Pity the perverts.

POOR old sex offenders. They have such a hard time of it, don't they?

The stigma, the questions, all that nasty old blame. It's rotten really and it's not like they can help it.

Which is why a judge - with a keen sense for the mood of the public, 51 per cent of which in this country is female and almost 100 per cent of which isn't a judge - has told a pervert it would be "utterly cruel" to send him to jail.

Andrew Jackson, the pervert in question, attacks young women in parks. He approaches schoolgirls and talks to them about sex. He's flashed a girl of 13, and these are just a few examples of a larger pattern of behaviour. Police have spoken to him twice before about stalking young girls in playgrounds and woods, but Jackson has a low IQ and a form of autism so he's not really taken it on board.

Yesterday Jackson admitted a sexual assault on a 21-year-old woman on a park bench, who was saved only when a friend heard her cries for help and pulled him off her.

He's not a rapist, but he is also not what you might call safe to be out and about.

He is out and about though, because Judge Jeremy Richardson QC seems to think that sex offences happen because men, whatever their IQ, just can't help themselves.

The judge said Jackson was "eccentric". He added that because "you have never had a full sexual relationship, it must be very frustrating" and "you are very much to be pitied". He told him to sign the sex offenders' register and have two years of community supervision.

I'd love to think the judge took pity because of Jackson's mental condition, but I doubt it. His words imply a belief that the crime could be explained by the fact he was a virgin, that there was a pent-up impulse any man is naturally a slave to.

It is not far from talking about frustration and pity to mentioning other words like natural, healthy, and normal. It is not much of a leap at all to say that willies are beyond anyone's control and that they can be blamed for bad behaviour, rather than their operator.

The fact is that most men can help it and manage to get through life without assaulting anyone. Those that don't tend to say things like 'I couldn't stop myself', waving their bits like a Get Out Of Jail Free card which makes judges and juries feel sympathy for men who cross the line even when they know it is there.

The true reason for Jackson's crime is not that he is a male, but because his brain is wired differently. His condition makes him clumsy and obsessive, and that's why he follows women and girls around. A woman with a similar set of mental instructions may well do exactly the same but no judge would say it was because she owned a mimsy.

Most of us would agree with that the last place Jackson needs to be is a prison surrounded by hardnuts and psychopaths, drug addicts and thieves. But he does need to be somewhere he's not going to be molesting women and frightening kiddies.

There used to be hospitals and special units for people with Jackson's problems - some of them awful, others amazing - but he can't be sent there for proper treatment because we've shut most of them down.

Instead he's being cared for 'in the community', which means he lives at home with his parents. I'll bet you any money they're good people who try their best and are at the end of their tether, with their allowances cut and no help on hand when they really need it. They are expected to provide the care of a hospital unit, for free, and forever.

The local police already keep a careful eye on Jackson - as I'm sure the neighbours do - but the judge has now decreed he will spend the next two years being formally 'supervised'. This will involve a weekly or monthly meeting with a social worker or counsellor who is already too busy, and who have no chance of changing things permanently because you can't rewire a brain.

As a result, Jackson will be back in a playground at some point. If we're lucky the police will spot him before he does anything and move him on, but one day they'll be busy doing something else. When that happens it won't be the police's fault, or his parents', or even that of his winky.

It will be because someone who needed more care than he got didn't have it. It will be because of a ridiculous Victorian notion that men are naturally rampant, and sexual offences are a normal consequence of masculine frustration.

It will be because a silly judge said a stupid thing, and didn't have the guts or the wit to see that the crime laid out before him had a cause far bigger and wider than anything that could fit in somebody's trousers.

A judge has the power to shame society into doing better.

This one just lets you do what you like.

Judge Jeremy Richardson QC: not bright.

All hail Naomi.

THERE are many awful things in the world that we just can't seem to get rid of.

Famine. Violence. Oppression. War. Richard Branson.

Perhaps we're just too used to it, too beaten down and oppressed by our own dreadful failure to make the world the beautiful place it could be.

We are stuck in the throes of a once-in-a-century global recession which a venture capitalist reckons is down to the fact people aren't getting sacked more often. A war in Afghanistan that's cost us £3 for every person on the planet has been one massive opium-growing project. And the Queen's lawyer has been misleading Parliament and authorising spying.

It's enough to make you weep. And we, the people, are too hide-bound and downtrodden to rise up and do anything about it.

But never fear! Naomi Campbell is here!

Yes, you read that right. After masquerading for nearly three decades as a grumpy supermodel Naomi has metamorphosed into a new Messiah who is going to save us all from ourselves.

(Will we also get shiny hair? - Ed)

Naomi unveiled her new religion on her 42nd birthday during a trip to the Middle East.

After a private tour of Bethlehem - I swear I'm not making this up - she emerged from her hotel in a shimmering white dress, sparking rumours she was a born-again virgin going to get married to her billionaire Russian boyfriend, even though he's already married to someone else.

Speaking to TV reporters at the mount, Naomi announced: "I’m happy to be here. Weapons and war, greed and oil … I hope it all stops. I care about health, about good vibrations, not destruction."

As the Beach Boys softly wept, Naomi lit candles in the Church of the Nativity on the spot where Jesus is said to have been born and visited the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, one of the holiest places in Judaism.

Naomi was attended by a number of disciples paid bodyguards, but for security reasons had to forgo riding on a donkey. Instead she opted for a cavalcade of blacked-out limousines.

