The John Blunt column

THE council prodnoses have been having a field day all over East Lancashire of late "returning the pavements to the people".

Or, if you look at this officious interference another way, they have been having a high old time ruthlessly and hypocritically hounding shopkeepers for an offence from which they have exempted themselves - even though they are the biggest culprits.

Holy writ from County Hall - now being slavishly acted upon by our town councils - decrees that those pavement advertising boards you see outside shops, cafs and so forth are a safety hazard, despite them being around for donkey's years.

They are, so this busybody edict says, a distraction for drivers and a nuisance for pedestrians and a danger to the blind and disabled.

Maybe they are, but no more than the far-more-numerous lamp-posts, traffic signs, benches, bollards, litter bins and statues that our councils have plonked all over the place.

Yet, here they are threatening traders with fines of up to £2,500 and, as we saw in Clitheroe last week, actually going round confiscating the signs and throwing them in the back of a lorry. But where's the justice in this - jeopardising the livelihoods of countless shopkeepers when the councils themselves are doing more than anybody to jeopardise public safety on the pavements?

And just how do they explain the loony logic of them encouraging - nay, ordering - thousands of people to routinely clutter up the footpaths with those darned wheelie-bins that they have foisted on folk?

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. But it seems that these meddlesome morons have nothing better to do.

Trendies need to clean up their act

THAT suede-booted rag, The Independent, reacted with typical liberal-trendy scorn to Jack Straw's rejection of the celebrity-backed campaign, launched by its Sunday stablemate, to decriminalise cannabis.

"New Labour does not want to scare off the Home Counties' Daily Mail readers it picked up at the election," it sniped.

But, surely, it's not a question of hanging on to the votes of the suburban middle class, but simply one of the Government not wanting our streets cluttered up with stoned, workshy, druggie lay-abouts who are of the same ilk as the idle winos Mr Straw promises to get rid of. The stupid trendies who think society would be improved by encouraging and increasing the number of dopeheads in its midst must already have addled their brains with the stuff.

She who dares wins

HAVING bashed the Government last week for failing to support the traditional family, I must today pat Social Security minister Harriet Harman on the back for daring to run the rule over a scheme that adds an overdue "or else" element to Labour's pledge this week of jobs for everyone.

For Ms Harman confirms she is studying a system they have in the state of Wisconsin in America that forces single mothers to go back to work when their babies are three months old with the threat of losing their benefits if they don't.

And it works. Over there, in 10 years, the number of families on welfare has dropped from nearly 100,000 to fewer than 36,000.

But it's not just a plunge in benefit dependency that's needed. If we are to keep the traditional family as the bedrock of a decent, stable society, we need to decrease the number of feckless single, teenage mothers bringing up anti-social louts-in-the-making. At present, we are paying them to do just that - and being rewarded by lifetime sponging on the state and a juvenile crime explosion.

Harriet should go for it.

Nursery stuck to the point

FOUR-year-old Marcia Asher's mum was furious when she collected her at her nursery school. The child was wearing a sticker which said: "I was in trouble today for hitting one of my friends."

The sticker, mother Julie claimed, was degrading. The nursery at Mansfield, Notts., denied it was malicious, but apologised.

Still Ms Asher is not content. "I won't be taking her back. They made me feel I was not doing my job as a mum."

Actually, I do not see why the school should apologise or why Ms Asher should be so angry.

For if it was doing the job of teaching her daughter the difference between right and wrong, it was engaged in a task that wise and sensible parents would be glad to have done for them when they are not there.

These beasts should get the chop

THERE will, I am sure, not be a jot of sympathy for child sex killer Robert Oliver who was forced by an angry mob to flee his home in Swindon this week just 72 hours after leaving jail. Served his time, paid his debt to society? Absolute rot!

This man was part of a sadistic gang of perverts who tortured and killed young boys.

That he was smuggled out of jail by prison officials and given a false identity after doing just eight years of a 14-year sentence is an outrage.

But even greater is the fact that he was ever in prison at all.

For if our parliament was not packed with cowards who spit in the face of public opinion and the need to protect children from evil perverts like Oliver, he would have swung from the hangman's rope long ago - to nationwide applause.

As it is, this monster is on the loose somewhere else now, with only the paper-thin protection of the loopholed Paedophile Register and police vigilance to defend children from his preying.

If, for goodness sake, our politicians will not bring back the noose or life sentences that mean life, then, surely, they ought to bring in mandatory castration for all serious cases of sex abuse.

How about it, Mr Home Secretary? Before some outraged parent with a more acute sense of justice than the current law is understandably driven to a do deserved DIY-job on the likes of Oliver.

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

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