Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

  Oh, dear. I think I’ve been a bit naive again. Because I sort of assumed that in the run-up to the general election, all three political leaders had made it pretty clear that cuts would be necessary, and that as a result, all of us had reconciled ourselves to a few years of eating less and buying fewer electrical gadgets.

  I figured also that after we’d finished laughing uproariously at the plight of the Greeks, we’d realized that we, too, would be in for a similar period of austerity. But I was wrong, because so far as I can see, no one is prepared to change their lifestyle one iota.

  Let us examine the case of Nottinghamshire. The Tory-controlled county council and the Labour-run Nottingham council propose to shave a total of about £100 million from their spending and lose 2,000 jobs in the process. Have those affected reacted with a shrug of inevitability? Not a bit of it. They’re all working to rule, and their union is making Churchillian noises about going to war.

  It’s not just council staff, either. You’ve also got a lot of middle-aged ladies jumping up and down on village greens protesting about plans to close their local library and not listening when anyone tries to explain it’s all on the internet anyway.

  Elsewhere, tax workers were outside the Treasury because their office-opening hours have been cut and students in Glasgow were to be found waving banners over plans to lose eighteen staff from the university’s biomedical and life sciences department.

  Doubtless, the druids will be similarly angry after Danny Alexander told the Commons that a £25-million visitor centre at Stonehenge will not now be built. I don’t know how druids express anger but if Alexander turns up for work with a lot of warts on his face, I guess we’ll know.

  Whatever, the point is that no one seems to recognize the need for cuts in spending, and if they do, they don’t think they should be involved. So what’s to be done?

  One chap called the Jeremy Vine radio show last week to discuss the problem with David Cameron. In a thick Birmingham accent, he pointed out that if you took all the money from the richest 100 people in Britain, all of our problems would be addressed and the other sixty million people could carry on as before.

  Amazingly, Cameron didn’t think this was a very good idea, so the man from Birmingham came up with another one. The prime minister should work for nothing. And therein lies the problem. It’s impossible, really, to get people to accept the cuts when so many of them are bonkers.

  And because they’re bonkers, there can be no doubt that when the cuts do start to bite, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with a selection of petrol bombs and much police brutality. We are, it seems, on our way back to 1979.

  Last week I suggested a way of averting this would be to cut off Scotland. But no one in power seems to be taking that idea seriously. So I have come up with another rather brilliant wheeze: register Britain as a charity.

  The last time I looked, British people were giving more than £10 billion every year to help those less fortunate than themselves. That works out at more than £200 for everyone over the age of sixteen.

  We put money in the slot to cure cancer, buy swimming pools for wounded soldiers, build orphanages in Romania, help keep drug addicts off smack, improve living conditions in Gaza: the list is endless. We give so much to charities for the blind that there are now more guide dogs than there are people for them to guide.

  In recent months, I’ve bought pictures to provide music lessons for kids with learning difficulties, signed several rugby balls, supplied a boot full of dung to help keep my local town’s lido open and then I spent a night with Louis Walsh to raise cash for Palestine. I even bought the chef Richard Corrigan at one party and I’m damned if I can remember why.

  Then there’s The Big Issue. I don’t like it. I think it’s boring. But it is the only magazine that I get every week. Sometimes I buy the same issue three times. Why? When I read Private Eye, which I enjoy hugely, I don’t think, ‘Ooh. That was brilliant. I’m going to buy it again.’

  The reason is simple. We enjoy giving our money away. It makes us feel all warm and gooey. Which is why we almost always give whenever we are asked. No, really. I reckon that if I knocked on your door this afternoon, explaining that I was doing a sponsored drive to London, in a comfortable car, to raise money for the Amazonian tree warbler, you’d give me a tenner.

  And think about what you’re doing when you roll a 10p-piece into the lifeboat on the bar of your local pub. You are paying to rescue some drunken idiot from Surrey who’s had too many gin and tonics and fallen off his yacht in the Solent, that’s what. But it doesn’t stop you giving, does it?