Naomi, who like Jesus was born in humble circumstances except it was in Streatham and worked as a carpenter doesn't get out of bed for less than £10,000 a day, ate a simple birthday meal of Palestinian lamb and rice which she shared among a gathered throng of 5,000 some friends.

She had amazing hair throughout.

That was yesterday. She's not been heard from since, which personally I think is a shame because I was looking forward to her hearing her talk about the meek.

Perhaps she's spending three days in a cave before ascending the steps to her private jet? We can but pray. I'm sure her sheets will fetch a pretty penny on eBay.

Reports of her jumping on waterskis over a shark in the nearby Mediterranean are, I am sure, wide of the mark.

Many people will mock Naomi for this trip but I think that's unfair. Frankly we're lucky there is someone selfless enough to care and try to take our sins upon herself, just as willingly as she accepts what later turn out to be blood diamonds from vicious dictators who deliver them to her bedroom in the wee hours.

At a time when we lack leadership and faith, it cannot but be a good thing that someone with a long experience of an industry in which people starve themselves for financial gain can help millions around the world suffering famine and poverty.

And having been publicly accused 10 times, at the last count, of assault against her employees, friends and on one occasion police officers, and attending court-appointed anger management classes, I'm sure there's nothing she doesn't know about violence, oppression and war as well.

"But what about Branson?" I hear you cry. "Is there anything Naomi can do about him?"

Well as someone who was banned for life from British Airways planes after a dispute about lost baggage I should think the beardy billionaire's annihilation is merely a matter time.

"I SAID PROPHET, NOT PROFITS!"

Wedlock 'em up.

FINALLY the leader of the Free World has said what most people think - he wants to punish gays for the rest of their lives.

They've have had it good for too long, if you ask Barack Obama. Our homosexual brothers and sisters have a far greater disposable income than heterosexuals, no risk of unwanted pregnancies, no call to rush home when a brat has earache, far better shoes for men and of course vibrant social lives.

Barack's obviously got fed up with gays having all the fun, and now says that seeing as the rest of planet has to endure it they can damn well get married and see how they likes THEM apples.

Infrequent sex. Anniversary restaurant trips. 'Date nights'. IN-LAWS. Thanks, Barack!

If I were gay, right about now, I think I'd announce I was a treesexual or pastiesexual, anything where I wasn't legally able to marry my partner. "Oh that's a lovely idea Traditional Cornish, it's just such a shame society won't let us be free, shall we do something more interesting instead?"

The above is of course a joke. Well, mainly a joke. My own experience of marriage was happy-at-first and bloody-awful-at-the-end, which was neatly mirrored by a subsequent divorce that began in agony and ended in delight. The process of disentangling yourself from someone you no longer love is so grim it's the main reason I've no wish to tie myself up again.

That's just me; I don't think everyone should feel that way. But there's an awful lot of people who want to tell others how to live their lives, whether it's who to marry, how to marry, how to raise your children, how many to have or whether you ought to have them at all.

There's a serving judge who has set up the Marriage Foundation to campaign against the 'scourge of divorce' and thinks Hello! magazine causes marital breakdown. There's bills being brought into Parliament for new dads to take more time off work and to have access to their children guaranteed after a split, but nothing compelling lax parents to foot even some of the bill for their offspring. And every five minutes there's a new dictat about what is good or bad for children.

In fact, as I recall, it was the business of saying you wanted to get married in the first place which made everyone else pipe up with their idea of how we ought to go about it. That's why, I suspect, the suggestion of gay marriage has made people start sounding off.

Not one to be left out, my twopenn'orth is this: I can't tell anyone how to have a happy marriage, but I can tell you how to screw it up. The main way of doing that is to forget that the two people who got married are imperfect creatures, and that it's a 40-year project in which there's no point sweating the small stuff.

Getting married is many things - it's an expression of your love, it's a public promise, it's a nice party. It's saying this is how you will spend the rest of your days. It's chaining yourself to somebody until one of you dies and hoping they don't kill you in the meantime.

And it's asking for increased regulation and state interference in your life - it's rules, expectations, standards which not everyone can meet.

Getting married isn't a right, because sometimes it goes very wrong. Marriage is a freedom, the ability to make a choice, announce it to the world at large, and then live your life accordingly. I don't really want to do it again even though I'm allowed, but at least I can choose.

Anyone who says same-sex couples shouldn't marry isn't talking about rights or religion. They're saying someone doesn't deserve the freedom to do something everyone else can, purely on the basis of who they love.

Well, I've seen people get married who I think shouldn't be allowed the freedom to use cutlery. I've known couples that look like a divorce waiting to happen. Some of them bumble through and some of them don't. They've all had the freedom to try.

More importantly, all the history books show that people who try to deny freedom to others always lose in the end.

It strikes me that gay people can screw things up just as well as straight people can, and they ought to be given the chance. They can't be any worse at it than we are.

Once you've done it, you're stuck with it.

D'oh!

ONE of the principal things to admire in politicians is their sheer refusal to admit when they've got it wrong.

Yesterday Tory party chairman Francis Maude, hauled to the House of Commons to apologise about his absent Prime Minister's £250,000-a-head private dinner parties for donors, claimed it was all down to a 'rogue treasurer'.

Rather than say the mea culpa the situation demanded, poor old Maude was ordered to attack the reds for not having such a great record on party funding themselves. All watched on the teatime news by voters for whom £250,000 would buy at least two houses, not just a couple of courses of SamCam's celeriac soup.

