I found the picture of Bunter Johnson and the Bearded Trotskyite entering Parliament yesterday quite amazing for their contrasting expressions. The roly poly one was beaming all over his chubby chops while Corbyn had a scowl that would have melted soap.

I confess I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the Queen’s speech and its attendant promises but with the majority he now has, Bunter will need to do more than promise us the world.

It won’t be enough to hire an extra 20,000 coppers for a start. He has to ensure that they are deployed on the streets, fighting crime and tackling burglary instead of pursuing politically motivated prosecutions for ‘hate crimes.’ More foot work and less paper pushing is required.

The fire brigade must be reminded that their job is fighting fires, not ‘celebrating diversity’ and putting the safety of firemen ahead of the lives of the people they’re paid to rescue. The Armed Forces should be told they will be judged on their ability to defend us against our enemies, not on how many sexual and ethnic minorities they employ. Ministers should ensure that schools exist to teach children to read and write, to teach geography, maths and foreign languages – not fill their heads with a revisionist Left-wing version of history and endless propaganda about climate change and gender fluidity.

Above all, Bunter must ensure that the extra billions being pumped into the NHS go to benefit patients and do not disappear inevitably into the black hole of the self-serving  bureaucracy that run the hospitals.

With an eighty-seat Tory majority and the support of most ordinary people, Bunter must sort out the mess that is parliament for once and for all.

If Labour is to have any credibility at all, they must get rid of Corbyn’s hard left supporters as well as the so-called moderates like that po faced clown, Keir Starmer who not only went along with the corruption of a once-respectable political party, but instigated its cynical attempts to thwart the democratically expressed will of the people it purports to represent.

What comes next for Labour? I don’t think I really care. A prolonged period of silence – at least four years, ideally – is overdue. Thankfully Squeaker Bercow has gone. This preposterous garden gnome abused his high office to derail Brexit and should be destined for well-deserved ignominy. Mind you he seems to be cultivating a second career as an entertainer now. He has just been paid to appear on an Italian talk show in which he shouted in Italian his catchphrase ‘Order, order.’ It is probably the most suitable role he could possibly play I’m afraid. He was always much more suited to the role of a novelty act than a serious politician and once he’s exhausted that vein, other opportunities await – town crier, placard holder announcing the end of the world, unicyclist, footman, food taster for a dictator, door-knob polisher. They would all suit him admirably. No, forget about all those jobs, let’s give him the career he was born to – a somewhat inept but very funny circus clown. The only drawback is that he is being paid vast sums for his performances and that is an insult to the rest of us.

I hope but am certainly not sure that we will hear no more from that weird woman, Gina Miller. Having failed to stop Brexit with her expensive court cases, she is threatening more legal action to throw a spoke into Bunter’s proposed constitutional reforms, so she could be back on our screens fairly soon.

Hopefully too we will hear no more from the Tory turncoats Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, David Gauke, the Totnes quack and the rest, who thought they were entitled to overturn the democratic will of the British people but were turfed out by their own indignant constituents. Now perhaps pro-EU has-beens Johnny Major, Michael Heseltine, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair will also shut up, although the last of those still kids himself that he is a force in the land.

We’ve had to put up with decades of being patronised by the smug, self-appointed metropolitan elite and betrayed by an arrogant, self-serving political class. Hopefully – only hopefully at this stage – those days are now over. Please let the government of this country be run with a modicum of common sense for a change.

You know I have never agreed with the concept of police and crime commissioners. What are they for damnit? Police forces have always been run by experienced coppers and it is only in recent times that the wheels seem to have come off. Now they are run by amateur politicians who surely know nothing about policing the streets.

For me, the calibre of most of these numptys is typified by the police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire. This buffoon has had to resign after sending suggestive messages and a photo of his own wedding tackle to a vulnerable woman.

Jason Ablewhite is said to have struck up a dialogue with the fifty-year-old at the Cambridgeshire force’s headquarters. The lewd comments continued for nine days until she reported him to his force via its online system after she ‘threw up’ after getting the image of his private parts.

He should be prosecuted for bringing his force into disrepute damnit. The coppers of Cambridgeshire do not deserve this.

Why is everyone so keen to take offence these days? An anonymous mother from Plymouth has told the media that she was subjected to a Facebook tirade for calling the guy who tumbles down the chimney at this time of the year, Father Christmas.

Apparently this is insulting because it is not ‘gender neutral’ like the American name Santa Clause. Well I am sorry. I have always called him Father Christmas and while I continue to believe in him, will always do so.

