Recently by George Tyndale

In his New Year message to the nation our Prime Minister told us that in the coming twelve months we must display the blitz spirit.

And just as the British people faced up to the German bombing we now have no choice but to summon up our stoicism, grit our teeth and see it through.

We were supposed not to be able to spot the big lie embedded in this patronising guff ---the idea that the catastrophe which awaits us in 2009 is the doing of some outside enemy, some force beyond our control and certainly beyond the Channel.

And in believing that the enemy might be in a bunker in Berlin we were supposed to completely overlook the fact that the guilty man is in fact in Number 10 Downing Street.
Gordon Brown has had his hands on the economy of this country for the past ten years.

It was Chancellor Brown who told us he had seen off Boom and Bust while presiding over the biggest unsustainable boom in our history.

It was Chancellor Brown who talked of "light" control of our banking and financial system when the whole edifice was being eaten away by the worms of greed, recklessness and worse.

It was he who put in place the new financial supervision system which was supposed to control dangerous excesses and to spot looming crises and which miserably failed to do either. Even the Bank of England now admits the system was woefully inadequate.

It was Chancellor Brown who encouraged growth based on private and public debt, who poured billions into public expenditure excesses when he should have been putting aside reserves.

He brushed aside pubic warnings that our monstrous mountain of unstable debt was threatening to become a disastrous landslide.

He oversaw a massive expansion of public sector jobs and a vast benefits free-for-all to hide the continued shrinkage of real employment.

And when the inevitable began to happen he told us that our economy was in better shape to weather the storm than any other on the planet. Another lie.

The size of that untruth can be judged by the fact that our public borrowing-- which he told us would be £25 billion this year --will instead reach £100 billion at least. And experts predict that our economy will suffer a bigger economic contraction than any developed country.

Now facing a New Year in which 1,000 people a day will lose their jobs, tens of thousands will lose their homes and untold numbers of firms will go bust he has the effrontery to tell us that we need to summon up the old British pluck. And break into a couple of choruses of Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Hitler? I suppose.

Even the normally somnolent Church of England has woken up to the enormity of his failures and misjudgements. There is hardly a Bishop in the country who has not condemned his policies as morally corrupt.

Given what this man has done to this country we all have a perfect right to be out in the streets demanding his immediate resignation, at least.

And calling for a full police investigation into the financial chicanery that got us into this mess.

An end to the lunatic policy of attempting to spend our way back to a position from which we got into this mess in the first place.

And for our politicians to come up with a vision of a future that might be both morally acceptable and economically sustainable.

And singing "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Brown?"

I'm sure that cyclist Chris Hoy is a very decent bloke. He is certainly very adept at riding a bike.

And if you accept that the BBC Sports Personality of the Year can be a representative of a sport that is of no interest at all to 99.9 per cent of the population then he was, no doubt, a worthy winner of that accolade.

But the suggestion that Mr. Hoy, winner of three gold medals in Beijing, should become Sir Chris in the New Year's Honours is plain daft.

Just as barmy, in fact, as the decision to make Kelly Holmes a Dame for winning a couple of races in the previous Games.

Merry Christmas!

That's not just a sincerely meant greeting. It also happens to be a prime example of why the Royal Mail is in such deep trouble.

We just don't need the postman like we used to.

And not just because being able to send electronic messages means we posted five million less letters last year.

Nobody who wants to transmit information that is either important or urgent would even dream of putting it in the post.

MPs on the House of Commons Children's Committee were shocked to be told that more than three children die each week because of abuse and neglect.

After being given the grim facts, chairman Barry Sheerman declared them to be "the most horrific figures I've ever seen brought into the public domain".

But why were he and his colleagues so shocked?

These appalling figures are well-known to the rest of us. Three weeks ago, in fact, they were reported in detail in the George Tyndale column.

Double murderer Peter Tobin will probably spend the rest of his life in prison. But that's only because he is already 62.

Tobin was already serving a life sentence for the rape and bludgeoning to death of Polish student Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006.

He has now also been found guilty of killing and dismembering the body of schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton seventeen years ago and burying her body in the back garden of a house in Margate, Kent.

On top of this the odd job man had a long history of sexual and violent crimes including sexual attacks on two fourteen year old girls.

Yet despite describing what Tobin had done as "among the most evil and horrific acts that any human could commit" the judge in the latest hearing sentenced him to just 30 years.

Given that Tobin is now condemned to a daily life of centrally heated idleness--at a cost to you and me of around £40,000 a year--it is quite feasible that he could yet totter of out of jail and enjoy the end of his worthless life on benefits.