And on exactly the same day Philip Smith, chairman of the Tories' membership arm, sent out this rather ill-timed letter offering people "the key to Number 10" if they will only dip in their pockets and cough up:

I'm reasonably certain the Lib Dems currently with their feet up on the Downing Street sofas won't take too kindly to the Tories starting to campaign for a 'real Conservative Government', and I'm not sure how much more Conservative they could arguably get.

Even more worryingly, the person to whom that letter was sent swears blind he is not, and never has been, a member of the Conservative Party, so the poor fools don't even know who's on their side any more.

Incidentally, it came with a Freepost envelope into which he has placed a short note explaining that Dishface gets quite enough money, thank you, and please remove me from your databases, then posted it back "because it costs them money".

At least the voters aren't stupid.

Welcome to my world.

BEING a journalist isn't all champagne and parties, you know.

More often than not you're sat in a stinky car filing copy on a laptop with barely any battery left in the rainy car park of a service station in the arse end of nowhere, because it's the first place you could find with a phone signal.

You've more than likely got out of bed at the crack of sparrow's fart to drive there, only to be told something you don't want to hear but have to turn into a page lead anyway, and already been bollocked twice for not having got there sooner, filed your copy yet or ringing the newsdesk when The Editor was talking to them.

Tired, depressed, under-appreciated, you file your copy, sigh, and then wander into the service station for a pee and something warm. Not too expensive, mind, because the days of claiming subsistence expenses while on the road are long gone.

And there, in a cabinet under some hot lights, shines the golden crust of a pasty.

You could queue up for some anorexic fries and a flaccid burger at the fast food franchise, but the act of engaging your mouth with either would only depress you more. You could try one of the stale tuna sandwiches sweating in a plastic wrapper, but it won't bring you any joy.

You want the pasty. Beef steak, potato, swede and onion - no carrot, carrot is wrong - all wrapped in a handy and tasty pastry container. It is the foodstuff of the working class, the food which since medieval times has powered industry and provided the humble employee the same sustenance it gave to royalty. It is better than a bridie, less messy than an empanada, more solid than a roti.

It sits there, glowing before you. Your fingers fumble for your money but, as usual, you've not much in your pockets. There are some bits of fluff, a business card for someone you can't remember, a paperclip bent out of shape to try to fix your mobile phone, and precisely £2.50 in coins.

'Thank God,' you think. 'That's how much a pasty costs.'

You fish it out from under the lights with a pair of tongs - you feel quite grown-up for being allowed to use the tongs in a shop - slide it into a bag, and nestle the warm package in your hand as you approach the till.

And there your dreams are dashed, as a hatchet-faced service station operative informs you 'at's free quid.'

You stutter. There must be a mistake. Pasties are cheap, affordable foodstuffs for the working classes, you protest. 'Free quid,' she insists. 'Wen' up inna budget, innit.'

There is no ATM in this godforsaken spot. No money in your other pockets, at the bottom of your bag or on the floor of your car, even though you hunt under the drifts of newspapers and crap with which it is covered. Disconsolately you return the glorious meal-in-a-pastry-coat to its spot under the lights, where someone wealthier may see it, buy yourself a poxy tuna sandwich for £2.45 and trail sadly back to your car.

You look at the sandwich. It droops. You sigh.

And the world, already quite shitty in so many major and far more important ways, gets a little bit shittier, just for you.

Thanks, Gideon.

Everything must go.

IT'S a hard economic fact that when you run out of money you have to start selling stuff off.

You go up to the loft and dig out that tent, admit the tennis racket would be better off in a new home and resign yourself to the fact that you will never make a very nice noise with that old guitar but it might get you £20 on eBay.

Of course you have to be careful to sell the things you don't need or can't use, and not more important stuff like a kidney or a lung or your car which are likely to come in handy.

If you're a government, you have extra reason to make sure you're not in the red but also to be careful about what you sell, because millions of other people may very well depend on the very thing you think is too expensive to run.

Which is why pre-Budget plans to privatise some parts of the motorway and trunk road network are... well... to be expected of the same people who were trying to hawk our trees to the highest bidder not five minutes ago. After all, if you're used to having your own forest and a private road, why would you think those things should be free?

Dishface's spin doctors have leaked that he is going to say in a speech we should open up the hard shoulder on major roads to 'aid economic recovery', which I suppose is more profitable than using it for ambulances and recovery of injured people, who can be a dreadful drain on resources.

The country arguably isn't doing very well at maintaining our roads - you need only look at them to see that - so perhaps private business would do a better job. The Germans already own our electricity and the Chinese have the water, and thanks to the economic crisis there's no risk of the roads being bought the Greeks or the Spanish.

Last time I was on a Spanish road the central reservation consisted of some chicken wire and scaffolding poles, one of which fell off and almost came through my windscreen. Mind you, if the Spanish took over the M25 it might become marginally safer.

So in a spirit of 1980s entrepreneurism, here are some suggestions for other things which Good Old Blighty Ltd could flog off and let someone else sell back to us for an extortionate profit:

* Rain. Despite millennia of being surrounded by this plentiful resource Britons have conspicuously failed to turn a buck from it. Whoever finds a way to charge for rain will be a gazillionaire very quickly, but it does need some investment to become a viable business model. Legally the government would have to claim ownership of clouds and lease whatever falls from them to the contractor, who then charges householders and water companies for allowing it to drop. We would also get extra whinging rights out of this as we could blame a foreigner for making it rain, as well as for not making it rain. And let's face it, there's no point in selling our sunshine.