Even more startling in the newspapers today was a piece on a leading academic and psychotherapist, Dr Sonja Falck who wants the calling of anyone a nerd or smarty-pants made a hate crime and dealt with by law. She tells the media that such ‘divisive and humiliating’ anti-IQ insults can have negative effects that last a lifetime and she wants people with the highest IQs in the country, who make up just two per cent of the population, to be protected by the same hate crime laws as ethnic, religious and sexual minority groups. 

She is herself obviously highly intelligent and a member of Mensa but I fear she must be losing her marbles a little. She also wants the ‘insults’ braniac, know-it-all, smart-arse’, dweeb and brain box to be covered by hate crime legislation.   

She clams victims of anti-IQ slurs often experience the same level of distress and isolation as other minority groups at the receiving end of verbal abuse. Extending legislation to include these words would, she claims, help stamp out the victimisation of more than one million Britons with an IQ score of 132 or over – in other words, members of Mensa.

Dr Falck has just launched a new book called ‘Extreme Intelligence’, a study of discrimination against those with especially high IQs. I don’t think I will be investing in it I’m afraid.

She said: “The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s. Other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently. Society at the time turned a blind eye to their impact by passing them off as harmless banter and it is only with the benefit of hindsight and academic research that we realise how wrong we were.

‘The same can be said about anti-IQ words like nerd, brainbox, geek, egg-head, dweeb and smarty-pants. Slurs such as these will continue to be used unabated at the expense of the brightest members of society unless and until legislative action is taken.”

Oh come on. When anyone gets the better of me or hits me with a sharp retort, my own immediate reaction is to call them ‘smarty pants’ or the more vulgar alternative and I do it with a smile. Besides, haven’t the new government got enough on their collective plates not to have to worry about this politically correct drivel? I don’t like the taste of most vegetables but if I say so, will I offend millions of vegetarians and vegans and thereby commit yet another hate crime? Where on earth is this nonsense going to end I wonder?

Yet Dr Falck, who lectures at a London university and also runs a highly respected Harley Street psychotherapy practice, says the legislation must be widened to include anti-IQ slurs, which she describes as hate crime’s ‘last taboo.’

No Doctor; someone else just like you will think of something else to be mortally offended by and we will all end up scared witless about expressing our own sincerely held views.

I have never had my IQ tested and don’t suppose it is very high but surely a little bit of common sense is preferable to being a ruddy genius who can’t cope with life. We all get perceived insults thrown at us through much of our lives and to my mind, it ought to make us stronger and better able to cope. If Dr Falck is serious about this, she might try imagining what it was like to attend boarding school at a very young age with choir boy looks and a name like Lemon.

Yet I can only smile when I think back on my feelings then and don’t believe the insults and bullying did me anything but good.

I was pleased that the Conservatives won the general election and pleased that they gained themselves a majority – and a big one at that – in Parliament. At least it gives them a lever to work with.

But listening to Bunter Johnson’s victory speech outside Number Ten, I felt a prickle of apprehensive doubt. It was a speech that could have been made by that horrible Blair fellow or his gloomy successor Gordon Brown. It could even have been made by Crafty Cameron and it did nothing for my peace of mind.

There was the usual hearty pledge of ‘carbon neutrality’ (whatever that means) by 2050. As far as I can see, the only way they can achieve that is by strangling the economy, destroying efficient power generation and making us all pay for windmills through higher gas and electricity bills. Yet China who have the world’s fastest growing economy sensibly depends on cheap, reliable coal. There must be a moral there somewhere.

Bunter also promised ‘colossal new investments in infrastructure.’ Does this mean even more hugely inefficient projects like HS2, which do no good, cost billions and massively overrun their budgets and timetables – at our expense.

There’s a promise of a ‘long-term NHS budget enshrined in law, 650 million pounds extra every week.’ Oh come on – no amount of extra money can pull the NHS out of the mire in its present form. We could spend every penny the country has on it and it still would not work as it is supposed to. Had he promised a cross party plan to overhaul the entire NHS set up, I would have had more faith.

And there’s the usual thoughtless nonsense about police numbers. This is vacant politicising I’m afraid. The problem with the police is not how many of them there are. It is the fact that they spend their time doing the wrong things, and refuse to return to the simple, solitary foot patrol, which was the original reason for their existence. I know. As a young man, I pounded British pavements for seven long years before going back to my own country. In those days, policing worked damnit!

Unfortunately Bunter is a populist rather than a conservative. He is a London bohemian who doesn’t understand the basic concept of being faithful in marriage. He has proved himself a serial adulterer and doesn’t seem sure how many children he has actually sired. In normal circumstances, I would not hold that against him but suddenly the man has been given enormous power.

