John Blunt has his say

But are not Tony Blair's attempts to stop "Red" Ken Livingstone becoming Labour's candidate shameful - and a clear insight into how bossy and arrogant our Prime Minister is behind that smile that makes him ever so popular?

Maverick Ken's loony-Left politics, as displayed when he was leader of the old Greater London Council - friendly towards Sinn Fein, gays and every single-issue nutter imaginable - may be a turn-off to the modernist Blairites who want you to believe all that kind of thing is in Labour's unelectable past.

But why should that debar Ken from putting up at all? Ours is a democracy after all.

You wouldn't think so, though, after all the scurrilous attempts by Blair to veto Ken's candidacy and shoehorn ex-health minister Frank Dobson into the role of Labour's would-be Dick Whittington. On top of the consistent "dossier of shame" that Blair's henchmen have spread about - Neil Kinnock being the latest recruit to the campaign to smear Ken - in the procedure to pick Labour's mayoral candidate, there has been the disgraceful ditching of the holy one-member, one-vote creed that Blair previously so piously championed in a blatant move to now rig the system against Livingstone.

No matter that, according to every opinion poll, Ken is the people's choice and perhaps the only one to stop the bumptious Tory candidate Jeffrey Archer (chosen by one-man, one-vote by London's Conservatives) from becoming Mayor, Blair has decreed that an electoral college will perform Labour's selection - so giving the 75 people who are London's Labour MPs, MEPs and candidates for the London regional assembly and virtually all likely to follow the dictates of the party's Millbank commissars and the block-vote wielding unions twice as much say as Labour's 68,000 members in the capital.

Clearly, the order from Downing Street is: Stop Ken. But why should Blair be allowed to defy the people he is always telling us that he champions?

It is sheer arrogance on his part - and perhaps jealously, too, of Ken's challenge to his own popularity. He deserves to be given a bloody nose. And if Ken cannot stand as Labour's clearly prime contender for London's mayoralty, he should do so as an independent and give bossy Blair the come-uppance he deserves - by a million more votes than the Prime Minister can personally lay claim to. Bunking off to Jamaica WERE we not led to believe that the insulting, do-gooder nonsense of rewarding young tearaways with expensive foreign holidays had been scrapped - not least because of the manifest failure of safari therapy to put them on the straight and narrow?

What, then, are we to make of the disclosure this week that a Nottingham-based charity, aided by an EU grant - in the long run, that means you and me yet again - is shelling out £5,000 to send seven teenagers from that city, all of whom are regular truants or disruptive in class, on a three-week holiday to Jamaica in a bid to improve their behaviour?

It goes without saying, of course, that this must be an outrage to their classmates who are not troublesome and do not bunk off, but this is not the point. For at the root of such codswallop schemes is not concern for the troublesome or lack of thought for the law-abiding or diligent who get no such grand rewards for their good behaviour.

Rather, it is down to the do-gooder culture which looks for all sorts of ways to justify its existence and the well-paid spurious projects that go with it at public expense.

You only have to read the Situations Vacant advertisements in such liberal publications as the teachers', probation officers' and social workers' bible, The Guardian, to discover how institutionalised is the living-off-the-backs-off the-scum set-up in modern-day Britain to understand how perpetuating the problem rather than curing it is the last thing that the handsomely-paid do-gooders want. Don't reward these cheats AMID reports this week that damages claims in the rampant compensation culture has cost the NHS, the emergency services and local government - in other words, taxpayers like you and me - a phenomenal £4 billion so far this year, there comes the heart-warming revelation that the Ministry of Defence (or, once again, you and I) is to pay out at least a further £4 million to personnel dismissed from the Armed Forces for being homosexual.

I do not care a fig whether or not these claimants have, as the European Court decided, had their privacy invaded by the ban on gays that the Forces have been forced to scrap as a result of this ruling.

Nor am I the least bit sympathetic to their claims of suffering trauma, injury to their feelings and loss of earnings and pension rights as a result of being hounded out of the services. For even if each and every one of these compensation-seeking gays and lesbians has suffered all of these upsets, I cannot understand why they are owed a single penny in redress - when they knowingly and deliberately signed on when they were quite well aware of the prevailing rules barring homosexuals and lesbians from the Forces.

Despite what the soppy European Court rules and despite what our weak government kowtows to, these people were cheating to begin with and it is an offence to real justice that they can, as a result, stick their hands deep into the pockets of the taxpayers in reward for breaking the rules.

It is no different from those servicewomen who were paid millions in compensation for being dismissed from the Forces for becoming pregnant - when they knew all along that was what would happen to them if they did.

I fail to see what is honest or moral about compensating arrant opportunists who broke the rules and then sued to get them changed to suit them. But, once more, this is almighty Europe that Britain, it government and its Forces are surrendering to - when we should be telling these loopy judges to get knotted. Hague could be quids in WITH big hitters from his own party such as Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke and John Major along with the Lib-Dems and business chiefs all ranged against him with New Labour in the Britain in Europe campaign, little William Hague, with only the old-time Right-wing ranters of Maggie Thatcher and Norman Tebbit recognisable among the Euro-sceptics on board his back-of-a-truck megaphone campaign to save the pound, is judged by the pundits to be vastly outgunned already.

But even though, thus far, written-off Willie's record as leader of the Opposition has been dismal, one thing that seems to be overlooked by both his pro-European (and, let it be said, pro-euro) opponents is that his shortage of big guns is offset by the vastness of his infantry on this issue - the majority of British voters. For, in a nutshell, the stance he has adopted is that of Britain remaining in the EU and demanding vast reforms of that corrupt and undemocratic institution and keeping out of the single currency, if not for good, then at least for as long as the people of this country demand - and, quite right, too, given that the strength of the already-ailing euro is based on a hotch-potch of economies, unlike the pound which is supported by one that is robust in contrast to most of those of euroland.

Now, ask yourself, is not that position - ridiculed by the know-alls of the Blair-blessed Britain in Europe campaign launched last week as some sort of patriotic goal - closer to the opinion of most British people than the sell-out stance of the Europhiles who hardly dare mention the euro or spell out its advantages to us.

Willie on a loser? Lacklustre he and the Tories may be so far, but on this issue it is he who has his finger on the people's pulse.

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

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