Stoning firemen just for fun. A pastime created by bored young people, during the troubles in Northern Ireland, seems to have spread throughout the UK. It was really very simple, all you needed was some bottle crates, some old whisky and gin bottles, to steal some petrol and tear up a few rags, make about four dozen Molotov cocktails, and you were in business. Go down the backs of some houses over a hundred years old, and dig up the square sets paving the back lane, steal some money and take it to an illegal dealer in dodgy fireworks, and then just decide what you were going to set alight. It might have been a pile of rubbish, or two or three cars or maybe even a bus, depending on your whim, but one thing you were sure of was that the police and the fire service would turn up. Then the fun started, you pelted them, you bombed them and you shot them with fireworks, and because of the way things are today there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it, it wasn’t worthwhile.
I have a solution, you won’t like it, and nobody will take it up. It’s a mixture of David Attenborough’s friends saving the animals, kidnapping, and government accounting. We’ve all seen people firing anaesthetising darts into harmless little animals, and carting them a few thousand miles, then letting them go in a totally new environment among a few of their own species, whose language they probably don’t understand. It occurred to me that if we fired a few darts into some of these youngsters so they zonked on the spot, the cops could lift them, that’s kidnapping, and then take them and lose them in station cells, scattered here and there, like the government has done with our various records. If they can do it in one case, why not another? After a couple weeks they just open the door and let them wander home. In the meantime they will have discovered that they might have been a bit bored when they were at home, but it was nothing like the boredom of solitary confinement.
Stoning firemen 2. Wisdom comes in strange bundles. For a long time I have known the government accounting is more about face-saving than veracity. At the present moment there is a chasm between the figures of the incidents of the fire service and police being attacked, collected by the unions, and those put out by the government. The unions have an axe to grind as does the government, but what the latter should understand is that when your probity is at a low level in the eyes of the electorate, they are more likely to believe the unions, especially on past experience, than they are of government records. It will be human rights of the young people which will be the concern, while forgetting that the human rights of a mother and two of three children in a house that is burning, and is not receiving assistance from the fire service, because a fireman is in hospital and the fire engine is up on a ramp. Perhaps instead we should zonk the parents and send them on an excursion round the cells in the police stations.
Government statistics on immigrants. Over the weekend the papers were full of statistics about the actual number of foreigners living in this country. What is evident from remarks made on chat sites on the Internet, is that nobody believes them, and when they quote that it’s 2 million, people feel that is closer to three or even more. I have been over this ground before but I think that it is worthwhile just to underline the facts. Firstly there seems to be no control over where and how these people are employed, which means that local authorities cannot plan how to accommodate them, presupposing they are needed anyway. When this country had a population of 50 million, we seemed to be moving along very well without the need of outside help. Now the population is 60 million, but doubts have been cast on the fertility of the indigenous population, so where have the other 10 million come from? 3 million people on the basis of three to a house, demands a million new dwellings, but housing shortage is causing first-time buyers to get into a level of debt that they may never get out of, so the number of houses required is rising yearly, and our environment is being steadily stretched. The environment is not elastic, and neither is the infrastructure. The infrastructure is made up of engineering works which take time to modify or install, yet nobody seems to be planning ahead. We in Northern Ireland have a case in point of house building having to be curtailed in certain areas, because the infrastructure was inadequate. It seems we can yap on about these problems, but the government is so keen to tinkering with things like education and health, daily, it hasn’t time to take the overall picture.