​The Good
 
It’s good to have the opportunity to congratulate Facebook instead of criticise it based on its actions or in-actions. They are to make sure that ‘news’ which originates from state-controlled sources, for example Russia Today, is clearly labelled as ‘state-controlled media’. Speculation still rages, and no doubt will continue, over what role, if any, Russian agents played in the election of President Clinton by exploiting Facebook. Facebook, however, says that when the hotly anticipated UK election takes place, they will set up a “dedicated operations centre” to ensure no foreign powers meddle in that election through Facebook.
 
Another good…
 
It was said when Harold Wilson introduced the Race Relations Act in 1965, we were the first country in the world to legislate against the native. Whatever your view on that, it’s difficult to believe that there was ever any intention for that Act to be used to protect those who peddle hate in this country and train, recruit and encourage people to make bombs and engage in terrorism. I’m proud of the freedoms we foster as a nation and am delighted that in order to protect those freedoms for the benefit of all law-abiding people, the Sentencing Council is recommending doubling the minimum prison sentence for those who train, recruit and encourage people to engage in terrorism, to a minimum of 10 years. There will also be longer minimum sentences for those perpetrating such crimes.
 
The Bad
 
I’m proud of my country, it’s history and it’s traditions, warts and all. Of course, our development has been far from perfect and there have been horrors along the way which shame all humanity. On balance, however, we seemed to have got it about right, until I’d say 50 years ago when things began, slowly at first, unseen and almost for perceived good reason, to start changing for the worse. I get a little impatient when hearing abuse hurled at emerging countries. They forget that those countries are making a journey now not dissimilar to what we made centuries ago, but we were not doing it in the world spotlight.
 
I have written before in the Giuliani mode about knife crime and, in particular, in my beloved London. Now I read that “street rangers” are openly and visibly wearing stab vests in what I have always thought to be the tranquil Norfolk town of King’s Lynn. What is this telling us? What message does this send to the world, to the potential tourists? The street rangers brief is to be helpful to tourists and be on the lookout for anti-social behaviour, but they are kitted out with stab vests, radios and body cameras. It is obviously felt that this is needed and that shames, sickens and saddens me. The street rangers are funded by business leaders which suggests to me there is a real need, as I can’t see businesses wasting money on the project otherwise. There are enough demands on budgets.
 
It’s part of the same disease as the vile racism in Yeovil last week. Lovely, relaxed, calm, friendly Somerset, like Norfolk, was once quintessential England. I lived in Somerset from the mid-nineties to the mid-noughties and saw change. Now we have the problems of county lines spreading alarmingly. John Major was ridiculed, and one could say was naive and should have seen it coming and presented it differently, for his ‘Back to Basic’ campaign, but he was right. When we see Amazon offering a back to school deal of a backpack and an 8-inch knife for the bargain price of £43.98, we still don’t wake up.
 
How on earth did we get here? I’ve spent 50 years speaking out on this. This is bad.
 
Another bad…
 
In 2018, nearly 4,500 people died from drug poisoning in the UK. 3,000 of them were the direct result of abusing illegal drugs. 637 of those deaths, a 100% increase on 2015, were from cocaine use. It’s cheap, it’s easy to get hold of and has almost taken the place of the usual brandy or port at middle-class, middle-aged dinner parties. The older you are, the greater the potential for cocaine to damage your heart. You might argue that most of these older users have been using drugs for years, indeed they have, and I know many who fit that category, but even more alarming is the fact that there is a huge growth in the use by younger, skilled workers and folk working in the financial sector. Of course, with all illegal drugs, the damage they do is not just to those using them, or potentially those around them. The supply chain is based on threat, fear, intimidation and worse. Now I read in The Times of a new and frightening development in the smuggling chain. Highly sophisticated semi-submersible craft plying from Columbia, where 70% of cocaine on the world market originates, to Mexico. Up to forty feet long, one craft can carry drugs worth £150m and the four-day journey is a living hell for the crew of four - but the payday sees crew queuing up for the trip, as they get £17,500.
 
Let me repeat myself. I have asked before. How on earth did we get here? I’ve spent 50 years speaking out. This is bad.
 
The Mad
 
As we near Halloween, the hype reaches a new level for something that I simply don’t remember as a kid. A ‘Penny for the Guy’ was in full flow on 31st October and was, as Arthur Dailey would say, “a nice little earner”! We now buy 10m pumpkins and hollow them out to create lanterns and faces of all ilk, often simply throwing away the flesh which then decomposes giving off methane which does more environmental damage than CO2! It doesn’t stop there… we also buy 13 million, largely plastic-based, costumes that are binned after a single wearing. This creates 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste, or, put another way, 83 million single-use plastic bottles!
 
