hard that the sole of his boot came off, it was claimed in Leeds County Court. The man was accused of criminal damage to a police boot’.

Evenin’, all!

The good old days - an American view.......

I just read Janet Daley's column and as usual was impressed. She does, however, gold plate sentences that would be more  powerful if plainly inked. She has a point. Namely, that the recent riots were the product of a society that has lost respect for almost everything decent such as authority, law, humanity, tradition and so on. She is adamant that, as some observers are want to conclude, the riots are not the result of class war and the logical conclusion of the liberal, socialist and welfare state.

The American right jumped on this conclusion with delight as it gave them an object example, however erroneous, of what the USA will come to under the likes of Obama and his liberal henchmen. Your riots were politicized here to the propagandistic advantage of the far right and a lot of Americans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. This perspective was followed with the caution that in all probability, the USA will be the next host of proletarian riots.

The greater truth is that something is seriously wrong. The political, social and cultural anarchy precipitated by changing values during the 60's has fostered a motherless society. Your were absolutely correct in your observation that the past was a different country.

Your first trek to Africa in 1959 marked my first trek to England and the British Isles. I landed wide-eyed and alone in Southampton after a stormy crossing. Initial impressions remain strong. One was the presence of bombed-out houses and buildings. Another was an almost total lack of color. A third was the apparent poverty; by contrast with the US. I vividly recall sheep in the meadows sporting black sooty coats, tiny cars, and yet a refreshing sense of tidiness. People queued, streets walkways were free of debris, greengrocers and butchers neatly displayed their goods. It was a Sunday and as I walked aimlessly around Southampton I saw young boys, identically clad in sweaters and short pants, playing soccer on lush greens. Above all, nobody was in a hurry. Tradition appeared to dominate and dictate pace, destination and comportment. Nobody seemed to notice I was there.

Your characterization of the village bobby could have been taken from the streets of New York or Boston. Big, friendly, strict, unarmed and Irish. They knew instinctively if a neighborhood denizen had done something wrong. And often a stern glare was enough to rectify the misdemeanor. That is all gone now. Modern sentinels are rigged up with technical hardware, deadly weapons and a host of crime-fighting gadgets that are at once intriguing and frightening.

  

As for censorship, you were not alone. I guess we would have needed to visit the Continent to be free of that and all that. My parents posted a list of all the current films on a cabinet door and each was rated by what was called The Legion of Decency. I too wondered how members of this legion remained untainted by the much flaunted evils of the films they rated. In any case, we scrupulously adhered to the ratings and avoided those tainted by the devil. Words like sex were banned from TV as were images of pregnant women. Housewives were normally portrayed as extremely happy and content women who cleaned house and cooked in a blouse and skirt, tasteful jewelry and a new coif with not a hair out of place.

There was also the terror of politics in the form of our hunt for Communists in the workplace, schools and universities, homes and in the arts, including the film industry. I was too young and immature to understand the dynamics of Sen. Joe McCarthy's witch hunt, but I intuited a few things; Joe was not a good person, Communists were bad people, I pitied Individuals interrogated by Joe and his minions, and the Soviet Union was evil incarnate. Those were the days, as you so quaintly noted, before Doris Day became a virgin.

Unquestionably, you and your lot in the UK had it much worse. I think Western Europe was even better off in the decade or so after WWII. Subsequently, milk and honey flowed like never before in Western history. Those born into this lifestyle never knew anything different and took our well-being for granted. Enter masters of the universe and those sufficiently void of social responsibility to amass fortunes, or do nothing, as long as it suited them.

Those good old, bad old days.....

‘The past is another country;

They do things differently there...’

I suppose it was inevitable that a consequence of the riotous assemblies in England that commentators should be wishing for the ‘good old days’ when we knew our place and law and order were administered by large bobbies unaided. (We had no juvenile crime. The village bobby, a huge Irishman with a bright red face, had two crime prevention tools. One was a thick leather belt around his tunic and the other was his cape which he used to flick you off your bike if you try to get away. Every Saturday night there were fights at the village dance. That was why the lads went there. PC Fish would wait outside. When it was all over he would flatten whoever was left standing and depart without even taking out his note-book).

