If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime

THE FRIDAY THING
LET us get one thing straight from the start, the hooded rogues, vagabonds, scrotes, misfits and low-lifes who smashed up stores and put lives at risk by setting fire to homes were not rioters.

They were outlaws, bandits, brutal robbers, the terrorists in our midst.

No wonder chubby-cheeked Dave wanted to bring in a wild-west marshal to sort them out.

Now I am not entirely in favour of putting up “Wanted, dead or alive” posters on the malevolent mob who brought death and destruction to the lives of ordinary citizens, but I cannot understand those who now bleat that we as a society are being unfair on those arrested and taken to court.

Not surprisingly, you might join me in thinking the Lib-Dems are the defenders of the rampaging mob.

Baroness Hamwee, who probably doesn’t shop at Poundland, the corner butcher’s or the local grocer’s, whose shops, homes and lives were wrecked, says that the Prime Minister’s pledge of zero tolerance on criminality was not acceptable.

One of her more articulate colleagues described it as: “Bonkers, bonkers, bonkers”, which is just the sort of language we like to hear from our representatives.

Writing in The Guardian (where else), the indignant baroness says that we should show zero tolerance to zero tolerance.

They talk like that, these Lib-Dems, because they live in some parallel universe to the rest of us, untouched by the real world and never entirely happy unless they are up to their knees in muck saving badgers. Most of us down-to-earth bods are on the side of the judge at Manchester Crown Court who handed out four-year jail sentences for looting, criminal damage and other entirely anti-social and criminal behaviour.

He justified the severity, pointing out that the situation had to be viewed in the context of mass mayhem and disorder, which totally disrupted hundreds of people’s lives and thus demanded appropriate heavy penalties.

Well done that judge, I say. It is not often we find a judge who actually appears to be on the side of the victims of crime and sends out a message to the law-breakers that a slap on the wrist or a finding-yourself holiday abroad is not always the sentence that suits society more than it does the miscreant.

The judge was protecting us rather than those in the dock, and surely that is how it should be.

Lib-Dem leader (for now) Nick Clegg said that offenders leaving jail from March next year would be “met at the gates and put through a tough process so that they find work and stay on the straight and narrow”.

Two thoughts on that: just where are the jobs going to come from and wouldn’t it be a much better deterrent to the law-breakers if they were met at the prison gates by Nick Clegg. Well, it would certainly make me emigrate.




ANOTHER reason this week to buy that twin set of kilt and bagpipes. Oh and don’t forget your trusty dirk!

The Scots, who already have free prescriptions when they are sick (I blame the whisky and porridge), and have universities that are free to Scottish nationals — though ultra-expensive to we and maybe not so we (sorry) English folk — are not about to face the draconian train fare rises that will hit English commuters.

Rail companies set the price increases in England while the Scottish parliament sets the fares over the border. The big difference here is that the rail companies do not have to seek re-election and can, therefore, charge more or less what they like. And they do. Whether you have to pay more to travel by train in Scotland if you have an English accent is not certain, so get practising the old “och aye the noo”.




FINAL WORD: Further evidence that the world is surely going mad.

Plastic surgery for pets, including, if you can believe it, testicular implants (apparently called neuticles, honestly) for neutered pets. Owners claim that it gives little Fido or Prince Obama the third a more masculine look.

There are also chin lifts, eyelid lifts, dental work and nose jobs chiefly, you will not be surprised to hear, in America, although, sorry to say, it is catching on fast in the UK where it has become a multi-million pound business.

Barking mad, if you ask me.