  Of course, when you are really passionate about a charity’s aims, we are no longer talking about the odd 10p. People are prepared to move mountains, or at the very least climb them, to raise thousands. Tens of thousands, even. And that’s where my scheme comes in, because we are all passionate about the state of our nation.

  I’m proposing, then, that your local MP comes round to your house every week with a collecting tin and that instead of organizing strikes and what have you, unions organize sponsored bike rides to Germany. We can all get behind this, eating as many pork pies in a minute and jumping out of aeroplanes, and then we can appear in our local newspapers, in fancy dress, handing over massively outsized cheques for huge amounts to the exchequer.

  Other charities may react in horror to this but they shouldn’t, because when the cuts come, they will suffer just like everyone else. If we adopt my scheme, the cuts won’t come at all.

  20 June 2010

  No prison for you – just lick my cesspit clean

  For reasons that are not entirely clear, the question of prison reform seems to have cropped up again. Good. It’s very important we reform the system so that prisons become disgusting and unhinged. No electricity. No light. No heat. And full to overflowing with inmates who are allowed to eat only what they can catch, or grow in window boxes. Window boxes that they must make from their own fingernail clippings.

  Unfortunately, other people think that prisons should be about rehabilitation rather than punishment. That they should be places for quiet reflection, whale song and afternoon poetry by interesting lesbians. Dostoevsky thought this. And so, to a certain extent, did Winston Churchill.

  There is even a charity that exists to campaign for the rights of inmates and their families. And I’m sorry, but isn’t that a bit weird? Because when you decide to help those less fortunate than yourself, there are so many worthy candidates. People with no homes, no arms and no chance. People with hideous diseases. People with their heads on back to front. And that’s before we get to the heart-melting question of children and animals. So why, I wonder, did someone wake up one day and think, ‘I know who I’ll help. The man who stole my bicycle’?

  It actually happened, though, and as a result we now have the Prison Reform Trust, which apparently believes that a prison sentence should be used only for the likes of Peter Sutcliffe. And, even then, that he should be treated with tenderness and a lot of crisp Egyptian cotton.

  Well, let me make something quite plain to the lily-livered eco-hippie vicars who think this way. If you come round to my house this evening, asking if I’d like to buy the man who stole my television a gift, I shall say, ‘Yes. But only if I can shove it up his bottom.’

  It gets worse. Only last week one of the peace ’n’ love brigade tried to claim that Britain’s judiciary was in love with custodial sentences. Really? Because recently a furore erupted over a case in which Cherie Booth QC told a man found guilty of breaking another man’s jaw that he would not go to prison because he was a religious person.

  On that basis, the devout Osama bin Laden can hand himself in, knowing Cherie will simply fine him fifty quid. And the Archbishop of Canterbury now has carte blanche to kill as many badgers, and children, as he likes.

  Strangely, however, the Haight-Ashbury views of the trust are shared by the outgoing head of the prison service. Yup. Mr Mackay wants fewer peopl
e sent to jail as well. And so, too, do the Prison Governors Association and Napo, the probation officers’ union.

  Such is the weight of opinion behind the call for more community-based punishments, I decided to do a spot of research. And I uncovered some interesting statistics. Last year 55,333 people were jailed for six months or less, at a cost of £350 million. And, apparently, as much as £300 million could be saved if they were given community jobs to do instead. That’s a powerful argument, now that an ice cream costs £700.

  And consider this. It seems that only 34 per cent of criminals given community punishments reoffend, compared with 74 per cent of those sent to a nice warm prison.

  It’s easy to see why this might be so. At present, criminals tend to mix with other criminals. I, for instance, do not know any smugglers or murderers, and in all probability you don’t either. That’s because these people live in a society where their crimes are considered the norm. At my old school, the worse the misdemeanour, the greater the so-called ‘lad values’ that encouraged us all to be more and more badly behaved. And I dare say it’s much the same story in Wandsworth nick.