He is also rich enough to have no idea as to just how bad, and how crammed with indoctrination, state schools have become and like all senior politicians he doesn’t have to worry about crime and disorder. Since he was Mayor of London, he has surrounded himself with aides who encourage the left wing and politically correct thinking, so beloved by the Corbyn followers.

I was particularly unimpressed by Bunter standing in front of a backdrop inscribed with the words ‘The People’s Government,’ That is a phrase that could have been concocted by Blair’s thuggish sidekick, Alastair Campbell damnit and it filled me with foreboding.

Bunter grandly told us that, ‘In winning this Election we have won the votes and the trust of people who have never voted Conservative before and people who have always voted for other parties. Those people want change. We cannot, must not – must not, let them down. And in delivering change we must change too. We must recognise the incredible reality that we now speak as a one-nation Conservative Party, literally for everyone from Woking to Workington.’

Again this sounds too much like the Blair creature in full flow. Is Bunter perhaps trying to make the Conservatives into New Labour? Crafty Cameron tried this – remember his ‘heir to Blair’ pronouncement? But he came unstuck because he just couldn’t get his own party to like the European Union. Nor did the people. So many of us had come to identify the EU with two things we greatly dislike. One was the abolition of Britain itself and its replacement by a slick, glossy, corrupt and grasping new society that seemed vaguely repellent.

The other was the arrival of migrants in numbers too vast to integrate, with the result that almost every town or district now has a number of separate communities.

How many of us understand or worry about trade deals or tariffs. Most of us – including myself – can’t tell the single market from the customs union. Yet for three years we have been forced to listen to continuous petulant wrangling from our elected leaders without there being any possibility of agreement.

This I am sure is what caused the tidal wave that gave Bunter J his huge majority. Yet when the Conservatives say they’ll ‘get Brexit done,’ they don’t actually mean that the great immigration wave will be undone or reversed. Nor can we expect a rolling back of the cultural revolution that has swept away so much of what was specifically British about customs and laws.

They’re mainly talking about technical trading matters, and the resolution of those will last for years to come. But they will be able to say that we have left, which is after all what the referendum was all about.

And those who hoped to get their country back will be left staring around them and seeing the same old mess. That is why, although I am thankful that the Marxist lot didn’t get in, I am a wee bit apprehensive about the current crop of Conservatives and particularly their leader.

While the British Media clowns write either gushingly or scathingly about the election result here, the media in Zimbabwe are reporting ‘Feasting in a Time of Famine’ over there. The annual conference of the ruling ZANU (PF) party was held this weekend in a little town called Goromonzi and at a time when the United Nations report that eight million Zimbabweans (over half the population) are in urgent need of international food aid to save them from starvation, the sheer excess of the political leadership is grossly obscene.

For seven thousand delegates, VIPs and the top leadership, one hundred and fifty cows were slaughtered to feed them, as well as five tons of chicken and eight tons of maize meal. Add to that bread, rice, fresh produce and other food items completely unobtainable for most Zimbabweans.

Ninety buses provided transport for the faithful even though fuel is in desperately short supply, four boreholes were drilled for water, a large transformer with a back up generator was installed for electricity when most of the country is in darkness and a car park for thousands of cars was constructed.

This frenzy of feasting and opulence is in stark contrast with the realities of life for most Zimbabweans. The average monthly income for a family is approximately four hundred zim dollars, bond notes or whatever paper currency they are using at the moment. A single small chicken in a supermarket costs ninety of these worthless units. A ten kilogram bag of maize meal costs one hundred and nineteen; a loaf of bread costs nineteen, a litre of milk twenty-five. A single mango costs twenty dollars and this in a country where mangoes have always grown freely. Even in the towns, people only have water once a week if they are lucky, electricity only comes on between ten in the evening and four thirty in the early hours. Queues of many hundreds of cars waiting for fuel are an everyday occurrence and if Zanu (PF) cars or government vehicles come along, they are given preference over ordinary motorists.

In the hospitals, the few doctors left say they are praying for their patients as they have nothing to help them with – no equipment, no medicine, no supplies. How many people are suffering and dying at home is obviously unknown.

The country is in a shamefully desperate state and perhaps the reason I have fears for Bunter Johnson’s tenure in Downing Street is the fact that my relatively prosperous homeland, Rhodesia was handed over to the corrupt thuggery of Zanu (PF) by the last Tory prime Minister with a whacking great majority – the late Margaret Thatcher.

I hope that was not an omen.

There was only one item that made me smile in my extensive reading of the newspapers this weekend. A lady columnist quoted the nineteen fifties film star, Joan Crawford on the subject of Christmas parties.

‘Remember, if you are hosting a party this festive season, always add a splash of vodka to EVERYTHING. Nobody ever knows and everyone ends up having a wonderful time.’ 