And finally…
 
Now, I’m not familiar with yoga or the legitimate hand movements of any religions, but I like to think I’d not confuse them with the raising of a single middle finger as an offensive gesture! Indeed, the Magistrates in Hastings did just that, despite taking 15 minutes, but one asks how on earth the matter ever got to Court. Hindu Sheila Jacklin has been doing yoga for nearly 30 years on the public beach outside her house. She points to sky, kneels, holds the palms of her hands together pointing upwards towards her chin resembling a praying stance, and conducts a variety of authentic yoga poses. But it appears that due to a dispute over planning consent, the police were called to investigate the Mudra symbolic gestures as offensive “F-you” gestures. You’d think that would be the end of it, but no, it was reported to the CPS. And yes, you guessed it, they decided to prosecute. When it got to Court the prosecutor, Paul Lamb, offered no evidence. He did however ask for an order to stop Mrs Jacklin engaging in her routines outside her house, which was denied. Her neighbours who kicked the whole thing off have gone quiet too – maybe they are on their knees praying!

​The Good
 
Hunger and malnutrition are amongst the most serious killers in the world.
 
The philanthropist Bill Gates, like Jonathan Dalton featured in my mad below, is 63 and this week gave a lecture at Cambridge University. He predicted that by 2040 medical and scientific breakthroughs will have rid the world of this curse. The advancements could also help solve the largely western problems of obesity, asthma, allergies and autoimmune diseases. Mr Gates told us that it is in the first three years of life the correct nutrition is so essential, otherwise the human body does not properly develop. He was speaking at the Hawking Fellowship where he was giving the lecture named after Professor Stephen Hawking. It will all come about by the advancement and development of “probiotic” pills, good bacteria to you and me. They create a healthy gut which is essential as the problems of malnutrition today affect 155 million children worldwide. That’s equal to the entire population of Bangladesh.
 
Mr Gates has also spent years and vast sums of money fighting malaria, which again he believes will be virtually eliminated by 2040. What wonder breakthrough will follow next? But as they say in sport, you can only beat the opposition in front of you, and from my involvement with helping Rotary to raise money to fight polio, I know that he trebles all the funds they raise, and polio has been eliminated from all but two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - although Nigeria has crept back onto the list…
 
Another good…
 
We have heard a lot of opposition to the culling of badgers which was seen as an essential action to cut TB in cattle. According to the National Farmers Union, 33,000 cattle were slaughtered last year because they had TB, but this transpires to a fall of 66% on the previous level. Not just badgers, but 67,000 wild animals have been culled since 2013. However, some experts believe that the risk of transmitting TB is greater from cattle to cattle than from Badgers to cattle.
 
As a kid I saw the effect of TB first-hand and indeed as a young man my uncle had been a sufferer - he had the cross scar in his throat. I’m not one to take a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but if this action of culling badgers, and other wild animals, has reduced tuberculosis in cattle by 66%, then clearly it is a good thing.
 
15 to 20 years ago when living in rural Somerset, I was walking across the square to a pub when a car roared through the village way in excess of the 30 mile an hour limit and winged a badger. It was clearly in great distress and one of the village old boys, a retired farmer, put it out of his misery and laid it in the corner of the front courtyard of the pub. I didn't really think about it, but I suppose if I had, I’d just thought him likely to bury it or burn it. Not so. A few weeks later he treated us all to a speciality, badger ham. Because it is illegal to kill badgers it was indeed a rarity, the prospect of it having TB never entered my head, but it was very pleasant, if a little sweet, although I’m not sure I’d want it with egg and chips, but then I don't eat eggs!
 
The Bad
 
I have written before about Extinction Rebellion and both the damage they are doing to the economy of London, which supports much of the rest of the country, and the double standards of wearing and using single-use plastic. As I have said before, they have made their case and it has even been taken up by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England. Speaking in Tokyo while the protesters were grinding London to a halt, he said business had to adapt and that “Firms that align their business models to the transition to a net zero world will be rewarded handsomely. Those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.” Pretty powerful support I’d say, but instead of working to implement what they have brought to the attention of the legislators, they demand the impossible of halting all greenhouse gases by 2025, just five years away. It simply can’t happen and I’m not sure how they are helping their own by queuing in numbers at MacDonald’s for lunch!
And this latest piece of disruption comes when we learn that from July to September renewable energy sources produced more electricity in the UK than fossil fuels.
Wake up, take a bow for what you’ve achieved and work together to implement what is needed. That way we might achieve it ahead of the current 2050 zero net emissions target and stop disrupting people’s lives and businesses. You need their support. We all do.
 