Well, my memory goes back to the time before Doris Day became a virgin, and I can tell you about the good old days

They were bloody awful!

We lived in a repressed and repressive society. In 1952 no less than 167,000 books were banned. Films were censored. The theatre was censored. In case anything even slightly risqué escape the attentions of the busybodies, we had local authority Watch Committees with power to ban films outright. When ‘Last Tango in Paris’ came out (as late as 1972), the Chairman of the Southend Watch Committee got a big headline in the Times when he announced that ‘Oral sex is not something we will swallow in Southend!’

Donald Gill’s wonderful sea-side postcards were regularly banned, like this one; Man; ‘Do you like Kipling?’ Girl: ‘I don’t know; I’ve never kippled!’

Anything ‘tending to deprave or corrupt’ could be banned’, although nobody thought to ask that if this were so why were the censors not corrupted?

Homosexual acts were criminal, and every day some unfortunate would be jailed for ‘importuning in a public place’ – usually ‘cottaging’ in the gents’ toilet - or ‘committing an act of gross indecency’. Contraception was hard to come by, and a very high proportion of marriages were of the shot-gun variety with often miserable results, especially as divorce was difficult and largely the privilege of the better-off.

We had capital punishment, including two complete miscarriages of justice (how many more never came to light?) but the execution of Ruth Ellis probably put the kibosh on hanging eventually. We had the Great Train Robbery, Profumo. I missed the swinging sixties because I went to Africa in 1959, but I had the stupid seventies with Red Robbo , Scargill, Heath, fuel rationing, the three day week, wage freezes, and generally a whole can of very smelly worms.

I grew up during WW2. I have to say that despite food rationing we ate like fighting cocks – and behaved like them. We were fortunate to live in the country. No food shortages there, but we always seemed to be cold and dirty. We lived in an agricultural cottage with one cold water tap, a bucket-and chuck-it lav in the garden. Heating and cooking was by a Victorian cast-iron range and laundry was a coal-fired copper. We bathed once a week in a tin bath in front of the kitchen fire and changed our clothes twice a week. But, as the Python sketch might say, ‘We were lucky!’. Many people had no mains water and had to carry two buckets of water on a yoke from a village pump maybe a quarter of a mile away. Some had no electricity.

The notion that we were ‘poor’ would have been laughable, and yet the measure of poverty today seems to be the absence of a large new flat-screen colour telly (one that has been substantially rectified of late).

We were also as tough as teak and devoid of fine feelings. One day, we were kicking a ball around in the main street (there being only 5 cars for a population of 1200 souls) when we saw two Wellington bombers. Suddenly there was an enormous flash, a huge bang and an aluminium shower as they collided. Two parachutes came out but were both on fire. One lot of wreckage dropped on the railway station a mile away and we were off to see it at the gallop. We were after souvenirs, especially live ammunition of which we already had a goodly stock. It was rumoured that one of the girls who lived nearby got a flying boot but dropped it because it contained a foot.

The fire brigade saw us off very quickly.

(When I learnt to fly years later I always kept a particularly sharp look-out).

We had no feeling that we had just witnessed the deaths of probably a dozen young men. But I think the moral of this for these times is that children are animal until they receive discipline,  parents’ upbringing, and some education, especially the difference between right and wrong (we had to learn the Ten Commandments by rote at quite an early age, although I doubt that we ever began to understand how one could covet thy neighbour’s ass).

There was church on Sunday followed by a large ‘dinner’ at 2 p.m. when the Old Man came back from ‘The Sportsman’, the News of the World that only he was allowed to read, then the endlessly boring Sunday afternoons when all sport and entertainment was banned (and no shops open, of course) until ‘The Billy Cotton Band-show’ and ‘Albert Sadler & the Palm  Court Orchestra’.

As if WW2 was not enough, we had 6 years of Labour government to follow. They quickly introduced bread rationing that we did not have at any time during the War. Sweets and chocolate came off the ration in time for the Coronation and Mr Attlee’s departure.

Then to grammar school. Was it as good as is claimed today? In parts. Mine had been founded 70 years before the discovery of America so it was pretty big on tradition including a weekly prayer for our founders, most of whom dropped off their twigs in the 15^th century.