Somehow I think they were happier days. There was far less about everyday life to worry about – except perhaps hangovers.

At last the general election is over and with such a huge Conservative majority, I had hoped that the country would settle down and start pulling together.

But no – there were anti Bunter demonstrations in London last night and I watched a particularly rancorous Question Time programme on the iplayer this morning. Admittedly it was a London audience but it did not make for easy viewing with many irritable arguments plus claim and counter claim. What is the matter with these people? Surely, they must realise that it is time for the Nation to come together and move on, yet it seems that nobody in this day and age is prepared to accept any view that differs from their own.

I fear that this way of looking at life is what leads to eventual anarchy.

The day was a good one for me though as I received advance copies of my new book, Ivory Challenge. It is another short novel that while being a love story of sorts, also tries to show the difference between trophy hunting and poaching. I suppose it is my own small attempt to counter the general hysteria that accompanies trophy hunting these days. I don’t want to hunt myself but I can understand the people who do and believe it or not, professional hunters are the most efficient conservationists of all.

I am often told that photographic safaris are equally good for conservation but I’m afraid I can’t agree with that. Eco tourists as they are called look at a totally artificial and unreal Africa. Yes, they see a number of wild animals and take photographs that have been taken many thousands of times before, usually from the rear seats of luxury safari vehicles. Yes, it means that individual animals can live to a grand old age, but in the bush that usually means they are ripped to pieces by hyenas in their old age or starve to death because they can’t catch prey any more or have lost their teeth.

In hunting areas, the land is harsher. There are few roads and the ethical hunters shoot only the oldest animals, because (a) they are the ones on hunting licenses and (b) they are invariably the animals with the largest, tusks, horns or other attachments. In general hunting clients kill cleanly and if they do not, the professional hunter with them will ensure that the animal is followed up and despatched before it is allowed to suffer unnecessarily. This keeps the populations of individual species at a manageable level and in the process, brings money in to local tribesmen. This in turn means that the tribesmen look on wildlife as a source of income rather than a dangerous nuisance so they learn to protect the animals in their areas. They also keep poachers away rather than encouraging them as they have always done in the past.

Well meaning people tell me that all hunting is barbaric and if one takes the basic concept of an armed man stalking down and killing a noble creature, then yes it is, but there is a great deal more to it than that. Hunting and killing are in the genetic makeup of Mankind and surely it is better that this is used to benefit wildlife rather than allowing wild life to be snared, to die in agony or poached by unscrupulous people who don’t give a damn for the animal itself.

I could go on but would suggest you read the book. It is entitled Ivory Challenge and is available on Amazon for £7.99 or as an ebook on Kindle for £2.99 or if you want a signed copy, through me, for £8 plus postage, which in the UK amounts to £2. An extra penny for a signature that could be valuable in a hundred years time can’t be bad surely?!

If any of you do buy or read the book, please send me your comments when you have. For a professional scribbler, readers’ comments – whether good or bad – are what keeps us glued to our typewriters.

So go on, buy the book and tell me what you think. If my little tale can change the outlook of a few irate people who have never given the hunting dilemma any serious thought, then it will have served its purpose.

I wrote an impassioned rant about politics and the Media earlier today but with my usual technological expertise, managed to ‘lose’ the lot while trying to post it. I know it is not really lost and is doubtless cowering somewhere in the bowels of my laptop but I don’t have the energy or the time to search for it.

In the meantime though I was sent an article entitled The Immorality of Saving Elephants. As most of you know, I spend a great deal of my time lecturing on the need to save elephants so the title of the piece set me back a little.

I do read everything I am sent though – apart from advertisements for this, that or the other – and when I read the article by John D. Holm and Robert K Hitchcock, who are both American university professors, I was impressed.

Let me quote from the piece.

Over two-thirds of the world’s African elephant population lives in four southern African countries: Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. By contrast, in the remainder of Africa herd numbers from poaching and population pressures have been in dramatic decline.

One would think that the four states protecting most of the surviving elephants would be rewarded for their exceptional efforts. But to the contrary, these states have been punished. This outcome was strikingly evident at the August meeting in Geneva of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The voting parties to the Convention rejected a proposal by the four southern African states that they be given the legal right to sell their stockpiles of ivory on the international market. They proposed to use their profits to pay for wildlife conservation and village damage caused by elephants.

How on earth can CITES justify such a moral failure to reward the four governments which are successfully investing in saving over two-thirds of the world’s African elephants.