Another bad…
 
I’m not having a pop at the police, honest guv!! Across the board I think they do an incredibly difficult job, unbelievably well. But of course, when things go wrong they are completely in the public eye. Sir Richard Henriques, a retired High Court Judge, wrote in the Daily Mail this week on the handling of what has become known as Nick’s case, about Carl Beech making false claims of a VIP sex abuse ring. It is hard to believe, but what on the face of it can only be called institutional ineptitude, was rampant in Operation Midland. Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times also writes scathingly on the way the matter was handled.
 
I suspect we will never know the true cost of the original investigation or the investigation into the investigation, but what I find alarming is actually the same as when I'm waiting in a shop to be served. I’m in disbelief sometimes at the gross inefficiency of the way the staff, who genuinely believe they are doing their best but are malfunctioning. They have never been taught or trained otherwise, but in my view that starts not when they start work but when they start walking and talking. We now have compounding failure generation on generation. It appears everywhere in life that people simply operate rather than behave in logical, methodical, practical, efficient ways. I have long been critical of the gross inefficiency of the public sector and commented that the SMEs in this country, which collectively provide 60% of the jobs, would flounder if we had the productivity and negative efficiency of the public sector. That is not to criticise all those dedicated hard-working public servants who are doing their best, because they do not know otherwise. All of us in the private sector have learnt many lessons the hard way, but there is no one there to bail us out when we have problems. When people screw up in the private sector, despite the huge amount of employee protection law, they get sacked.
 
So much of the culture and attitude to life has changed in time on this planet. I can but only wonder how many villains slipped through the net, either not apprehended or for lack of a proper investigation in the presentation of the facts. It is time we woke up to the fundamentals of life where excellence in all things is our target and we no longer accept mediocrity in the name of political correctness.
 
The Mad
 
Now, I’m more than aware of the seemingly unstoppable advance of knife crime, not that I accept it is unstoppable. But this is lunacy and madness - where was the common sense in this?
 
Community-minded Jonathan Dalton, 63, who lives in Abberton, Essex, found himself in handcuffs with the threat of being tasered having trimmed brambles on a footbridge to keep the village tidy! Initially, the taser was pointed at him by an officer who had summoned support which arrived in the form of two WPC in a patrol car. A member of the public had reported someone carrying a small sword and a knife, which was actually a pair of garden shears that had been owned by Mr Dalton’s father. The first officer approached him in a patrol car then leapt out shouting at Mr Dalton to put the weapon down and when he replied that it was just his garden shears, the taser was drawn and he was handcuffed.
 
Now, I wasn’t there, but I’ve seen the pictures. He said he was carrying a pair of shears which would have been pretty obvious. But it’s not just one copper’s misreading of the situation, all three were present when he was handcuffed and searched, by which time of course they could see the truth of the situation. Essex police, like all other forces, have been having to make difficult manning decisions but this wreaks of ineptitude. I’m a defender of the tough job they do, but where has the common sense gone? Mr Dalton has written a tongue in cheek letter of complaint to the Chief Constable, but no reply.
 
And finally…
 
This is mad and made unfortunately humorous by the victim's name, Tina Springer, who was shot by a puppy! But it wasn't a springer, it was a Labrador puppy called Molly. She was in the back seat of her owner’s car when she was frightened by a passing train in Enid, Oklahoma, and jumped on a handgun, shooting Miss Springer in the leg. Why is Miss Springer in the car with a 79-year-old Brent Parks? She’s his carer. Well, I know the wind comes weeping through the plains in Oklahoma, but dogs shooting people?
 
This isn’t unique, however. It has happened before when another Labrador, aptly called Trigger, stepped on a 12-gauge shotgun and shot her owner in the foot in Indiana.

The Good
 
There has been an argument made for years that the BBC must be impartial because all sides criticize it. I’m not sure I’ve ever bought into that, you can be wrong twice and as my old nan was forever at pains to tell me, “Two wrongs don’t make a right!” Jon Humphrys has given us an insight but the kneejerk reaction to the Naga Munchetty comments about Donald Trump should perhaps be in this dispatch as madness. We don’t want bias presenters, and you don’t create equality just by giving both sides the same amount of time – Norman Tebbit used to have his stopwatch out and a few choice comments to make on that subject thirty to forty years ago! I find it insulting to be fed what are obviously lies in the chapel of politically correct balance. Whether the argument is left or right or even neither, when the interviewer is just making a point, often to make themselves look good, that ignores the underlying facts. Blinkered narrow questioning. As someone who receives a lot of compliments for my interviewing style, I want the discussion to inform, to bring out information and truth, not to be a head bashing confrontation! One of the best interviewers was not a so-called ‘heavyweight’ interviewer, but Jimmy Young!

Back to Naga and her comments. It is true that presenters are not there to peddle their own agendas or their employer’s agenda and the BBC must ensure that doesn’t happen. But George Orwell was right, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” But does that apply? I don’t think Trump complained! You are not impartial by allowing obvious lies to balance proven truth. It is unworthy. We hear a lot at the moment about trusting the people and it was heartening that so many BBC staff were critical of the original decision, but I bet the cynics will be questioning their motives.