* Wind. Traditional wind turbines don't produce much bang for their buck. I suggest a more reliable source of wind would be an army of Iain Duncan Smiths, which could be stationed on hillsides where no-one will have to listen to him and produce great gusts that could turn turbines day and night, in any weather. A salt-resistant version could be strapped to the White Cliffs of Dover to repel foreigners; this clone would be fuelled entirely by self-satisfaction.

* Children. At present we pay £20.30 a week for a first child and £13.40 for additional children. We have further costs in terms of schooling and medicine, and of course their carbon footprint is extremely large. I suggest instead of paying parents we privatise the right to have children, thus ensuring only those who can afford to raise them in a government-approved manner can do so. Many firms have attempted to exploit children in the past, so for maximum revenue opportunities these contracts should be put up for auction on a regional basis and perhaps allow corporate sponsorship by firms such as Lidl and Asda in areas of poor people, who can breed on an approved basis in order to provide voters, customers and other fodder.

* Kettles. Any attempt to privatise tea-making generally would be met with huge opposition and likely campaigns of civil disobedience, possibly even involving the drinking of coffee. However taxing kettle usage would enable the lucky leaseholder to turn a buck in every household at predictable times; advert breaks in the X Factor, for example, and whenever Melanie Phillips appears on Question Time. WARNING: This may lead to more Melanie Phillips.

* The BBC. This national institution has been created over many decades' public investment, which makes it ripe to be flogged to someone else for a pittance. The Americans will probably want it, which on the plus side means we'd get to see Pride & Prejudice again, but in return Huw Edwards would turn into Rush Limbaugh. The Germans would want to assimilate it into their existing TV networks and the French would try to run it for a bit and then give up. The Italians would turn it into an inexplicable game show and the Australians would fill it with idiots, but if they pay us money then who cares?

* The NHS. Oh, hang on... too late.

See? There's loads of things you can sell, if you think about it. And that's without starting on the Royal Family, shoe leather, and breathing.

The question, of course, is whether you really want to.

How much have you got, sailor?

Bloody wimmin.

IT'S that 0.27 per cent of the year when females are recognised as not being too mad, naggy, annoying or hormonal. An International Women's Day, just for little ol' us? Wow. Thanks.

That blessed 24-hour period when it's all right to say 'Huzzah for girls!' and the men in charge of stuff say things like 'Afghanistan, yeah, dreadful isn't it? What shall we do?' before they go back to trading women's rights for a political deal with the Taliban.

Let's get this straight. I am a woman, and I am amazing on more than just the one day a year. I am frequently an idiot as well, but usually not for too long, and in this country people like me form 52 per cent of the population. Elsewhere in the world the figures are different, not least because females are killed, abused, sidelined, abandoned, and generally treated in a rather offhand manner to such a large degree that 100million women who should have been born seem to have disappeared.

Regardless of that, we are not a minority. We are not a pressure group, a campaign, a token or something anyone ought to be having a sit-in for. We are 49.76 per cent of the world's population and if all of us who were born had the same medical treatment and social chances we'd be a superpower. We'd be the gender equivalent of China. You don't like what we do? Well, Fuk Wu.

That's not to say that taking a day every year to point out the iniquities of the world is a bad idea. It's the only way some of those issues are ever going to get in the papers or on the main news bulletins, so it's worth doing even if it is offensively tokenistic to your average European female who can hold a driving licence and own property without anyone's by-your-leave.

But then there's the hypocrites who hand-wring over wimmin's stuff when it's March 8 and go back to screwing them over on March 9. Step forward, Prime Minister Dishface and Mini-Me Clegg.

Today these two middle-aged numpties are going to announce plans for a law against stalking. They're not going to mention the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 which is supposed to do that already, but which is rarely exercised properly by the police or courts and is more often used to stop journalists asking questions of people who'd rather they didn't. And no-one's going to say that your average stalker is too deranged to give a tupenny-ha'penny for what the law says about anything.

The politicians are certainly not going to admit that in recent months support for them among that 52 per cent of the population has dived off a cliff. Whether it's public sector job cuts, benefit reforms, the recession or pension changes, it's women who are losing the most, and the polls are showing that they have rather gone off Dishface and Cleggy as a result.

So what they're also going to do today is announce that Britain is going to sign up to the Council of Europe's Convention on Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. Yay for the girls, yay for the boys who like girls, please vote for us again next time.

This convention is an interesting thing. Firstly it was produced in May last year, so we're a little slow in getting around to it. It's been signed by only eight member states so far which is pretty poor, and Germany says it won't apply to asylum seekers. And I'm not sure that Dishface and Cleggy have read it all the way through.

There's plenty of pledges which are prime examples of hope triumphing over expectation - Article I promises to eliminate all violence against women for example. But it also says that signatories should devote financial resources to combating violence and ensure adequate rape crisis support and refuges for women.

Article 20 says: "Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to ensure that victims have access to services facilitating their recovery from violence... services such as legal and psychological counselling, financial assistance, housing, education, training and assistance in finding employment.... access to health care and social services and that services are adequately resourced and professionals are trained to assist victims."

Except Britain's women's refuges are turning people away and closing beds because of the cutbacks. Housing benefit is being cut, jobs are going part-time, JobCentres and training services are being reduced, and the NHS is being turned inside out. So we're flouting the convention before we've even signed it. Sod the women, let's buy off the bankers.

The convention also promises to provide civil law remedies for women against their abusers. Only, oh yes, massive reforms of the Legal Aid system make that impossible unless you're rich.