The maths and physics master had joined the school immediately after army service in WW1. He remained for over 50 years, retiring in the 1970’s. Your actual Mr Chips. The other masters had mostly just returned from the war. The women teachers were all spinsters from the lost generation after WW1, which had decimated their potential husbands. Some could teach; some couldn’t.

The quality of education was variable but the fact remained that it was the only way for a boy from a state school to get a higher education or a place at Sandhurst or Cranwell, two favourite career choices when you became an instant gentleman.

The fifties were certainly the worst decade of my part of the 20^th century. When I was commissioned into the army my working-class roots were regarded with a certain lofty disdain. Snobbery and class-consciousness were the dying gasp of the old order. I was never very good at deference, so there were a few clashes.

And we had Korea, Malaya, Cyprus, Suez, Kenya and the Cold War to stop us getting too complacent. And 2 years compulsory military service, of course, which did rather help to concentrate the mind on world events.

Popular music was dire – Max Bygraves, the Beverley Sisters, ’How much is that doggy in the window?’, ‘I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue tooth brush’. Restaurants were ditto. Pubs were grungy and stank of tobacco, feet, halitosis, stale beer, BO and armpits (not much change there then, apart from the smoke). There were 2 TV channels and a BBC monopoly on sound broadcasting.

The ‘good old days’?

Balderdash and piffle!

A bit of positive policing......

You heard it here first; Kittenheels May aka Laura Norder is due for an early bath.

What makes me believe this? Because the Daily Telegraph, now house journal of the Tory Party since the departure of Heffer, carried a vitriolic attack on her, virtually accusing her of being the heir to Harman and a closet socialist. This could only have been the result of some pretty vicious briefing  from on high, probably at Cabinet level.

Dave wanted Bill Bratton to take over the Met. She said ‘no’ – Brits only. So who’s minding the shop? The Old Bill will get Old Bill one way or the other. And I suspect that she is out of order anyway, because public appointments in the UK are open to citizens of the EU, Switzerland and Turkey, probably by some EU fiat, so Brits only is out, surely.

So what’s Bill’s philosophy of effective policing? He says, basically, that the police should be respected by the public and feared by villains.

We have been here before; step forward, Sir Percy Sillitoe (only he can’t because he is long dead).

Sir P was the famous head of MI5 in the years after WW2, but he previously been a top cop.

Born in 1888, he joined the British South Africa Police (the Rhodesian police force – nothing to do with South Africa). He served in the South West Africa campaign (in which another BSAP contemporary was Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris who got fed up with marching all over the Great Namib Desert and became a pilot so that at least he could fight in the  sitting-down  position).

After another spell post-war in colonial police he returned to England and eventually became Chief Constable of Glasgow.

At the time Glasgow was Dodge City with knobs on; it was run by the razor gangs, such as the Billy Boys and the Norman  Conks. The City Council was irredeemably corrupt.

Sir P’s philosophy was that the gangs had to be made to fear the police, not the other way round. He recruited the hardest men he could find, mostly ex-service Highlanders. They met violence with violence. Prominent amongst them was Sergeant Morrison – Big Tam.

One of the gangsters thought he would make a name for himself and attacked Big Tam. When he appeared in court thre morning after his arrest, he had a broken jaw, black eyes and some difficulty in standing upright.

When the charge of assaulting Big Tam was read out, his defence lawyer suggested changing the charge to ‘attempted suicide’.

Sir Percy contacted the gang leaders and suggested it might be healthier if they practised their trade elsewhere. After some were hanged, others sent to the Barlinnie for long spells and so many of the City Council banged-up that it almost ceased to function, this advice was taken.

Another candidate for POTUS?

There are rumors afoot that Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, will succumb to the pleas of his supporters and compete for the Republican nomination. This is the best news we have heard in a long time.

Texans, on the other hand, are a bit conflicted as their not so favorite son, Rick Perry, just decided to run this past week. In doing so, he zoomed to the top of the popularity polls. Perry cannot win as he carries tons of baggage in the form of skeletons on the campaign trail.

To begin with, he is not terribly bright, a mediocre student, and a huge opportunist. He began his political career as a democrat and during the end of that period in his life, he not only supported, but managed the campaign of Al Gore in Texas.