But I want to rise above all that. In an era when the boss is often too afraid to stand up and be counted, Lord Hall made his own enquiries and said the original decision was wrong. If the press is there to hold the executive to account, and that is a major part of its role, then it was perfectly reasonable for Naga to say what she did. I find Trump’s comments repulsive and am not alone. But that doesn’t make me anti Trump and nor am I pro Trump. I decide on each issue and often find myself quoting dear old Jimmy Young who would skilfully get something into the public domain and then say, “I’m glad I didn’t say that”! We weren’t that, damagingly, PC then!
​
Another good…
 
Many of my roots and early experiences are around the greatest of all rivers, old Father Thames, and the London docks in which my family worked for generations. My home is on the river in Bermondsey and I have a secret and special place that I was taken to as kid for a treat. Unbelievably, it is still just about there between developments. So, it is with great delight that I see 53 acres of Rotherhithe being redeveloped at a cost of £4bn. It’s going to have everything, a far cry from the mess that Hitler created, and the sixties plastered over. New streets, a park, 12 acres of open public space, a million square foot of shops, two million square feet of offices and factories, and 3,000 homes - with a third of them affordable. It will create 20,000 new jobs. Heartening, but when it is all done and dusted we need to make sure that people appreciate and respect it. We must not allow it to go into decline the way so many developments did in the sixties.
 
The Bad
 
I find myself drawn to Trump again, who as I say is not all bad, and there are many Americans who now have jobs they never expected to have who will sing his praises. We live in a different world from the one I was born in. Things are instant and while most people struggle to connect the immediate past with the here and now, those who aspire to public life, unlike members of the Royal family who are born into it and I could quote the Duchess of Cornwall on that from ten years ago, have to proceed with more caution than, say, Lloyd George did with his sex life! As I wrote a while back in admiration of Jean Trumpington after her death and she had a great story about Lloyd George and a tape measure! The question of whether a private life is a private life and whether it is relevant to the public will always be unresolved. Perhaps that is best, but when the leader of the free world talks about shooting people crossing illegally into America from Mexico we have reached a new low. Just in the legs to slow them down, he is reputed to have retreated to, or maybe build a water-filled moat and pack it with alligators and snakes, and seal it off on the US side with flesh puncturing electrified spikes.

So, where did I get this from? Border Wars; Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigrants, by Michael Shear and Hirschfield Davis.
 
I was born after the war and it was rarely talked about, but I have met many who experienced the atrocities of Hitler and others who have been exposed to more of the same since. But this is not tolerable anywhere let alone in the land of free. Back to my old nan… two wrongs do not make a right.
 
Another bad…
 
Words fail me on this. It appears that Boeing knew about the potential nose-diving issues with the 737 Max airline. They experienced similar problems with the 767, the military version. They fitted a new fail-safe system into the 767 but didn’t fit that into the 737. Two crashes later and 346 lives lost they’ve still not said why they didn’t upgrade the civilian version. Maybe they thought they’d solved it another way, but the silence leaves a bad feeling.
 
The Mad
 
I cannot say that I have ever forgotten where I left my car, but I know people who have. I had a partner once who would often have to walk round the car park for bit, but this is something else. 19-year-old Connor Spear from Plymouth went to Bristol for a night out at a music festival. We have to assume that he wasn’t tipsy because he was going to drive home. But he couldn’t find his car! After two hours he gave up and caught a lift back with a mate. His mum took him back the following week and they spent 12 hours looking but to no avail.
 
In desperation, his mum put an ad in the Bristol Post offering a £100 reward and sure enough it was found, undamaged and unticketed a few streets from where they had spent 12 hours hunting.
 
Great to see the local press helping out, but what worries me is that this lad gets a vote!
 
And finally…
 
I’m going to run a couple of things together here. Girls are not allowed to wear skirts anymore at Stowmarket High School because they have glass staircases, and skirts might give rise to upskirting! Firstly, I’m intrigued as why they have glass stairs and secondly how they got past the old ‘Elf and Safety’ geezer! Leave that aside, I’m taken to my interview with Emma Sayle where we talked about the simple issue of respect. As one parent commented when talking about the new, and disliked, school uniform, it can’t be about the glass staircase as the teachers still wear skirts! Food for thought there, but total madness - as is the police being called to a house in Walkergate, Newcastle, because two-year-old Elizabeth and her five-year-old brother, Stephen, were playing naked in a paddling pool in the back garden. Someone had anonymously tipped off the NSPCC, but the officers said they had no cause for concern and the matter is closed. There is probably more to it, but I wonder if whoever kicked off and tried to start a mad waste of time and resources, is one of those criticising the lack of police resources. Ummm…