And for final proof that 'Calm down, dear' Dishface doesn't give a monkey's cuss what the convention says, we need look no further than Article 40 which says: "...any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment, is subject to criminal or other legal sanction."

Except when you're in the House of Commons, when you can say whatever you like. Whoopsy!

Although it says stuff the world should already be doing the convention really matters in many important ways, and if the men who sign it don't believe in it or act on it then they can still be held to account by it.

So I'd just like to say - sign away, boys. Pat yourselves on the back, and forget about it all tomorrow.

But don't for a moment think that those bloody wimmin have gone away.

Man on left: "We need to do something for women."

Man on right: "We've got pink flowers. What more do they want?"

Capitalists 1, Hippies 0.

OCTOBER 15, 2011 was a remarkable day in the long and noble history of peaceful protest.

Angered by a global economic crisis triggered by risky banking and frivolous governments, a group of entirely well-intentioned campaigners decided to occupy the London Stock Exchange to force a change and highlight how the rich are causing the poor to suffer.

All good stuff, except the stock exchange was closed. And it's private property, so anyone sitting down in it who's not supposed to be there gets turfed out pretty quick.

So instead the protesters went and sat down outside St Paul's Cathedral, where it would be more difficult to remove them, there was a handy Starbucks for charging up their Macbooks and from whence they were yesterday finally removed by bailiffs after a series of civil court hearings.

Now, lots of stuff which the protest movement, during the past few decades, has promoted is stuff that many of us agree with - war is bad, nuclear weapons aren't nice, sexual equality is a good thing, freedom of choice, the right to vote and so on. The 99% of people who don't have all the money think the financial system needs to be sorted out. Yet for some reason people that campaign consistently for those things always seem to get it wrong. Why is this?

Well, the one thing hippies have never managed is decent PR. They tend to think their message will speak for itself, without realising they need an interpreter.

I said at the time, and I'll keep on saying it until people pay attention, but if you're going to campaign you need to have targets you can hit. Newspapers usually launch campaigns only when they have a reasonable chance of success, because then you can have a big WE WIN headline on the front page rather than a 'sorry, we lost' news-in-brief on page 35. A failed campaign is not news.

So if you're going to protest against the global economic system, you need to piss off the people in charge of it. The fact fairly lowly bankers have to walk past your tent on the way to their shiny office might irk them but irking never won any wars. You need to annoy the boss of Goldman Sachs and some world leaders, or else not bother at all.

You also need to get the public on-side. They already hate bankers, so that should be easy, but the Occupy lot nallsed that up too by deciding to stage a sit-in at a church. The public generally like churches. They certainly like pretty ones designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and they have a very soft spot for iconic ones which survived the Blitz and Lady Di got married in. It's basically the nation's church, and if you park your dirty tents outside it they won't like it.

And you need a clear message everyone can understand. Instead the hippies gave us a wonderfully aimless manifesto which I saw them debating and voting on during one of my visits to the Occupy camp, which at points had more journalists in it than demonstrators:

1. The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.
Who wrote this, Neil off The Young Ones? Do you mean 'The System' or 'The Man'? You ought to be demanding changes to global financial regulations and international debt trading, shurely?
2. We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.
If I ever see a slash added into the word 'disabilities' ever again as long as I live I'll come and occupy you, sunshine.
3. We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.
Well, that's dandy if you're a tax exile, unemployed or otherwise not adding to the pot. The rest of us have already paid for it, we're still paying for it, and we're paying for Greece and Iceland and everywhere else too. You may as well refuse to breathe anything but FairTrade oxygen.
4. We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.
Well you've got three things in a mess here. There's arguments to be had around the cuts but how are you going to end tax injustice in Ghana or corporate power-grabbing by having a sit down in London?
5. We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.
What does this have to do with tents?
6. We support the strike on the 30th November and the student action on the 9th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.
Marvellous. Well done. Lots of people do. Did you really want to waste a manifesto point on 'solidarity, brothers'?
7. We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.
Riiiiiiiight. You've watched a lot of Star Trek, haven't you?
8. We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.
I'm being oppressed just reading this tut. Are you likening organised rape in the Congo or famine in Niger to the problem of first-time buyers who can't get a mortgage?
9. This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!
You smell. No.

So after four months in the cold and wet the Occupy St Paul's protesters achieved not a single one of their aims. They didn't even raise awareness of the movement, really, because we already had strikes and marches and riots and all they educated us about was civil trespass laws and that even churchmen get arsey if you crap in the apse.

And therein lay the protest's major flaw - that despite initially being supported by plenty of decent, ordinary, working people it had a message so woolly and aimless that it attracted every crusty vagrant in a 10-mile radius. People who are on the streets with mental health or drug problems pitched up, bringing with them dealers, graffiti, hygiene issues and troublemakers, thereby neatly killing off any remaining public support.

There will be people who say the nasty old media did for this demo, by relentlessly pointing out facts and other inconvenient truths. But if the hippies had anyone with so much as a week's experience as a hack on their team they'd have had the benefit of some clear and simple advice about what not to get in the papers for - no drink, no drugs, no empty tents, no unwashed hair, no using a cathedral as a toilet and tear up your LGBT equal arsewipe multimedia manifesto.

I can't help thinking that just one day actually sat in the stock exchange would have caused 'the system' more problems, and had more public support, than the four months they've spent fannying about in a churchyard.

But don't mind me. Camping's not really my thing.

The Fox wants a power shower.

Boxing, (n.): the act of fighting with fists.