The CITES majority, led by animal rights groups in the developed countries, claim they must be pragmatic. Effectively, this pragmatism means preventing all trade in elephant products, regardless of the moral cost. A recent Economist essay states that this pragmatism derives from a simple correlation. The one-time legal sales of ivory CITES allowed to three southern African states in 2007 resulted in increased smuggling for over a decade. The theory is that legal ivory comes on the international market one year and creates demand thereafter for smuggled goods. Most surprising in the case of the last legal sale in 2007, the poaching and smuggling is alleged to still be evident in 2018, eleven years after the legal ivory went on the market.

This is arrant nonsense I’m afraid but let me go on with the article.

We would suggest that according to standard economic theory, the causation runs in the reverse: When there are no legal products on the market, the demand for smuggled products goes up. What the animal rights groups and CITES are doing is creating demand for poaching and smuggling by clearing the international market of all legal ivory. To add insult to injury they are unwilling to reward the African governments that prevent elephant poaching from engaging in delimited international trade, the profits of which should be used to fund policing the poachers.

Surely this must be obvious to even the most determined animal rights campaigners. If trade is allowed and ivory is available, the demand for illegal ivory must diminish. Black markets are particularly vile and the black market in ivory ranks second only to the black market in hard drugs in terms of profitability.

The animal rights cause is further undermined by the fact the key organizations in this movement raise hundreds of millions of dollars from their supporters for their activities in saving the elephants. Yet neither they nor CITES itself allocate any of these millions to compensate rural villagers in the four countries whose crops, livestock, water points, and people are endangered periodically by the massive wild beasts roaming free in their midst. Nor have these organizations offered to financially assist the four African governments that are using costly police powers to prevent poaching in their territories. In effect, the wealthiest countries in the world are employing their overwhelming power and influence to impose trade policies on African countries with much less wealth.

The immorality of the current situation is multi-faceted. The animal rights organizations are raising millions of dollars from their unsuspecting supporters to save the elephants in developing countries, and they are using that money to lobby their governments to impose a policy which:

1) does not achieve the objectives their supporters are promised,

2) forces African countries to fund these failed policies,

3) punishes governments which save their elephants, and

4) offers no compensation to villagers for financial loss and physical suffering.

The Authors are quite correct you know. My latest book Ivory Challenge has recently been published and although it is a little love story set in the African bush, I have endeavoured to put forward most of what these two chaps have said in their article.

The situation is desperate and it is time that CITES ignored the voluble rabble who comprise so many of the animal rights groups and brought a little real pragmatism to bear.

With their current policies, they are merely hastening the ultimate extinction of the elephant – a result that I spend a great deal of my life campaigning against.

I have just come back from a weekend house-sitting stint in Darkest Gloucestershire and due to fog, the journey up there took a good three quarters of an hour longer than it usually does.

At one point, I was peering into the gloom ahead of me and concentrating with everything I had when I was distracted by a motorway sign way above my head.

‘FOG’ it told me proudly. As if none of us knew! Visibility was less than twenty metres and traffic was crawling along, yet some pen-pushing paper-shuffler in his nice warm office spends time, designing a sign that informs in very large letters what Nature has already made abundantly apparent.

God protect me from fools in offices!

As we enter the last week of election campaigning, God protect us all from modern politicians too. Not only in Britain but throughout the ruddy world. I understand little about American politics but the American people elected Donald Trump without being subjected to the thuggery and intimidation so prevalent in my own country.

Trump is a braggart and in many ways a bit of an ass, but like him or not, he has done most of the things he promised and seems to me to have proven himself a better president than his immediate predecessors.

Yet when he attended the recent NATO summit in London, he was subjected to ridicule by a quartet of political buffoons and stomped off in a huff.

Presidential hopeful Joe Biden was quick off the mark with his political ad mocking President Trump. Only hours after Trump returned to America, the contemptuous footage was being rolled out across the globe in a damage maximisation bid.

‘Look, the world is laughing at him, world leaders cannot trust him,’ crowed Biden, showing footage of Bunter Johnson, Macron of France, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Canada’s Justin Trudeau sniggering behind Trump’s back at a Buckingham Palace reception. Their remarks were caught on an open mic because they were all too idiotic to realise that the presence of so many TV cameras tends to suggest that a number of microphones will be dotted around the room too. Yes, the saga certainly said something about the kind of man Trump is, but it said far more about his smug tormentors.

It seemed somehow pathetic to see this sad quartet of losers and chancers, who found safety in numbers and their joint ineptitude jeering at a political colleague who wasn’t there to defend himself.

Princess Anne is one of the few hard working Royals, but she didn’t do herself any favours either, hovering around at the edges of this group, snickering away with the best of them. Perhaps she had forgotten that her calamity-prone younger brother Andrew was banned from the event because he is up to his sweat-free neck in a rolling boil of sleaze and scandal.