  Before you think I’ve gone all soft, consider this. If we take them out of their cells, dress them in orange jumpsuits, shackle their legs together and get them to hoe the municipal roundabouts in our local towns and villages, then they will no longer be among their own. They will be among us.

  As a result, we will be able to tell them things. And after they’ve spent six months on a roundabout, being told things, quite loudly, they may start to understand that their life is not normal and there is nothing particularly brilliant about shoving a pint pot into another man’s face.

  How brilliant is that? The hippie vicars are happy because the crims are out in the open air, getting fit and doing something useful. And we’re happy, too – especially if we are allowed to throw things at them as we drive by. Tomatoes. Eggs. Bricks. And so on.

  I’m starting to like this community punishment idea very much. And already I’m thinking of jobs around my house that need doing. Painting. Decorating. Licking the cesspit clean. Think. The offender would be able to see how a normal family lives and I would be allowed to call him names and hit him over the head with a stick.

  Criminals could be made to retrieve shopping trolleys from Britain’s most disgusting canals. They could be made to perform dangerous stunts at theme parks with killer whales and lions. And put the cones out on motorways. Imagine Boy George being made to put his head up a cow’s bottom to see if its calf is the right way round while you call him names and pelt his backside with veg.

  It gets better. Because if lags are made to pick up litter and weed central reservations, we’ll need fewer expensive prisons, it will save local authorities a fortune and, what’s more, the decent people currently employed by councils to do menial jobs would become free to earn a proper living in the private sector – inventing wireless routers that work, for example.

  I can see now that my views on prison have always been naive. And I can see why prison officers are so in favour of community punishment instead. Because, to put it simply, everyone wins.

  27 June 2010

  Move along, officer, it’s just a spot of dogging

  The last government was so enthusiastically bossy that in thirteen years it introduced 4,300 exciting ways for us to break the law. It even made it illegal to detonate a nuclear device. But there’s nothing new in this, really. All governments like to think up new rules. It’s natural.

  That’s why I smelt a rat the moment Nick Clegg emerged from behind his urn and asked ‘the people’ to say which laws they wanted repealing. The deputy prime minister? Of Britain? Asking us if we want fewer laws? Nah. Plainly there was dirty work afoot.

  And so it turned out, because on the very same day, a senior police officer was explaining that proposed government cuts meant there would be an inevitable drop in the number of officers. ‘Aha. So that’s it,’ I thought. ‘They have to cut the number of rules because they simply don’t have the money to police them.’

  This all sounds very brilliant, and you may be thinking that soon it will be all right to smoke in the pub and drive in the outside lane of the M4 and even, perhaps, use your dogs to scare off the fox that’s eating your children. But don’t get your hopes up because I’m willing to bet that in the next five years the number of laws that do actually get repealed is roughly none.

  So therefore we must turn our attention to the police force and wonder what might be done to save money there. Many may suggest that, instead of cutting officers, those in charge might like instead to cut the number of courses constables are obliged to attend before being allowed to climb a ladder, or ride a bicycle, or dive into a lake to save a drowning child.

  This, however, is probably fatuous, so I propose that we turn for inspiration to the Dutch. I realize, of course, that the Dutch police do not have the best reputation. Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse once did a marvellous sketch – ‘I’m sitting here with my partner and, I’m alsho happy to shay, my lover, Ronald’ – that reinforced a commonly held view that Dutch policing is one part crime-fighting to ninety-nine parts homosexuality.

  More recently, we were told that in an effort to combat anti-Semitic crime in Amsterdam, Dutch policemanists were using ‘decoy Jews’. The whole idea was ludicrous, even before we get to the question of: why not use real ones? Because, let’s be honest, Rutger Hauer in a skullcap isn’t going to fool anyone.

  I first experienced the Dutch police back in 1975 when a group of Indonesian Christians from the South Moluccas hijacked a train outside the Hollish town of Assen to complain about … actually, I can’t quite remember.