He underwent a heartfelt conversion to Republicanism when it was clear that George Bush Jr. would become president. Rick was then Texas' Lieutenant Governor and as such, automatic heir apparent until the next gubernatorial election.

Chris Christie weighs a ton and suffers from asthma, for which he was recently treated on an emergency basis.

The good news is he is a reformer who managed to clean up New Jersey in fair order. That is no mean task as Jersey is replete with corruption in almost every sector. He middle aged and personality wise, a cross between a cage boxer and John Kennedy. He is a lawyer, prosecuting attorney, with a clean record for going after big names and winning. If the rumors are true, he will lead the contenders list bumping Rick at least into second place.

I personally doubt that Rick will long be in second place anyway. He just yesterday said to a group of supporters in Iowa, that it would be treasonous for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, to decide to put more money in circulation. O, who is currently touring Iowa on one of his two new 1.2 million dollar busses, quickly announced that Rick needs to be careful what he says.

So does O, by the way. It has just been made clear that illegal immigrants will in fact benefit from the new health care legislation. O said publicly and in the face of serious doubt, that illegals would not benefit from it. They get in the back door as it has been decided medical staff may not ask about the social status of people seeking clinical or emergency care.

The hue and cry is over the original deception and the millions of illegals who will now be legally attended to by certain clinics and emergency care people. This is at taxpayers expense of course.

Still no mention of sensible tax reform such as the flat tax or the fair tax. The latter is a tax on spending as opposed to income. It means that anyone spending money in the USA, including visitors and illegals, will pay a heightened sales tax. It is estimated that such tax would bring in substantially more than the current system.

It is not as simple as stated above and there are accommodations for poor people to get some relief.

It looks good to me.

In Washington............keep left!

Peter Oborne's column on morality in the UK and the striking similarities between corruption at the top of society and vandalism at the bottom was dramatic, dynamic and daring.  He looked more like a moral philosopher than a conservative member of the press corps in his scathing condemnation of the PM and Parliamentarians.

It was refreshing to see someone take the moral high ground, although I am sure he made no friends in Whitehall by so doing. He seems to have committed a Heffer. The parallel between social ills in the UK and the USA is frightening. 

Talk show hosts here predict our time will come with vandals in our streets. That our politicians are also highly corrupted needs not be mentioned, as it is taken as a given. The thrust of this prediction is that vandals in the UK are the product of socialism. Under Obama, the US is also going socialist.

Hence, our youth will be virtually wards of the state in their dependencies on government aid for food, housing and welfare. Having nothing to do, and no sense of responsibility whatsoever, they will begin to riot and burn and loot. This pedestrian view of UK history and Western sociology captivates the public.

No wonder they want someone like Bachman or Perry to lead them into the fray.

Dave's in charge.....so that's alright, then.

Now that the affirmative shopping spree appears to be over, and Dave has got the Old Bill an Old Bill from the Big Bagel to help in cleaning up Broken Britain perhaps he might start with public morality.

We have plenty of historical precedent.

As a reaction, perhaps, to Cromwell’s Puritanism the English went on a 140 year bender. London was one great stew of prostitution, crime, drunkenness, and brutality, a huge whorehouse. Victoria and Albert introduced – er – Victorian values. Britain was a fairly disciplined and moral country for nearly 70 years after Victoria, although the rot probably set in during the tacky ‘60s. Maybe one reason was that for almost all the 20^th century until the ‘70s most men had military experience, and that is generally character-forming, believe me. And no, I am not suggesting a return to National Service

The media and entertainment business might be a priority.

Foul language and prurient behaviour seem to be the stock in trade of TV these days. Call me Mary Whitehouse but is it really necessary to put out a ‘contains strong language’ warning for ‘Have I got news for you’ this week? It is supposed to be an amusing mickey-take on the news of the week. Is Dirty Desmond the Top Shelf King, a ‘proper person’ to take over C5? We can see what is coming with his soap ‘Candy Bar Girls’ set in a lesbian boozer in Soho (and no, I haven’t watched it, just like M Whitehouse). His forthcoming attraction is a nude ‘Big Brother’, according to the papers. And the latest C5 blockbuster had a couple humping noisily away in the first few minutes. It was also very boring and got the off-button treatment.

