Recently in Current affairs Category

RELATIVES of Ronnie Biggs say that the release of the Great Train robber will make a big 'spiritual' difference to the family.

Well, that's nice.

I'm sure that the family of train driver Jack Mills, who never recovered from being beaten up during the 1963 robbery, will be delighted.

Mr Mills, you may recall, was 58 at the time of the attack.

He was battered with the handle of an axe, and handcuffed.

He never returned to work. In 1970 he died of leukaemia.

Biggs was handed a 30-year sentence but escaped after 15 months and went on the run for more than 30 years.

The vicious thug lived the high life in Australia and Brazil, held up two fingers to Britain and was treated like a VIP when he decided to come back for free medical treatment in a stunt engineered by The Sun.

Now he is all over the national news, thanks to Justice Secretary Jack Straw's shameful U-turn.

After previously blocking the release, saying that Biggs had shown no remorse, Mr Straw decided to let the robber go on "compassionate grounds" - because he is frail and suffering from pneumonia.

Michael Biggs says his father has expressed regret for the robbery, but does not regret "living the life he had".

Jack Mills, of course, has been all but forgotten in the mass hysteria.

He did not have chance to live the life he might have had.

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.

The Home Office is inviting us to be shocked and amazed that the number of women fined for being drunk and disorderly has risen by a third in the past three years.

What we should be outraged about is that the numbers aren't even HIGHER.

The statistics show that total number of females who paid a penalty for being legless reached just 7,930 in twelve months.

That's a mere 21 a night for the entire nation.

An enthusiastic young copper could find that many female drunks in any town centre on any Friday night.

Boys as young as 12 are to be given "condom cards" so that they can pick up free contraceptives.

A quarter of all violent attacks are now carried out by women.

Every day 240 females are arrested for violent attacks.

We are supposed to be shocked by these new Home Office statistics.

But why?

Obviously what we are witnessing here are women demonstrating some long-hidden natural inclinations.

TV celebrity Bear Grylls has been appointed as the new Chief Scout. Mr. Grylls is the star of Channel 4's got-up action series "Born Survivor".

The show features the 34 years old supposedly surviving in hostile territory. But it has already been admitted that when he was portrayed as roughing it in the wild places of California he was in fact spending his nights in a luxury hotel.

The "sulphuric gases" that surrounded him turned out to be the work of his production crew and a smoke machine.

So presumably the nation's 450,000 Scouts can expect some fascinating new celebrity-style challenges under the guidance of their youngest ever leader.

Perhaps bracing outdoor weekends will in future be centred on the requirement to leave a hotel bedroom window open at night. And tough tests of enterprise will involve Surviving For 48 Hours Only On What Can Be Purchased From Waitrose.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that servicemen and women serving overseas are protected by the Human Rights Act.

This decision threatens to unleash a flood of compensation claims from the families of men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will also create a new level of nightmare on the battlefield. Senior officers feel operations will be hamstrung by decisions being affected by or even questioned under the terms of the Act.

After four years and the spending of £100 million no-one has been convicted in connection with the July 7 bombings in London which took 52 lives.

This may tell us a great deal about the ineffectiveness of our security forces in combating small cells of extremists.

And more about their shortcomings is likely to be revealed next month with the release of a report which will detail how MI5 and West Yorkshire Police missed opportunities to monitor two of the suicide bombers.

But they're not the one ones to blame ...