No surrender to scum

NOW I realise why I am a victim of (undetected) crime.

According to Home Secretary Jack Straw, it's my fault for having a video for some thief to covet so much he had to literally smash his way into my home to steal it.

It's the same with these toffs going about with £20,000 Rolex watches on their wrists and getting mugged for them.

Asking for it, aren't they?

How ridiculous for Mr Straw to suggest that crime figures are rising because people today have more possessions worth stealing.

What a rash lot people are, working hard to buy their videos, computers and so forth and encouraging the deprived to steal it as a result.

It's not the amount of steal- able loot that's the problem.

It's the criminal scum who know they have little chance of being caught and of being punished if they are.

But, really, there are times when you wonder if the police have surrendered to the scum and have switched over to nicking the easy targets instead.

For the snapshot I had last week of their priorities was most illuminating.

It came on the same night that this newspaper reported the case of cabbie Stephen Thomas who went to the police station in Great Harwood to complain that a passenger he had dropped off at a nightspot in the town had smashed his windscreen before going into the club. Mr Thomas said the police refused to act - in case their going into the club to look for the alleged hooligan started a riot.

He got a similar response when, dissatisfied, he took his complaint to Darwen police station.

And the police said that if the same thing happened again, they would probably say the same again.

But, whether they feared they would get too much trouble or whether it was too much trouble, isn't the police response pathetic?

It amounts to: 'Hard luck, chum' - not just for the out-of-pocket Mr Thomas but also for the rest of us victims of written-off crime.

Yet contrast the effort the police were putting into cracking down on the negligible problem of drink-driving on the afternoon that we carried Mr Thomas's tale.

On my way home from work, I drove past four police vehicles and at least as many officers mounting what a custom-made sign said was a 'Drink-Driving Checkpoint' (there was absolutely no pretence that this wasn't a random testing set-up - despite the law saying they are not allowed).

But, surely, if our police force can muster the resources and commitment to tackle one sort of crime, it ought not to be shrugging its shoulders at the sort Mr Thomas was a victim of.

Or is it now his fault for owning a cab?

Foot down on the hate pedal

AFTER adamantly refusing, just three months ago, to put the brake on the petrol tax robbery - now amounting to £2.63 of the £3.32 motorists pay for a gallon of unleaded - the Treasury is now reported to be reaching for reverse gear. Seemingly it is worried that the prospect of £4-a-gallon fuel by the next election will cost the government dear in votes.

So it should.

But is this reported climbdown prompted by the sheer injustice of drivers and hauliers being ripped off at way over the rate of inflation and to the tune of millions?

No. It seems that Chancellor Gordon Brown is deaf to the protest.

He has woken up to the anger only because private polls show that petrol taxation was harming his personal ratings with the voters.

Diddums - he wants to be loved.

But the fact is that it is because he has made himself disliked that he is jerked out of his disdain for a fair deal for the driver.

Foot down on the hate pedal, folks - it's the only way to get through to the arrogant ego-maniac politicians with free limousines, it seems.

Poor farmers' rich pickings

WE are, of course, given a sharp insight into whose interests come first with the "poor" farmers - their own or that of their animals - when we find 355 sheep dumped on the RSPCA in Wales by protesting farmers who say prices have fallen so much they cannot afford to keep or kill their stock and when one calf dumped in a Welsh telephone box with a plastic bag over its head was left to suffocate.

But repellent and irresponsible as such actions are, equally infuriating is the continual assumption by farmers that they are owed a living by the rest of us - when across Europe householders are paying through their nose for their food in the form of the £30 billion of subsidies they already give farmers. And they have the neck to moan about supermarkets ripping them off with their prices when their subsidies are costing UK families at least £20 a week extra to fill their shopping basket to begin with.

Now, on top of this, when their own over-production has glutted the market and sent prices for livestock plummeting, the idea is being floated of paying farmers golden handshakes of up to £40,000 to quit agriculture. This is presumably so that we might have less of the subsidy-grabbing over-production and wailing about calves and sheep being worth nothing as a result.

But why should the taxpayer bail them out still more?

The government never suggested that the mines should be similarly protected because they were churning out coal they could not sell, did they?

So what's special about farmers?

I wonder how many of the hundreds of workers made jobless recently in East Lancashire by ruthless market forces in the footwear industry would have even contemplated for a minute demanding the sort of featherbedding by the taxpayers that farmers get and want more of.

Perhaps they should dump unwanted shoes in telephone boxes and wait for the sympathy of the state and public in return.

£64,000 p.a. - for what?

WE must be thankful for small mercies. If the Foreign Office had decided to appoint a full-time specialist gender equality adviser, rather than a part-time one, to make sure that women are fairly represented in the department, it would be costing you and me nearly £64,000 a year for the person's wages.

What peculiar talent does it take to command such a rate of pay? I don't know. But, having already appointed an ethnic minority liaison officer, the Foreign Secretary gives us a clue of what he expects.

"I need a Foreign Office that is representative of all that is best about modern Britain," he says.

"That means men and women from all walks of life and from the different communities that make up a multi-ethnic Britain."

Fine. But if the order is that, at the FO, people of all races and sexes get an equal opportunity, does not Robin Cook only have to decree it for it to become the rule - rather than have someone on more than £1,200 a week pro-rata to do the same?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.