A man as depraved and loathsome as this should not be given even the slightest glimmer of hope that one day he will be able to walk free.
So just how bestial you have to be to get a real life sentence in this country?

Two men have been give a whole life sentence this year--Steve Wright who murdered five prostitutes in Ipswich and Levi Bellfield, 39, the West London bouncer who was found guilty of two murders and remains the chief suspect in the disappearance of schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

But even counting those two the number of prisoners condemned to actually die behind bars stands at just 37.

As many as ten life sentences are handed down every week in our courts. On average "life" turns out to be just over 10 years.

Now look across the Atlantic. Compared with our three dozen whole lifers the Americans have 30,000.

It was one thing to walk away from the death penalty. Ever since we have been walking away from any real penalty at all.

What a tragedy Michael Jackson did not make it to Britain to contest the High Court action brought against him by Sheik Abdullah Bin Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa.

The second son of the King of Bahrain claimed that the King of Cosmetic Surgery owed him £4.6 million.

Sadly, the action was settled out of court.

Which means that Mr Jackson avoided the need to drop in just when we needed him most.

When I first heard that a health authority had attempted to force a 13 years old child to have a heart transplant I was appalled.

And that was before I knew anything about Hannah Jones.

Now that it has become clear that Hannah is a remarkable, intelligent, courageous and articulate young woman the sense of outrage has simply escalated.

Teenage girls who watch a lot of sexual activity on TV are twice as likely to get pregnant as those who don't.

This is the finding of a major research project in the United States which studied 2,000 youngsters aged between 12 and 17.

Researchers identified 23 programmes popular with teenagers which had high levels of sexual content, including Sex In The City and Friends.

By the end of their three year project a quarter of those who watched a lot of these shows ended up pregnant. In the group which did not watched less the figure was just 12 per cent.

We're supposed to be very excited about the purple tomato.

This is the sad looking salad item developed by scientists in Norwich which has changed colour because it has been genetically modified by being given two genes from a snapdragon.

The result is that - as well as being purple - it carries increased levels of something called anthocyanins which may offer protection from some forms of cancer.

Perhaps.

We can't be sure because the only tests so far have been carried out on mice which themselves have been specially bred to be peculiarly susceptible to developing cancer in the first place.

And in any case there are a few problems here.

Even if the purple tom does have some anti-cancer properties, how are we going to get people to eat it? As everybody knows, the population is already resistant to eating anything vaguely healthy, which includes salads.

If we can't get people to eat nice red tomatoes how on earth are they supposed to be persuaded to eat purple ones?

Anyway, the new tom contains only the same amount of anthocyanins as a spoonful of cranberries. So why not eat a spoonful of cranberries then? Or a snapdragon for that matter?

The truth is, of course, that the gushing announcements of this research - paid for with our money - have more to do with the promotion of GM technology than the realities of healthy living.

The Government is, for some reason, desperate to foist GM crops upon the British countryside despite the potentially disastrous effects they could have on our soils and all existing plant life.

So it is desperate for a few public relations victories in order to convince us that GM is a cute and cuddly science that can do us nothing but good.

Indeed, news of the purple tomato came alongside the leak of papers that reveal a new EU campaign to push GM down our throats.

The initiative - agreed by representatives of 27 Governments including our own - is designed to speed up the widespread introduction of GM crops and to "deal with" public resistance.

Prepare yourself for news of the bright orange lettuce that makes you thinner, richer, younger and much more attractive to the opposite sex.

Over 600,000 children in England and Wales go to nursery for up to ten hours a day.

A report into what they eat there has revealed some alarming findings. Tens of thousands of the toddlers are being crammed with junk food that is actually banned in schools. Some establishments spend as little as 25p per child on the meals eaten throughout the day.

According to the organic campaign group the Soil Association, which commissioned the report, what our youngest citizens are surviving on is "unhealthy, highly processed and potentially dangerous".

This is of course a scandal. And it is blindingly obvious that nurseries should have been included in the guidelines which are supposed to be combating poor health and obesity in our schools.

But this is the second worrying insight into life in nurseries that we have been offered in the space of a few months. The last one, from Ofsted, revealed that almost 700 nurseries were "inadequate".

But these remain details. Here we have well over half a million children who are being brought up in mini-communes by strangers, deprived of any real family life and certainly banished from the love and understanding of their mothers and fathers.

The fact that they are being fed junk and not given the level of care and stimulation they need is scandalous.

But the big question remains unanswered -should we be inflicting such a start in life on hundreds of thousands of children at all?