  Anyway, this was on the news a lot at the time and what I do remember is being staggered by the Netherlandic forces of law and order that turned up at the scene. In Britain at this time policemen were all Dixon of Dock Green, but over there they all looked like a cross between Jesus and Jerry Garcia. The main spokesman was wearing loon pants and a bandanna and had hair so long, I felt sure he would trip over it should an attack on the train be deemed necessary.

  But here’s the thing. I bet you can’t remember what the Moluccans wanted, either. Nor, I’m sure, can you remember how the stand-off ended. All we know is that a terrorist organization was formed, it struck … and then it simply vanished.

  In Britain, it took our smart, clean-cut, well-turned-out officers thirty years to deal with the IRA. And the way things are going, it’ll be even longer before they get to grips with Johnny Taliban.

  So you have to wonder. What do the Dutch have that we don’t? And if they do have something, could it work over here, now our police force is made up of two constables, one stapling machine and an elderly dog called Sam?

  I posed this question to a Dutch friend recently, and while I may have been drunk – or he may have been stoned – he said, ‘Yes. We are different from you. We can play football, for a kick-off.’ He went on to explain about how law enforcement works. Here, if you put one wheel into a bus lane, you can expect to go to prison for several thousand years. But there, if there is a sensible reason and no bus was present at the time, the police will get back to their tender lovemaking and leave you alone.

  Fancy some sex in the park? Try it here and you’ll still be struggling out of your underpants when Plod turns up. In a main park in Amsterdam, officers are advised to turn a blind eye, provided the coupling is fairly discreet. Want a joint while walking through Amsterdam? Well, you can’t. It’s illegal. But provided you don’t bother anyone else, the police won’t bother you.

  We have a word for that here, too. Well, two, if we’re honest. Common sense. And I wonder what would happen if it were applied; if you could make a phone call in a car if you were in a traffic jam at the time, or you could smoke indoors if everyone else wanted to smoke as well, or if you could read poetry at a summer festival without having to buy a licence.

  Imagine it. The police could worry about crime that does matter
and ignore crime that doesn’t. The savings would be huge and the increase in efficiency dramatic.

  Of course, this would require some discretion from the policeman at the scene. And that could be a problem. I know plenty of Plod I’d trust with the job but, equally, my life in Fulham in the 1980s was ruined by an overzealous constable who really would have done me for ‘walking on the cracks in the pavement’ if he’d thought he could get away with it.

  So here’s what I propose. We adopt the Dutch system – if such a system exists outside the football-addled mind of my friend – only we give it a little tweak. If the case is brought to court and the magistrate deems it to be a waste of his or her time, then the arresting officer is made to pay – out of his children’s piggy bank if necessary – the cost of getting it there.

  4 July 2010

  Burial? Cremation? Boil-in-the-bag?

  As we know, death is a great leveller; communism in its purest form.

  Your family may choose to remember you with a giant pyramid on the outskirts of Cairo, or they may choose to mark your passing with a bunch of petrol-station chrysanthemums, crudely tied to the railings on a suburban dual carriageway. But you’re still dead.

  It’s much the same story with the bodies of those brave First World War soldiers that were recently exhumed from their mass grave in France and buried with more dignity elsewhere.

  Now, their families can pay their respects in quiet reverence, which is very nice. But the soldiers themselves? Still dead, I’m afraid. I write about death a lot. It bothers me. I don’t like the uncertainty of not knowing how or when it will come. Will it be tomorrow and spectacular or will it be many years from now with a tube up my nose? And what happens afterwards? That bothers me, too.

  In my heart of hearts, I know that nothing happens. But of course I could be wrong. We may come back as mosquitoes – in which case I will find Piers Morgan’s house and bite him on the nose just before he becomes Larry King. Or we may come back as lions. In which case … I’ll do pretty much the same sort of thing.