Bunter was in the thick of it, of course. Yet with his priapic tendencies and chaotic private life, he has little call to laugh at anyone.  Many of us live in hope that come Friday, a solid majority and a good wind behind him will be the making of Bunter, both as a human being and a politician. But I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

Meanwhile Emmanuel Macron’s two-year presidency has been disastrous, with a strike that will bring the country to its knees, but worst of all is Trudeau, the idiotic Canadian leader who does yoga, had sympathy pains when his wife was in labour, wants to ban the word mankind because it is sexist and seemed to spend most of his youth wearing blackface make up at parties and then abjectly apologising for it.

Instead of laughing at Trump, this pratwinkle should be studying his economic record. For while America’s economy is booming, Trudeau has driven Canada’s into prairie dust.

Yet many professional Trump haters admired this pathetic display of playground nastiness as further proof of Trump being unfit for office. Well perhaps he is. I don’t know but hopefully the impeachment hearings will decide his future one way or the other.

In the meantime, whatever happened to statesmanship, to ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man,’ to strength of character, rising to the occasion and doing one’s country proud? All that seems to have disappeared from public life a long time ago.

Instead, we are left with this shower of half-baked twonks. The political class of today are more than just a disappointment – they are a disgrace to their profession and their respective countries.

And we have to elect more of them on Thursday.

I have always had mixed feelings about the thorny issue of capital punishment. In general, I don’t approve because few murders, no matter how brutal are carried out in totally cold blood.

Terrorism on the other hand is a different matter. Terrorist crimes are carefully planned and executed with no feelings for the innocence of the victims. As a relatively young man, I was heavily involved in the Rhodesian war and while the rest of the world looked on our opposition as freedom fighters, to us on the ground, they were terrorists, pure and simple.

I won’t go into details here because the memories still haunt my dreams, but the victims of that war were generally helpless and uninvolved. They were usually incapable of defending themselves and despite public opinion in the west, most of them were black.

Thankfully, capital punishment was in force at the time and convicted terrorists were hanged, which to me and to most other folk who witnessed their atrocities was the correct thing to be done.

For some years now Britain has been fighting – not quite the right word I’m afraid – a terrorist war. There has been a long sequence of killings of innocent members of the public, culminating in last Friday’s horrific events on London Bridge, wherein two young people were murdered while merely going about their daily lives.

Now it turns out that the terrorist involved, one Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism offences many years ago but due to the feebleness of the legal system in this country was released early to continue his war on innocents.

When he was convicted less than a decade ago, the judge gave Khan an indeterminate sentence – he could only be released after a ‘lengthy term of imprisonment’ if he convinced the Parole Board, he was no longer a danger to the public. That was as it should be but the initial robustness quickly unravelled. 

In 2013, the Court of Appeal overturned the earlier ruling and gave him a sixteen year jail term instead. This meant that, under the automatic early release regime imposed by the last Labour government, he would be set free just halfway through his sentence. Due to the system, not even the Parole Board was involved in the decision to release the man. This is surely highly disturbing and just as disturbing was the pathetic gullibility of the penal authorities. 

As soon as he was jailed, Khan pretended to have abandoned his violent fundamentalism. 

“I want to live my life as a good citizen of Britain,” he wrote deviously. 

His ruse worked so well that he became a poster boy for the supposed success of rehabilitation and deradicalization programmes, but as is now palpably evident, Khan’s assertion of civic responsibility was a front. He was still a terrorist at heart.

Tragically for those who died, the judiciary and academia were fooled, largely because of their addiction to institutional leniency. That outlook is also revealed, as Bunter Johnson indicated yesterday to Andrew Marr, in the early release of more than seventy other convicted terrorists.

Why for God’s sake. Even if they haven’t yet killed, these people are killers of the most barbaric sort. One recent study of European jihadists found that almost twenty percent of convicted terrorists become repeat offenders. 

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor who carried out a review for the Government of Islamic extremism in our jails. Yesterday he wrote that there are ‘shockingly bad’ deficiencies ‘in every aspect of the management of terrorist offenders,’ characterised by ‘jaw-dropping levels of naivety and bureaucratic obfuscation,’ which mean that rehabilitation courses are ‘easy to game.’ 

So the state is failing in its duty to protect us, especially with an estimated four thousand would-be jihadists in our midst. Unfortunately the term ‘jihadist’ lends them a spurious respectability as it makes them out to be fighting for a cause. While this may be true in a few cases, these people are terrorists at heart – inadequates trying to make a name for themselves at the expense of others.