TWO blokes stand up and knock the crap out of each other. People gather to watch, and money changes hands about who will win the fight. Pictures are taken, cameras roll, and blood is spilled.

If you see it, do you call the police or stay to watch the sport? Because according to events in Germany yesterday the above scene is perfectly safe and reasonable - as long as it is roped off.

Now, I understand the copy of your average sports reporter about as well as I do Japanese or algebra, so it's taken me a while to wade through the first-person outrage and dramatic colour in all of today's papers about 'controversy' and 'dark day for our noblest sport' blah-blah.

But, fundamentally, what happened is that several men got involved in what is known as 'a brawl'. First one bloke spat in another bloke's face, then (after fighting him officially, and losing) marched up to another bloke at  press conference prompting what tabloids might in other circumstances call 'a fracas'. Blokes went toe-to-toe, threats were made, bloke swung punch with hand holding bottle, bloke's mates got involved, bloke started brandishing a camera tripod and smacked his own mate on the noggin.

It's none of it brilliant behaviour, but no-one died, no-one was seriously injured, and it's the kind of stupid willy-waving by idiots I've heard in a thousand court cases and seen first-hand on nights out. The main difference with these events is that normally they are fuelled by alcohol, and in this instance it seems to have been precipitated by those two consistent partners-in-crime, testosterone and stupidity.

Now it seems that because the men in question weren't drunk, it wasn't 3am and there wasn't a girl involved, the police want to question everyone and press some charges. After all, we can't have that, can we?

Except all the blokes involved are fighters. They've been trained, over decades, to be bigger and more powerful than the other bloke and to smack him around according to a set of rules in order that people can make millions of pounds and have the thrill of watching blood be spilled. Is it really a surprise to anyone that fighters are a bit fighty?

I can't help thinking that half the outrage is from sports reporters who were sat in that press conference and suddenly realised that the two blokes they watch and comment on in the ring are REALLY big and REALLY close and REALLY annoyed. Once they got over the squealy terror, they've all started harrumphing about what a shameful day it is for the sport.

Then there's the likes of those who call boxing a gentleman's pastime, who think everyone involved loves their mum, sets an example to children, follow Marquess of Queensberry rules and give the other feller a fightin' chance, doncherknow.

Perhaps once upon a time. But it's always been about money, blood, and power, and smacking the hell out of someone who's got in the ring because he wants some of yours. It's one of the least sporting sports there is, because it doesn't leave much room for luck or plucky underdogs. And it's never going to be much different to two guys knocking ten bells out of each other in a pub car park; it's just we've taken those men, fed them up and taught them how to do it properly.

It seems bizarre to me that we're fine with gladiators in the Coliseum, but seriously expect them to play together like nice boys on the bus home.

And it's more than a shade hypocritical that punching someone behind a rope while millions bay for blood, drink beer and gamble on the outcome is socially acceptable, while landing a smack when no-one had the chance to put a bet on it first is considered a crime.

<< This is 3 months in jail

 

This is absolutely fine >>

Let them eat less cake.

THE issue of eating disorders is a complex one, and therefore difficult to solve.

There are people who eat too little, and too much, and who harm themselves not because they do or don't like food but because they hate themselves.

They deserve a degree of sympathy, and help with the mental health issues and addictions which are plainly causing serious harm.

Then there are those whose early death is being hastened not so much by sickness but by a terminal stupidity of the kind which makes Joey Essex look like Stephen Hawking, people whose lack of brain power is replaced by a towering edifice of denseness so severe it would make Charles Darwin despair for the future of the human race and piss off to the Galapagos to live with the finches forever.

This is best demonstrated by the tale of Britain's fattest woman, Brenda Flanagan-Davies of Gateshead, who at the age of 43 has achieved an almost matching weight of 40 stone.

Brenda eats six meals a day, troughing down 6,000 calories which include cheesy chips, cola, pizza, more chips, Chinese takeaways, pickles, chips again and an average of nine chocolate bars in 12 hours.

Because of her size Brenda needs the help of the welfare system to the tune of £36,400 a year to pay for a team of carers who wash her and prepare sensible meals which she also manages to tuck away in between the junk food, a reinforced bed, and various allowances to keep a roof over her head as she has not even been outside the house for four years, much less been able to get a job.

Brenda's days are spent shopping online for food - she spends about £1,000 a month - staggering a short distance to the shower, and reaching into the fridge beside her bed for the next snack. She managed to get married but on her one trip out with her husband she busted the front suspension on his Mondeo.

Doctors have told her to diet or die, and that her body is too fragile to undergo surgery to fit a gastric band.

Brenda seems to be well aware of the problem, because she said that the bigger she gets, the sadder she gets, and the more she eats.

She said: "I want to help myself but don't know where to start."

I'll tell you where to start, Brenda. MOVE THE FRIDGE TO THE END OF THE GARDEN.

You'll soon be trotting up and down quite happily, I'm sure. And perhaps with a bit more movement and a few pounds off your self-loathing might lift and you'll get better in other ways too.

Everyone has a few wobbly bits - it's normal. People often call themselves fat when they're not. The obesely thick, however, those whose weight and stupidity are affecting their lifespan, are going to cost the nation millions over the course of even a shortened lifetime and harm the health of those around them as well. It must be easy to balloon from 20 stone to 40, because by that point you can't move much and care even less. But it's not like this creeps up on you, not that you contract a virus and wake up one day and suddenly need to call the fire brigade to help you take a leak. How does anyone not notice when they go from 10 stone to 15? It takes effort to eat 6,000 calories a day. I couldn't fit even half of Brenda's diet in my stomach, she's had to train to achieve this. Why did no-one step in at an early stage and explain this simple equation to her?

input - output = size

Fixing all the reasons for an eating disorder is difficult work. Brenda was bullied as a youngster, and although it was 30 years ago and she is now a grown-up, has the brain and willpower of a child. If she can't figure it out for herself the carers we are all paying a lot of money for need to move the fridge, unplug the laptop and perhaps ban the bloody chips.

