I was gently berated by a reader yesterday for not having posted a rant in a long time. In fact, he told me that there has only been one this month. Sorry – I have been finishing up a fairly lengthy book and have had a few family problems to deal with but here I am – back and raring to let rip once again.

I was amazed and slightly horrified at Bunter J and Pritstick Patel’s joint announcement of their new ‘crime bill’ last week. Do none of these modern politicians ever actually think about crime and policing? If they did, it would not take them long to discover that preventative police patrolling – on foot please – plus properly deterrent sentences for those convicted more than once hugely suppress crime and disorder.

What has happened in this country since I pounded the beat in the early sixties is that more people have seen crime and bad behaviour as a minor risk, so the number of active villains has gone up enormously. The politically correct police have responded by waiting for them to commit crime, then chasing about wildly, getting nowhere and giving up. I get the feeling that many of them are reluctant to get their hands dirty.

Meanwhile, our liberal prisons fill up with multiple repeat offenders, most of whom don’t much mind being there, because they run the ruddy show and make huge profits through largely criminal enterprises while they are banged up.

But all our supposedly well-educated Prime Minister and his tough talking but apparently inactive Home Secretary can come up with are populist gimmicks that any moron could see through – chain gangs in high visibility jackets and dedicated police officers to soothe our brows once we have become victims which of course is far too late.

Please Mr Johnson, try thinking for a change. Read up on crime and policing then think some more. If you did that, you might actually do some good.

Meanwhile this gimmicky government is spending one hundred million pounds on an anti-obesity campaign. 

Why for God’s sake? Surely people are already well aware that if they stuff their faces with doughnuts and junk food, they’ll get fat. And if they get fat, they’re more likely to get sick. 

You don’t need a weatherman or any other sort of modern ‘expert’ to convince anyone of that. 

Nor do we need the Nanny State wasting millions telling fatties who don’t mind being fat what to eat. 

It is surely their own funeral and I for one do not want my hard earned tax payments going to cause a miniscule dent – and it will be miniscule dammit – in national slobbery.  

Every one of us should have the freedom to make our own choices in life. If people do not mind being fat, then let them be fat dammit!

I was puzzled to watch reports of the recent floods in Germany, whose huge rivers have happily flooded throughout history. They droned on about global warming as if this was unquestionably the reason for rivers overflowing. Was it? How could we know for sure so soon? How come so many had died? Couldn’t they have been warned in time?

Now I learn that timely warnings were in fact given. A British expert, Hannah Cloke, who is professor of hydrology at Reading University, spoke of a monumental failure of the system, adding: “I’m disappointed that particularly in the cities you had people washed away. That suggests that lots of things are going badly wrong. It’s no use having massive computer models predicting what’s going to happen if people don’t know what to do in a flood.”

The European Flood Awareness System issued an extreme flood warning earlier that week and questioned why the toll was so high. And the German weather service, DWD, said it had passed on the warning to local authorities, who should have been responsible for organising any necessary evacuations. Yet you need to search to find this news, hacking your way through the modish dogma about global warming and climate change.

The climate has always changed dammit and I can’t wait for cold and windy Princetown to start warming up.

In the media coverage of the mass and completely illegal migration from France to Britain, a lot of reports seem to be based on a total misunderstanding of what is going on. When British vessels pick up these illegal migrants from boats supplied for their use by gangsters, they are not ‘rescuing’ them. They are helping them to make an unlawful entry into this country. This is exactly what the gangsters intend, and British authorities are meekly doing what the criminals want them to do.

The word ‘rescue’ should be reserved for people who, through no fault of their own, have got into difficulties at sea, thanks to unforeseeable events such as storms or wrecks or collisions. Those folk do not mind where they are brought ashore, as all they seek is safety.

People who deliberately set out into congested, deep water in boats unfit for that purpose, and who would angrily object if they were taken back to their point of origin, have not been ‘rescued’ when they are helped to arrive in Britain.

Incidentally, apart from these dinghy people, is anyone else fleeing France at the moment? I know they are having problems in the cities but only the illegal immigrants are actually taking to the water.

Pritstick Patel keeps assuring us that she has the situation under control but the number of illegals has already broken all records this year and is steadily rising. Few of them look like genuine refugees either, so why can they not be sent straight back to where they came from?

But no – Britain is housing them, feeding them and giving them pocket money to keep them going. I feel that there is something very wrong with the system somehow.