Some people use spanners but words are the tools of my trade. I can remember in my youth we used to catcall at each other that ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.’

With hindsight that is obvious rubbish as all too often, words can and do hurt but in the twenty first century, this so called ‘hurt’ is taken to extremes.

Take the case of the Conservative candidate for Ludlow in the forthcoming election. Philip Dunne will probably face a police investigation for alleged hate crime but what was this heinous offence?

Mr Dunne said that a Sikh Labour rival for the seat was ‘talking through his turban.’ This allegedly racist ‘insult’ was taken badly by the said rival, Kuldip Sahota who promptly reported the matter to West Mercia police and demanded that Bunter Johnson suspend Dunne over the incident.

What puerile nonsense but oh so typical of the snowflake generation of today, many of whom like the worthy Sahota are standing to become our elected leaders.

Sahota is quoted as saying, ‘His comment about my turban was hateful. He shamed and humiliated me in a public attack on my faith and my community.’

What bigoted and pathetic claptrap! So if someone accuses me of ‘talking through my hat,’ – an old fashioned but still widely used English expression – am I to take offence and regard it as a hate crime?

Or do I just get on with talking through my hat to the best of my ability?

I did smile when I read about the Labour pledge to plant two billion trees by 2040. Taken literally, that is eight point three million a month, three hundred thousand a day, two thousand four hundred an hour and the scheme will cost two and a half billion pounds.

Quite apart from the impracticality of the logistics, where will these clowns put all these trees? There is no room left damnit! Everything has been or is being built on and space of any sort is at a premium in twenty-first century Britain.

I was sent an interesting article this morning on what is really happening to the world. The piece was written by a bloke called Kevin Casey and says what I have been saying and writing about for years. There are too many people in the world. Let me just quote from a couple of paragraphs in Casey’s article.

In this century, what we still mistakenly call economic growth is environmental destruction, pure and simple. Nothingwe do today can be called sustainable on a planet that has already endured four solid decades of irreplaceable resource use. The 1970s were the last sustainable decade for mankind. Unfortunately, at the time, no one took notice that a tipping point had been reached and passed.

Our current environmental woes have almost nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with how we’ve been treating the earth – not just recently but for many centuries. We’ve always abused the earth horribly and managed to get away with it because our numbers weren’t significant enough to cause lasting damage. Now our numbers are out of control, and that presents us with limited options.

How right he is. Surely even the most imbecilic of political leaders – I am not naming names – can see that the time for more and more development as they keep promising has long gone. It is surely time to try and repair the damage we have already caused – if it is not far too late.

I watched Question Time a couple of days ago and amid the usual lies, counter lies and childish arguments that went on, one remark did make me smile. The question was based on Labour’s claim that Brexit will mean selling off the National Health Service to America. The American writer Lionel Shriver was on the panel and she wryly commented, ‘Who in their right mind would want to buy it?’

That rather summed up the state of modern Britain I’m afraid.