No hacking here — we prefer the good old ways

I THINK I can safely say that the Oldham Chronicle is not into phone hacking; not least because we don’t know how to do it. Some of us have a hard enough time texting.

And what would we find out if we could practice these dark arts? Charlie’s butler, housekeeper and yacht captain (Charlie, of course, is admiral of the fleet) calling to ask how many guests are expected for the weekend cruise; Jim McMahon placing an order for shoes that will help him walk on water (he’ll need them before the year’s out) and Howard Sykes’s bakery confirming another emergency order for pies.

No cause for a House of Commons debate there then, and I don’t expect either that our newshounds go out armed with swag bags of loot to pay the good lads and lassies of the local police force for information. The 37p and two pesetas in our petty cash box wouldn’t even buy us the time of day.

No, the Chronicle relies on good, old-fashioned methods of journalism (and no, I don’t mean making it up). Contacts in high and low places are the order of the day, most reporters’ notebooks filled with names and phone numbers of people in the know, a few of whom are occasionally prepared to talk to us. Others, of course, say things to us (quite often to me, surprisingly) that we could not use in a family newspaper.

Most of us in this business are appalled by the antics of the News of the World in hacking into the phones of murder victims, their family and friends and the relatives of those killed and injured in the July, 2005,terrorist outrage.

We all like a good story, reporters and readers alike, but the vast majority of journalists would have no truck with such underhand and criminal activities.

I would say that it is the sort of thing that could get journalists a bad name except that most of us (me included) already have a reputation that if not exactly bad is certainly less than squeaky clean.



THE latest twist in the continuing saga (it has outlived “The Archers” by some years) of our efforts to protect ourselves from those who come to our country to harm us is that we still have a loophole in the system that could allow terrorists to the enter the UK without showing a passport, driving licence, library card or even a family photo to those controlling our borders.

How long will it be before someone pushes a Tesco trolley containing a bomb through one of our airports, bus or train stations without anyone raising even an eyebrow, let alone the alarm?

Apparently any would-be terrorist could enter the country through what is called a common area travel channel without challenge and then, like so many before him, just disappear without trace only to later emerge on some grey and shaky CCTV screen wearing a balaclava and carrying a rucksack towards a bus, train or shopping centre.

How long have politicians of various political persuasions been talking about controlling immigration? Certainly over the last two decades it has been at the top of the political agenda with vows and promises that have all turned out to be hollow. With the Olympics coming up next year and the flood of folk from foreign parts reaching record proportions, will we get the gold, silver or bronze medal for protecting our borders or the booby-trap bomb award?

The truth is that as time goes on we seem to get dafter and the world and his brother and sister know it. Why else would a woman who has taken a family-sized dose of fertility pills board a plane from Africa with five children in her womb and fly to England to give birth, costing us, the hard-pressed taxpayers £200,000 and the new mum nothing. And we will probably allow her and her children to stay because we are daft.

The PC brother and sisterhood will accuse me of being racist when, in fact I am not promulgating any of the nasty ists at all but merely making a plea for common sense to prevail (remember common sense? It went the way of good manners some years ago).



FINAL WORD: Owners of the Whispers development in Royton are, to put it politely, extracting the urine from all and sundry (I hope they have a big pot) over the town-centre eyesore. With all the red tape, rules and restrictions that tie us in knots these days, I am staggered that the council can’t just send in the bulldozers and get rid of it. There’d be plenty of volunteer drivers.