SKY offers about 67 porno channels (one owned by the aforesaid Dirty Desmond). When were these legalised? I seem to recall that Maggie firmly shut them out.

The Red Tops are unspeakable. There were 23 ‘tit ‘n bum’ pictures in a single day’s edition of the Star! The advertising is substantially for porno DVDs, phone ‘chats’, and vacancies for performers in ‘adult’ films.

So we could make a start with a new Obscene Publications Act.

Drugs? It is certain that the criminalisation of drug-taking is the major cause of crime in the West. So the answer is obvious. But drug dealing needs to be treated on the same level as murder, with life sentences for dealing in Class A drugs. They have few problems in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and elsewhere. (As an aside, a young man of my acquaintance, hard working, never taken benefit, doesn’t do drugs, thumped a gatecrasher at his party in his own home and got 6 months. While he was in the slammer he was offered every kind of drug you care to name).

Booze? Well, what do you expect when closing hours are almost extinct and beer is cheaper in the supermarkets that bottled water? My local actually buys its stock from the supermarket because it is cheaper than the landlord can get it from the brewery at wholesale prices. So bring back stringent licensing laws, Dave. And put a ruddy great tax on alcopops!

But what we are probably going to get is another useless and expensive public inquiry so that they can kick the can down the road ‘to find the causes’. The cause is blindingly obvious. ‘The ‘submerged tenth’ are illiterate and unemployable and so have no incentive to lead proper lives. And who is responsible? Mostly the teaching profession, the NUT and successive governments that have tinkered with the system and banned teachers from exercising proper discipline.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When I left school many years ago almost no school leaver had a reading/writing age of less than 14 years. A recent survey gives the appalling stats that 69% of white kids and 50% of black kids are functionally illiterate – that is, they have a reading of less than 7 years. The irony is that 50 years ago a high standard of literacy was not a prerequisite for getting a job. Manual labour was in abundant demand, and any thicko could get a job in a car factory when industry was booming and there was a shortage of labour. A, man working on the line was probably earning more than a bank manager. When my brother started his contracting business most of his employees consisted of manual labour. When he retired almost every function had become mechanised. He only needed a handful of skilled workers.

The demand for pure muscle has diminished almost to vanishing point. Education has gone from being a ‘good thing’ when I was young to being an absolute necessity. And in the face of this challenge, the county has gone backwards.

Illiteracy is easy to tackle. During my army days we had a small number of recruits who were to all intents illiterate not through any fault of the education system but probably because they were habitual truants (sons of small farmers, for example, who were frequently kept at home because their help was needed on the farm).

The Army Education Corps got them up to speed in 6 weeks flat. I have been involved in adult literacy campaigns in Africa. It only took a few weeks to teach reading and writing even to people for whom English was not their first language.

And another thing. Prison sentences for under-25s should include compulsory education for all with a reading age of less than 14, and be indeterminate so that you don’t get out of jail until you can at least read and write.

Blair and Broon created a society with no moral compass (although Broon liked to talk about it a lot), no values, no proper male role models, no discipline, no sense of worth, no hope and the sexual habits of the  farmyard.

So what was the outcome of it all, Dave?

Simple, my old pompoenkop.

Moral nihilism.

'I should have kept my legs closed......'

By remarkable coincidence, in the same week as ‘the troubles’ the English Test cricket team  made us feel good about ourselves. They didn’t just beat the best team in the world. They thumped, clobbered, and moerad them. England is now playing the Aussie way. The downside to this is that they seem rather dour. The last real character was Flintoff, with his booze-fuelled escapades, like swanning around in a pedallo at a very late hour, risking drowning the night before a big game in the West Indies.

Cricket has always produced spaced-out characters.

Shane Warne, the greatest spin bowler of our times and reputedly prodigious in the underpants department, is currently getting a lot of coverage over his affair with a passé popsie who once made a film but has since earned her keep by doing what she is best at, and  is now reaching her ‘use by’ date. Warnie is noted for his biting wit but he met his match when bowling to Botham. ‘Hello, Beefy’, he said, ‘How’s the missus and my kids?’ ‘The missus is fine’, replied Botham ‘but the kids are retarded!’