Surely a stricter approach is needed and although I am no great admirer of the Conservatives, at least in Bunter Johnson and Priti Patel, they have two people at the top who seem determined to adopt a far tougher approach.

But what about Labour. Surely they must understand the feelings of ordinary men and women going about their daily lives in ever more likely danger from released terrorists?

Jeremy Corbyn does not give me a great deal of confidence I’m afraid. His Party was the architect of both automatic early release for prisoners and the 1998 Human Rights Act which has created a gold mine for the legal profession but undermined the fight against crime in general. 

In fact, Corbyn’s own oft-expressed philosophy is hardly a boost to the confidence of those who favour a tougher approach to the problem. An acknowledged terrorist sympathiser and anti-Western Marxist, he called the death of Osama Bin Laden ‘a tragedy’ and has questioned the shoot-to-kill policy against IS leaders. Is it any wonder then that the notorious extremist Anjem Choudary once called Corbyn ‘the voice of the oppressed.’

To distract from his past utterings, Corbyn at the weekend spoke of the need for more police, but that is not going to help I’m afraid. Police numbers were irrelevant in the Khan case, given how quickly and decisively they were on the scene. The real issue was Khan’s freedom to murder and maim. 

That is why Bunter Johnson’s policy would be a far more effective way of dealing with terrorists. 

If they stand by their promises, the Conservatives will immediately introduce longer sentences, to be served in full, if they win the election. For all that, a hung Parliament will mean more paralysis just when action is so badly needed against these murderous people.

I know capital punishment won’t be brought back, but sometimes it is the only answer to keep people safe when going about their daily lives. If we can’t hang them, put them away for ever even if it does go against their ruddy human rights.

Those two young people who were murdered on Friday had human rights too, but their rights were obviously not as justified as Usman Khan’s rights. 

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.

I was in the pub with a friend the other day when the ladies were putting up Christmas decorations. It seems to start earlier every year with Christmas culinary delights on supermarket shelves in August, but for me, the magic of Christmas has long gone.

As a boy it was always a magical time with a Christmas stocking and little gifts, most of which were home made. Nowadays that doesn’t seem to do and gifts for children become ever more lavish and expensive. Does that make them more appreciative I wonder? Somehow, I doubt it.

But for many, it is still a wonderful time of the year – if adults don’t spoil it for them. My youngest Grandson – bless him – prepares for the arrival of Santa with a great deal of refreshing enthusiasm, decorating the tree and leaving snacks and sherry out for the great man. He is getting big now but I pray it continues for a while yet.

Yet only this week, in a speech for which she has since apologised, the Mayor of West Bridgford in Nottinghamshire, Christine Jeffreys used a Christmas countdown event of all places, to tell an audience full of very young children that the rustling under the Christmas tree is ‘just mum and dad.’ What happens to these political bigwigs when they take office. Are they all compelled to undergo a lobotomy before donning their chains of office or is stupidity and lack of common sense a prerequisite for the taking of that office? This cretinous woman has intentionally spoiled a happy time for those children but I wonder why she stopped at that. Why not disabuse them of notions about the Tooth Fairy too? 

Of course they would have found out the truth soon enough as we all must do, not just about Christmas, but about life in general.  Children grow up so fast these days, terrorised by the likes of that irritating brat Greta Thunberg, confused by issues such as transgender that not in our wildest dreams would we have thought of during distant childhoods, but surely they deserve at the very least to hold on to the idea of a benevolent Father Christmas. 

The season of good will – huh! – is almost upon us. Don’t let’s shatter childhood dreams just yet. 

To illustrate my point a bit further, I can only shake my head in bemused wonderment when I read about the shenanigans going on at the moment with the political ‘debates’ taking place on television channels in the run up to the election. Last evening there was a debate between leaders on climate change (I didn’t watch it) and when both Bunter Johnson and Farage declined to participate, the Channel 4 organisers substituted ice sculptures for them. This despite the Gove fellow turning up and offering to take Bunter’s place. He was told that he could not as he was not the party leader.

Mind you, one report of the fiasco that I read claimed that the winners of the debate by a very long way were the ice sculptures themselves. The audience paid far more attention to their inexorable dripping than to the banalities uttered by the participants.

Which for me rather sums up the level of political debate taking place at the moment. I think I would prefer to believe in Father Christmas than in any of the political clowns squabbling to run the country.

At least I can trust dear old Santa.

Well it seems that having seen a dry riverbed in some exotic country to the East, Jeremy Clarkson has suffered some sort of damascene conversion and become a believer in climate change. Does that mean he will be gluing himself to picture windows next time the Extinction Rebellion clowns decide to close down major cities I wonder?

