‘America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality’.

There was some coverage of the Royal Wedding but a lot of media speculation as to whether it cost millions or just hundreds of thousands. The whole event was so redolent of ‘High Society’ that one half expected Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong to make an appearance. The groom needed a shave. All done in the worst possible taste, maybe, but good luck to ‘em. We like a larrikin, so Bill the War Hero will always be liked here. At least he added to the gaiety of nations, which is more than can be said for any of his successors. But as I mentioned before, Hillary certainly needs a course with Weight Watchers. She has more chins than the Beijing telephone directory.

The good news this week is that scientists have proved (at least to their own satisfaction) that teetotalers are four times as likely to get rheumatoid arthritis as boozers. So trebles all round, just to keep those old joints a-working, coming on top of the Spanish study that says red-wine drinkers are less likely to suffer heart and circulation problems provided that they don’t imbibe more than 20 units a day. This is about 5 bottles. Ole! But I am certain that if I am cremated it will take two weeks to put out the fire.

Prison is in the news at this time, as the Government muses on what to do about the immediate prospect of waiting-lists for a cell. The Prison Service is getting like the National Health Service, except that you have a better chance of surviving your sentence.

In my simple way I had always thought that the measure of success in law enforcement was a reduction in crime, and that increased clear-up rates, convictions and prison populations were indicators of failure unless the crime rate falls at the same time. I have also misguidedly thought that the guidelines for imprisonment were that the crime is so serious that no other sentence would be appropriate; that the convicted person was likely to be a danger to the public; that he would be likely to re-offend; that he had a record of conviction for similar offences; that further charges were likely and the convict was likely to abscond or interfere with witnesses; that the convict was likely to seek retribution against the jury or witnesses; or some other good and substantial reason why there was no reasonable alternative to banging up the wrong ’un in the bridewell.

Both UK and US bang up people who don’t fall into any of those categories. For examples; a 73-year old widow with a clean driving licence pulls out of a side-turning, is hit by a motor-cyclist who dies; charged with causing death by careless driving (another new crime invented by the NuLab stasi); three years porridge. A hard working 24-year old, with no previous and in gainful employment since leaving school, has a party in his house, has a skinfull (surprise, surprise), thumps another male reveller, and gets 3 months. Whilst in the nick he is offered just about every Class A substance going, at reasonable prices. Was public safety improved?

Lord Chancellor Clarke would seem to be of a similar mind as he has called for a reduction in the numbers of people sent to jail at vast public expense. Needless to say, he has received a good kicking from the fascisti who believe that you should be put in the nick for cycling without lights.(I refuse to use the term ‘Ministry of Justice’ as if England were a banana republic without the bananas; whatever made Blair think that ‘justice’ and ‘law’ were the same?).

I began to reflect on this following The Economist commenting on the topic big-time. Here is an extract from the Leader:

‘IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting or fishing. The original intent was to prevent Americans from, say, poaching elephants in Kenya. But it has been interpreted to mean that they must abide by every footling wildlife regulation on Earth. The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece. Two are still in jail’.

In the US you can get time for failing to prevent your employee from breaking regulations you have never heard of e.g. the railroad construction supervisor who got 6 months when one of the workers accidentally broke a pipe that allowed some oil to spill in a river.

The rate of imprisonment in the UK is high compared with other European countries, but in the US it is four times as high as ours. The gist of the two major pieces in The Economist is that in the US there is such a plethora of rules and regulations that it is impossible for anyone to avoid becoming a criminal, but politicians are unable to resist the ‘I’m tougher than you’ syndrome. The US has 748 inmates per 100,000 population; the next highest is Russia, trailing with 600,000, and Iran in 4th place can only manage 240.

One of the oddities about Deepwater is that the only evidence we have seen of environmental disaster is repeated pix of the same bedraggled pelican and people picking up pea-sized tar-balls off a beach. We are accustomed as a result of disasters in Europe to seeing beaches completely covered in sticky crude, thousands of dead or dying sea-birds, and bulldozers lifting tons of oil-soaked sand away for disposal. Why have we not been shown similar pix from Florida? CNN did quite a big piece on this; on affected Florida beaches the investigators had to use ultra-violet lamps to show up the oil deposits that were otherwise quite invisible to the naked eye. Chemical analysis show that oil pollution of the sand was 2.6 parts per million. (And hardly had I written this when the DT ran a piece calling into question the extent of environmental damage entitled ‘Was Tony Hayward right?’ - to play down the disaster assumptions).