This is on a par with the exchange between McGrath (Aussie) and Brandes (portly Zimbawean). McGrath ‘Why are you so fat?’ ‘Because every time I screw your missus she gives me a biscuit!’

Botham got suspended for describing the English selectors as ‘a bunch of gin-soaked old farts’. His mate David Gower was suspended for buzzing the field in a Tiger Moth.

Many years ago the Duke of Norfolk was a keen cricketer and his team was drawn from the estate. The captain was the head gamekeeper or some such. The umpire was his butler. On appeal to the umpire for an obvious dismissal the umpire replied ‘His Grace is not quite out!’

I must confess that I started to lose interest years ago when ‘sledging’ started to get out of hand (for those who don’t follow the game this is the art of so abusing and teasing the opposite sides players that they lose concentration). But it goes back a long way. A perfect example is when one of the Aussie players in the 1932/3 series called the English captain, Douglas Jardine, a ‘pommie bastard. When Jardine complained (and he was notoriously stuck—up), Woodhall, the Aussie skipper, yelled through their dressing room door ‘Which of you bastards called this Pommie bastard a Pommie bastard?’

But the cruellest cut must have come from Fiery Fred Truman, one of the all-time great pacemen. A batsman hit an easy catch of Fred’s ball, but the fielder let it go straight between his legs. ’Sorry, Fred’ he said ‘I should have kept my legs closed’. ‘Aye’ growled Fred ‘And so should thy mother!’

When an American asked an old English gent what kind of game was this cricket, the reply was ‘Game? It’s not a game. It’s a way of life!’

How true!

Mr Grumpy here...........

Here we are, at the beginning of another round of serious campaigning for the presidency of the US and all I want to do is either yawn or scream. Mitt Romney is still leading the pack of Republicans. He is the yawn part. A talking head. Coming up fast is Michele Bachman, born in Iowa, representing Minnesota in Congress and a born again Christian. She is the scream part. All she can come up with are tired sound bytes critical of Obama. She can't win, but is only making a hit during the famous Iowa Caucuses which kick's off the political marching season for the next year and a quarter.

Bachman spawned five kids and along with her husband provided foster care for another 23- all teenage girls. She is smart, a graduate of William and Mary law school, and she is holy. Her religious views are applied Evangelical Luthern which compel her to place all actions and issues in some sort of biblical context.  Between her and Jesus, anything can be accomplished. She received her first law degree from Oral Roberts University.

Oral was one of our first grandstanding evangelicals who pioneered Sunday morning television services. He went on to establish Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. He became second only to Billy Graham in Protestant popularity which was fueled by a commitment to charismatic Christianity and revival meetings featuring faith healing. Much of the latter was practiced on schedule every Sunday morning.

Michele is not easily intimidated gfiven her intimate relationship with the Lord and her unflagging belief in His and her power. She is a founder member of the Tea Partya in the House of Representatives  practicing fiscal conservatism as if she were on steroids.

She will undoubtedly win the Iowa straw poll, and will doubtlessly decline in subsequent tests beginning with the New Hampshire primary early in 2012. Her ranting and raving and public display of religion will not set well with the old-style New England conservatives. Yet, she may be preferable to the latest contender, our very own Rick Perry.

The son of a share cropper, Perry conned his way to the top. Full of himself and self-confidence, he reminds one of an over-aged member of a college fraternity. His announcement this morning that he would enter the race surprised nobody. He did come across smooth and sweet and well-spoken, all of which he is not. He must have rehearsed for days. Impromptu speaking is not his strong suit, indeed, I am not sure what is. He is always seeking to hit home runs and seldom pulls it off.

He has been implicated in a few major scandals involving the use and probable abuse of his power as Governor. Above all, he epitomizes the type of politician that seeks office to advance his personal agenda. The American public claims to be sick and tired of these types of politicians, but yet we vote them back into office time and again.

In fairness, Perry presided over some beneficial legislation regarding tort reform. Under his watch, limits were established on law suit damages and the principle of 'loser pays' in cases of civil litigation.