But they won't, because they're pea-brained enough to have left cola within easy reach of a fattie who's too moronic not to drink something else. And it will probably be less than a week before someone even more incurably dim than Brenda appears in a newspaper to claim they're actually Britain's fattest woman and waaah waaaah waaaah.

If only I had a gun, they'd all start running around pretty quick.

Thick, sick, and infuriating to know.

F.U.B.A.R.

WHEN something takes the lives of up to 37,000 civilians, something is usually done.

When 2,882 soldiers are killed, someone raises concerns.

When somebody spends around £500billion on something that didn't work, questions are normally asked.

And when those in authority were warned all those things were going to happen before they even began, governments fall, people get locked up and there's a big old public inquiry.

So I'm sitting here waiting for the announcement that the White House and Downing Street, and Dubya and Blair, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Robertson, Hoon, Reid and all the other people who thought war in Afghanistan was a fabulous idea are going to be hauled in front of a panel of pissed off people, debt-ridden citizens, bereaved relatives and limbless soldiers to explain themselves.

I expect I'll be waiting a while.

But just for the record, the 11-year war which was launched purely and simply to find and punish the relatively-small number of people who planned the 9/11 terror attacks has so far killed thirteen times more people than died in the Twin Towers and in financial terms cost 38 times as much.

And that's without counting the 12 journalists killed for reporting it, or the veterans' medical bill, and the decades of welfare payments.

In return for our input Afghanistan has seen small but not-to-be-sniffed at improvements in terms of immunisation programmes, public education, roads, transportation, women's rights and some almost-democratic elections which means its parliament has one of the world's highest proportions of female representatives in the world, at 28 per cent.

It also has the fourth most corrupt government on the planet, three quarters of the civilian casualties were killed by their own countrymen, and things like this still happen:

So it's not exactly an unqualified success.

Now a leaked report for US military commanders, compiled from prisoner interrogations, reveals the entire thing was a waste of time. The Taliban will regain control when troops finally leave in 2014, the population prefers the certainty of fundamentalism - emphasis on the mentalism - to the vagaries of a corrupt elite installed by the invaders, and the new Afghan army and police force we've been busy training were in fact Taliban all along.

Oh, and the whole insurgency has been funded, backed and arranged from Pakistan from whence, students of history might like to note, the earlier Afghan civil war from which the Taliban emerged was also masterminded.

Worse, none of this was a surprise.

Experts in Afghan matters were lining up to point out the problems of an invasion, but because this didn't fit in with "HOO-AH! HUT HUT HUT" they weren't paid much attention to.

If only George 'What's a Dubya?' Bush had taken time to read the predictions of Professor Paul Wilkinson of the University of St Andrews, who wrote a book called Terrorism vs Democracy in 2000. It mentioned the possibility of suicide plane-jackers, and when interviewed by an enterprising journalist six days after 9/11 Prof Wilkinson went on to say that war was a bad way of dealing with these particular fanatics.

He said: "There is no simple military panacea for dealing with this phenomenon. It is a much more subtle, sophisticated mixture of political, diplomatic, criminal justice, intelligence and other activities such as sanctions. Intelligence in a free society is at the heart of a successful strategy to defeat terrorism.

"The general strategy has to be a multi-dimensional one. It cannot depend entirely on military force. That has never worked in the whole 30 year history of modern terrorism."

(Only that didn't happen.)

In case anyone had trouble understanding, he went on: ""Sending troops into a country like Afghanistan with its very hostile terrain is a dangerous task. These people know their mountains and their valleys, every rock and every cave... The death of innocent civilians... would decrease international support for America and increase support for bin Laden."

(That did happen.)

And finally Prof Wilkinson pointed out: "A powerful democracy like the United States, with its strong underlying principles for the rule of law and upholding human rights, should not desert the moral high ground."

(Well that didn't... oh.)

Perhaps the powers-that-be took no notice of Prof Wilkinson because the above interview appeared in the Birmingham Post. Maybe they ignored every other expert saying exactly the same things in their own departments and to other news organisations because they were all a bit deaf, blind, dim, or just as fundamentalist as those they thought they could defeat with bombs rather than brains.

But I suspect the main reason they didn't pay any attention was because they were too busy cock-waving to do any damn thinking.

War costs, words don't.

What do they do all day?

THERE are more people out of work than at any time in the past 17 years.

There are more people aged 16 - 24 without a job than at any point since records began.

Inevitably, this means there are more people claiming benefits in order to pay for food, heating, and housing.

There are more people working part-time, fewer taking early retirement, and fewer mums who can afford to stay at home to raise their children.

It doesn't really matter what your personal politics are, because left, right, or raving loony you should be able to see that these things do not add up to anything good.

In fact logic tells you that unless it improves fairly radically the cost to the state in terms of welfare, crime levels, poor health and social problems will be greater and have far more wide-reaching effects than bailing out the banks in the first place, which is what has led to our current plight.

Perhaps we should have let the banks fail; perhaps it was better to avoid that. Who can say?

