Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Wednesday 1 June 2011

It's not fair, waaa waaa waaa.

PERSPECTIVE is a tricky thing to grasp when you think the world revolves around you.

So Cheryl Tweedy lost her job but still got paid £1.2m for it and is authorising her 'people' to put out stories that she is "fragile" and "depressed" and, far more believable considering her criminal record, "raging". Never mind there are 2.4m unemployed who don't get that pleasure, and thousands a week who join the dole queue with the bare minimum redundancy payout.

Prisoners whinge they lost the vote along with their freedom, and demand the right to IVF with their wives and girlfriends on the NHS. Perhaps you should have thought about that before you committed the crime, you anti-social sods?

The reason selfish people complain about "poor me" is that after a bit people give in just to shut them up. That's why Ratko Mladic, the man known as the Beast of the Balkans and alleged mastermind of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 people, was arrested and promptly sent on a day trip to lay flowers on his daughter's grave.

(The same grave, FYI, that journalists have been reporting his regular visits to for at least five years. Why were the cops never there waiting for him?)

Rights are wonderful things but the current mess of our hotch-potch legislation leaves a lot to be desired. The Human Rights Act is an exercise in vagueness so open to interpretation that judges have built a de facto privacy law on the basis of 17 words outlining "a respect for privacy and family life". It doesn't say anything about protecting adulterers, criminals and the corrupt from public disgrace, but that's what it's being used for. And the same words are being used by prisoners to demand IVF so their partners can conceive while they're in jail.

It all comes back to a general complaint of "but it's not fair". But as my first chief reporter used to growl at me while dragging on a ciggie: "Life's not fair, get used to it."

What's needed in these matters is a little perspective. And the best way of achieving this would be for us to send all our prisoners, Ratko, and yes even "Ya jiggaboo!" Tweedy, to a nursing home.

If they had cold food, a wash once a week, were left alone and unsupervised in a tiny room, had food put just out of reach and were left to rot in their own urine while paying £1,000 a week with no hope of ever getting out, they might understand what unfairness really is.

Meanwhile our grandads and nanas could go to jail, where they would have access to showers, hobbies, walks, a library, gym, pool, education, free prescriptions, dental treatment, IVF if they felt like it, bedding washed twice a week, their laundry done, a guard to keep an eye on them and bring meals and snacks to their private room in which they could have a computer, TV and radio. They could have daily phone calls and regular family visits and pocket money from the taxpayer.

And that, my friends, would be fair.

 Try looking at it again.