I totally agree with your view of Tony Hayward; he is an oiler, not a PR spinner. He has a First in Geology, not in telling PR porkies, plus a Ph.D. He was dead man walking from his first utterance, but he should never have been put in that position. It was the duty of the useless Chairman, whose expertise is mobile phones and saunas, to have been upfront, aided and abetted by his remarkably silent Director of Spin, the invisible man from Lehman Bros. However, Tony has a pension of £600,000 a year plus a £1 million sweetener and a seat on the board of the Russian end of BP, so he is not going to be signing on for welfare any time soon.

I watched an interview on Randall with the new man at the helm of BP. Typical American courtesy, reasonable, very articulate, and nothing gung ho whatsoever. He also made a point that he and Tony were friends (the unspoken part of that being ‘don’t give me any sh** about Deepwater’). He struck me as a very likeable guy, and quite unflappable. (It is untrue that, because of the Deepwater brand damage, BP is reverting to its former name – the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company).

And according to Mark Mardell, the Beeb’s man in America, the media hysteria is in the UK, not the US. Or perhaps your media has more interesting stuff to report than the outpourings of a small group of self-important Senators about Lockerbie who may have been naive enough to think that UK politicians and senior officials would rush to their bidding or that Hayward would not spot the perjury trap a mile off, recognising it as November grandstanding.

I don’t think the Senators are that thick; my take is that they knew very well that Straw and co would tell them to get knotted, which would give them more column inches and Fox News time. In any event, they would have found Straw to be like a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.

Meanwhile, Dave piles faux pas upon gaffe. His comments about Pakistan - in India, of all places - remind me of a meeting I attended with the Pakistan Chief Justice in Islamabad a while back. A German woman in the group started to tell him how much better they did things in India. Air conditioning was unnecessary in the atmosphere that followed.

This reminds me that you once asked what it was that I liked so much about Pakistan apart from the wonderful scenery.

Well, for starters, respect for an old geezer like me. During that same visit I had to meet the Election Commissioner, the Honourable Qureshi. When I reported to reception, the guy at the desk picked up the phone and said’ Sahib, here is Sahib Lord Robinson!’ Respect at last!

And humour. I was being taken around by the delightful Pakistani Information Attaché at the British High Commission. Passing the US Embassy, he told me that there had been recent trouble when a mob tried to burn it down. When I asked the reason, he replied ‘Because of Salman Rushdie and the ‘Satanic Verses’’. When I reminded him that Rushdie was a Brit, he said ‘We know; but it’s the Americans we don’t like!’ I recall being at dinner in Bangladesh with the Pakistani World Bank Resrep. This was just after India announced that it had the Bomb. Putting on a perfect Indian accent (quite different from Pakistani), he made the announcement. ‘We peace-loving Indians are proud to announce that we have made a peace-loving nuclear bomb. We are now making a peace-loving missile. When we have it we peace-loving people will bomb the sh** out of the Pakistanis!’

I have always found them to be hospitable, courteous, friendly and honest. I can only speak as I find.

The Pakistanis have had over 11,000 people killed by terrorists, so it ill-behoves Dave to talk about them exporting terrorism when (so far) all ours have been home grown. Prime Ministers always want to be their own Foreign Secretaries; Dave should leave it to Hague, a far more experienced and intelligent politician.

Your comments about sabre-rattling over Iran prompts me to say ‘next time you are on your own, maties’. I can’t believe for one moment that O would get involved in another round of hostilities in a Moslem country. Having said which, I distinctly recall before Gulf 2 rubbishing the views of those who thought that war was imminent. I could not accept the total madness of attacking a country that was the only secular bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, that was the antithesis of Al Qaeda, and was far too weak to be a serious threat to anyone, after the pasting in Gulf 1. I thought it was all grandstanding by Dubya to show that he was tougher than Daddy. How wrong can you get?

And with an assassination attempt on Armadinajacket (or firework, depending on whether you believe the Iranian Government news service) being maybe an indication of further destabilisation of the regime, it seems to me that the right approach is to let the system implode with just a little help from the dirty tricks department.