There is one truth that is absolutely unavoidable and does not relate in the slightest to politics.

This is that 8.4 per cent of the people here are out of work:

And 100 per cent of the people in here are not:

MPs earn £65,738 a year, plus expenses, which works out to around £180 a day.

The maximum Jobseekers' allowance available to someone over 25 is £3,510 a year, which works out to around £9.61 a day.

I can't help thinking that if we switched the rates of pay around, the feckless, lazy scroungers who leech off the state might pull their bloody finger out and do some work.

And the ones without jobs might do better as well.

Good work, girls.

HERE are some recent events.

A woman was on national TV this morning because she had two vaginas.

Three women are on an oxymoronic 'celebrity reality' show on the basis they are frequently pictured naked or in swimwear.

A fourth is on the show because she is nationally reviled for having an affair with a married footballer, a fifth is famous for having yo-yoing weight, and a sixth for being a bit of a harridan. There are no other women on the show.

Last week a female TV presenter with a new job gave an interview to a national newspaper (agreed with her agent) in which she discussed how her breasts were not as large as those of her predecessor.

The 11-year-old daughter of two celebrities has been pouting for a fashion photographer in pictures published by her own mother on Twitter.

An actress who caused a row by stripping naked to play a dominatrix in a pre-watershed Christmas drama - adapted from a book in which the strong female character was not a prostitute - says it was "really empowering".

A female politician who has had arguably the most publicity and attention of any woman in the House of Commons bemoaned the fact woman are trivialised in a glossy photo-shoot with a men's magazine.

A 30-year-old who is probably the best-liked female in the country, after her grandmother-in-law, never speaks.

Now, I am no hairy-arsed right-on We-Hate-Clarkson fully-paid-up member of the Wimmin's Brigade. My gender comes in all shapes and sizes, colours and types, and I'm fine with all the ones which aren't morbidly obese, who in my experience are generally lazy and should lay off the cake because they're sucking money out of our health and welfare system and, more importantly, are taking all the cake.

I accept there will always be -isms of many kinds, not least between the genders, but so long as they fire in both directions and don't do too much harm they do not bother me much. Such is life.

But I was raised on tales of strong women doing their best in difficult circumstances - before they had the right to vote, when they fended for themselves in the wars, as they struggled for equal rights in the workplace and their own homes. Despite the fact it's the 21st century I've had to do the same, on occasion. And considering the popularity of this anonymous blog the fact you don't know what I look like doesn't seem to stop you judging whether or not you like me and what I have to say.

I don't know about you but I can't help thinking what Emmeline Pankhurst or Elizabeth I or George Eliot - all of them unpleasant people in their way, intolerant and autocratic, not great to live with but without whose achievements my life would be the poorer - would think, if they spent twenty minutes in our world.

I expect the first 10 would be spent being religious and asking what happened to petticoats, but the last half would involve trying to work out how to get back to their own lives which, as brutal and horrid as they were, generally gave women a jot more credit and respect than we get today.

I don't have a solution for it apart from turning off or away, nor anyone in particular to blame beyond random finger-pointing. I'm just boiling with generalised outrage, because I bet that if you think of the one woman that you most admire in the whole world, she would not put up with any of this shit.

But for some reason we are.

Dear Diary, another quiet week...

ANOTHER day, another reason to bang your head against the wall and scream "WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY THINKING?"

Example number one: the Cabinet yesterday held its weekly meeting in the handball arena at the Olympics park. Let's leave aside for a moment the fact there is a perfectly serviceable Cabinet meeting room in Downing Street, and let's also ignore the local paper photocall of some men in shirt sleeves sitting around a table looking bored, which after many years of painful experience I can tell you looks more like a town council bypass planning sub-committee than a meeting of world statesmen.

Let's concentrate instead on what our beloved Prime Minister Dishface said afterwards. He urged people complaining about the Olympics to "stop grumbling" and added: "This summer’s Olympics will put the eyes of the world on Britain as we host not just an unparalleled sporting spectacle, but also a chance for companies from across the globe to interact and do business here in the UK. We expect these events to generate at least £1billion for British businesses and they are vital to our efforts to secure a long-term return to sustainable growth."

Sounds marvellous, doesn't it? The answer to all our problems.

But hang on, just one cotton-picking minute, sonny Jim. The Olympics are going to make us £1billion? One whole billion British pounds?

That is exactly the same amount we've made from people buying copies of Kate Middleton's frocks. And she hasn't cost us nearly as much as the Olympics so far.

Because the cost of the Olympics, while it repeatedly comes in "on-budget", keeps being ratcheted up like a 15-year-old's school skirt once she's left the house. It was originally £2bn, and today the "on-budget" cost is £9.3bn.

So our return on investment, as a nation, is going to be a loss of 89 per cent. Yes, I think we can all agree, this is an unparalleled spectacle. It's the kind of thing we can tell our grandchildren about in the years to come: "And then the people in charge decided money was unnecessary, largely because they'd pissed it all up the wall anyway, and we started using tears as currency instead."

On the very same day, this picture emerged of our former squadron of Harrier jump jets - one of the greatest British engineering feats of modern times, versatile, beloved, brilliant, and above all quite cheap to run - decommissioned, taped up and bought by the Americans to use as spares for their own Harriers, which they want to keep in service.

Now I'm no economist, but it occurs to me that a nation which gets a better return out of a human coat-hanger and scrap metal trading than regeneration and financial acumen is arguably on its arse.

And we wonder why Scotland wants to leave.

All aboard, and bagsy the whisky.