July 2009 Archives

THEY say there is no fool like an old fool.

Certainly, there is no fool like an old football manager.

Ron Atkinson, the former West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa coach, did not win many friends when he unwisely uttered remarks about black footballer Marcel Desailly live on television.

The Cafe Latte society immediately labelled him a racist.

This despite the fact that he has been instrumental in encouraging black footballers throughout his career.

Now you might think that the old adage 'once bitten, twice shy' is sensible.

Not Atkinson.

He agreed to appear in a forthcoming fractious episode of Channel Four's Celebrity Wife Swap, which will be aired next month.

The Conservatives want to launch dozens of new TV stations across the nation to broadcast local news.

Why?

If existing regional TV news programmes have any useful function at all it is to demonstrate that television is totally ill-suited to localised news.

In some areas both BBC and ITV regional news is little better than a joke.

And even at this level ITV says it can no longer afford to produce and transmit the service.

Which is why the Government wants to slice £80 million a year off the cash received by the BBC from licence payers in order to keep ITV regional news on air.

There are more than a million unemployed people in this country who have not worked a day since New Labour came to power twelve years ago.

The best part of another two million have been without work for seven years or more.

There are any number of explanations for these bleak statistics just revealed by the Department of Work and Pensions.

Some of the jobless are, of course, simply bone-idle and enjoy sitting on their backsides while living off the rest of us.

Ronnie Biggs is a despicable old crook who deserves to die in prison.

But Justice Secretary Jack Straw's decision to ensure he does just that poses one very large question.

What about the rest of them?

Biggs was given 30 years for his part in the Great Train Robbery back in the Sixties.

The irony is that under our laughable parole system all he had to do was behave himself, say he was sorry and in 10 years he would have walked free.

That would have been a quarter of a century ago.