Of course the climate changes and always has. This world has seen times of excessive heat and times of excessive cold but it has always coped. Now it appears to be struggling but that is because there are far too many people and because there are not enough jobs to go around, a veritable army of bureaucratic paper shufflers has been created and they are exacerbating the problems of a changing climate.

Take the scenes we see in this country year after year when countless homes are ruined due to flooding. Firstly, the demand for the building of ever more homes to house the ever expanding population means that these homes are built in low lying areas and with the building of every single home, natural drainage disappears and the risk of further floods multiplies.

And of course all British rivers and flood plains are now ‘managed’ by one of the said pen pushing armies, grandly known as the Environment Agency.

Every time there is flooding, this vastly over staffed agency defends itself vigorously, but then they would, wouldn’t they? And with their overriding power their defences have been widely published. But surely the majority of these floods could be avoided with a little bit of sound common sense? Before control of the rivers, drains and flood plains, were handed over to this self important quango, those in charge were the river agencies and before them the local farmers and landowners in their various water-management groups. And although there were autumn rains which were often torrential, we heard nothing of widespread misery and crippling, uninsured financial loss. Because they didn’t happen. 

The local people knew their individual territories intimately and, as they farmed them, had a vital interest in their maintenance. They understood the countryside whereas the bright young sparks of the Environment Agency most certainly do not.

Theirs is a story of out of touch, office-based ignorance, of low-lying areas such as the Somerset Levels (remember them flooding a couple of years ago?) being left untended, the rivers and drains there left undredged in case a vole or a rare woodlouse is disturbed; crucial run-offs choked with weed. In short, a load of once free-flowing watercourses are full to the brim by late October, just waiting for a few more inches to burst their banks and bring disaster to nearby country folk.

We have politicians running around the country at the moment, each of them making wildly impossible promises as to what they will do if we vote for them. I would like just one of them to pledge to conduct a really thorough enquiry into not just the Environment Agency but our entire quangocracy. 

These people sit in warm offices far from the real world, shuffling paper as they work on their real agendas – expanding their size, staff levels, budgets, salaries, pension pots, expenses, rules and regulations – the really important agendas of life! 

When crises emerge, or even just threaten to emerge with time to do something, a holed-up civil servant behind double-glazing eighty miles away is a waste of space and almost inevitably they react when it is far too late. 

When local problems were handled locally by people with a personal and vital interest, there may have been a few disturbed dormice or newts but we seldom got entire communities wading through their devastated homes.

The bureaucratisation of this country has been steady and relentless until all our lives are now administered by ‘jobsworths’ many miles from the crisis – which is why we get so many damned crises.

This week there was more government inspired violence in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. Yes I know it is on the other side of the world and part of that dreadful place called Africa, but while Mr Corbyn is again threatening to preach about the evils of colonialism, can we not spare a thought for those people who are suffering and dying because the benefits of colonialism have been taken away from them?

Film clips of men, women and children being savagely beaten by uniformed policemen in city streets are rarely shown on the British television channels, nor do they appear in the daily papers. However, they are smuggled out and posted on to social media where they tend to make one’s blood run cold.

This sort of ‘legal violence’ should not be allowed in this gentle twenty first century. But where are the politicians or demonstrators of the western world when this is going on? Why are they so quiet about it? Come on Mr Corbyn; take Emmerson Mnangagwa and his governing thugs to task, not long dead colonial administrators of a bygone age.

Let Mr Mnangagwa know of your disapproval, not that he will care. He is oblivious to what is going on in his own country and while the Zimbabwean economy struggles, inflation rockets upward by the day and the majority of his citizens are starving, this worthy president of one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world flies out on five State visits in a luxury Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner. This gin palace costs a staggering seventy five thousand American dollars an hour to rent! The price tag on this latest trip for aircraft rental alone was twenty five million American dollars.

This did not even include the cost of food and luxury accommodation for himself and his large entourage!

The Vice President (as did Robert Mugabe) spends months in China and other foreign hospitals getting treatment for some secret ailment while four hundred doctors get fired in Zimbabwe and basic medical facilities are falling apart or have become non-existent as I told you the other day.

Hyperinflation is currently topping three hundred and seventy percent through poor governance and the complete lack of understanding of crisis management, or any management damnit.

Fuel and other basic necessities are largely unavailable. Unemployment is well over ninety percent. The media is controlled by the State and elections are routinely rigged.

Blame is packed on the colonialists, imperialists, whites and foreign countries that have imposed personal sanctions on a handful of leading politicians. No blame is taken by Mnangagwa himself. On the contrary, last week, ten city streets around the country were named after him!

Now it seems that Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party are going to encourage this corrupt buffoon by agreeing with him that everything that smacks of colonialism is inherently evil.