This week I’m writing my column from Delhi and Bombay. I love India. It is a perfect assault on all of one’s senses. But I can’t help but think life here is a bit like a three-tier wedding cake. The top and smallest tier is the new bubbling modern economy complete with its obsession with glitzy advertisements, the latest mobiles and flash cars, looking western, very white and even like David Beckham.

Underneath, the second and more substantial tier is the inheritance of the British Raj – cricket, fine Victorian buildings, beautifully spoken English, a disciplined army, a decent civil service and a lasting democracy.

However, the bottom layer is the largest – a mind-blowing poverty, a birth rate out of control and a violent vigilante attitude. If you knock someone down in your car, don’t stop, as the villagers will string you up. If your nephew runs off unexpectedly with a girl, leave town, as her family will strip you naked and rub hot sawdust into your skin before leaving you tied to a tree.

And don’t take up burglary – just try to ask the 10 youths who were caught this week and beaten to death by villagers west of Delhi because they weren’t satisfied with police action in response to previous thefts. Nevertheless, most of these beautiful people seem to be very cheerful in this extra-ordinary environment. Unique? Quite! See it before globalisation takes it away.

Can the Oprah singer really smash Hillary?

The US Democrat Party has always had a slight identity crisis. It is locked inside a nation that believes totally in the opportunities presented by private enterprise and capitalism and therefore it would be hard for anyone to sell the ideology of left wing politics in their mildest form, let alone use words like socialist, communist or even liberal.

So by other nations’ standards, the Democrat Party is hardly a left-of-centre alternative to the obviously right wing Republican Party. Instead, in the past it has tended to latch on to the verbal idealism of pretty useless college boy look-alikes such as John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and the loutish con man and worse, Bill Clinton.

But this may all be about to change with the forthcoming election of their candidate for the 2008 presidential election. This is because the Democrat Party is being presented with two unusual candidates for its presidential nomination.

The two front-runners are a white woman and a black man, with the usual college boy twit, John Edwards, lagging behind in the opinion polls. And with the current President of the United States, George “Dubya” Bush, continuing to be so unpopular, the future Republican candidate, whoever that might be, will have an uphill struggle on his hands. This means that there is a very real chance that the next President of the United States could be a Democrat and therefore might be either the first woman or first black man, if either of them becomes the official Democrat candidate as seems likely.

At the moment, white woman Hillary Clinton, affectionately known as “the Witch of Whitewater” in Washington DC – apparently because she knows where the bodies are buried regarding her rather unorthodox past property dealings – is well ahead in the opinion polls. However, black man Barack Obama has found a very special ally in the US’s highest paid and most successful TV celebrity Oprah Winfrey, who is reported worth $1.5 billion – nearly as much as Sir Paul McCartney but without having the need to possess the same obvious talent. But then that is shallow celebrity USA for you, isn’t it.

Oprah is not only able to help deliver the black vote, pull in stars like Stevie Wonder, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Halle Berry, Linda Evans, Dennis Haysbert and director Paris Barclay to spread the word, but has huge influence over middle America, especially among women voters, due to the success of her top-rated TV show.

Now this raises a very interesting question. Why has the aging and slightly dumpy TV host, who has described Mr Obama as both “my favourite guy” and “my choice”, sided with her colour rather than her sex? This is even more intriguing when one considers that she stormed to fame whingeing on and on about all men and the importance of “girl power” long before anyone had ever heard of the Spice Girls. Either way, she will deliver to Mr Obama a massive boost to funds and, more importantly, thousands of votes.

My guess is that good old “Big Lips Oprah”, as she is known to her domestic staff, has actually met Ms Clinton and therefore knows what a lot of us suspect – that the “Wicked Witch of Whitewater”, whose cackle as she flies by broomstick from one political dinner to another can turn a child to a pillar of salt, even at a thousand metres, had her nervous system removed at birth and was sent here from another planet.

If she fails, let’s hope she doesn’t join Mrs Arafat and settle in Malta. Frankly, the island just isn’t big enough – although she might be able to offer cheap flights to Gozo but personally I wouldn’t book in the kids.

Proof that people get the government they deserve

Sorry guys, but here we go again. The last few weeks in the UK have been simply just business as usual.

In just one month, a man was stabbed to death when he complained to two black youths who had thrown a chocolate wrapper through his open car window in London. A second was kicked to death when he confronted an abusive gang of white youths outside his home in Warrington. A third was beaten to death in Sunderland purely because he was simple. A fourth was stabbed in his bed while he slept in Maidenhead. And so on and so forth – all over the country the tale goes on.

Even worse, in Liverpool an 11-year-old, Rhys Jones, was shot by a teenager on a bike. His crime was purely to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within minutes, he had died in his mother’s arms. You may even know about this case, as his age and obvious innocence attracted the world’s media.

All of these people and their families deserved better and yet the British government’s answer to the raging violence is to fiddle the crime statistics concerning their term in office while asking kids politely to hand in their guns. Impressed? No, nor am I.

So, as I have continually told those who follow this page, Britain is awash with drugs, crime, violence, murder, corruption, greed, incompetence, cruelty and lying politicians. There are over 170 violent Afro-Caribbean gangs in London alone, where 18 teenagers have either been stabbed or gunned to death in the first seven-and-a-half months of this year. The Guardian newspaper warns that this is largely due to absent fathers and therefore the lack of a decent male role model at home. They are right. I wrote as much for the Daily Mail in 2002. Effective government action was nil then and no doubt will remain so.

If you visit Britain and are lucky enough to escape the attention of these drugged-up muggers, whose violence often ends in death without a thought of regret, you still run the considerable risk of being set upon by either a gang of bored youths, drunks high on 24-hour drinking or perhaps even a cane-waving or stone-throwing bunch of nine-year-olds. This could easily be your fate if you are silly enough to walk alone in certain areas of London or most other out-of-control cities in the UK, where local neighbourhood murder is so common that it usually only makes the regional news.

In addition, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the National Health Service is falling apart amid bureaucratic incompetence, filthy hospitals and a botched recruitment system that has left thousands of doctors without work. The armed forces continually complain of under funding, cutbacks and faulty equipment.

As Chancellor, Fatty Brown wrecked the nation’s pension industry and thus threw into doubt the financial security of millions in old age. And, by the way, if you are unlucky enough to reach old age in Britain and be pushed off into an old people’s home, there is a more than a 20 per cent chance that you will be abused, beaten and left to lie in your own urine for hours on end, according to a Parliamentary Select Committee Report. The public transport system is both unbelievably dirty and unreliable and sometimes even dangerous. Foreign rapists, murders and crooks have been released into the community rather than being deported. Paedophiles have been discovered teaching in schools, while the police target motorists rather than criminals, which might be just as well as the prisons are overflowing and lacking sufficient investment to cope with those being sentenced – so inmates are released ridiculously early purely to accommodate new prisoners.

Apparently, the drug taking and generally morally questionable gang that make up the government are too busy lining their own pockets to be able to arrest this mess. Recently, Ed Balls(up) became yet another minister, in a long list, caught wasting thousands of taxpayers’ cash on an unnecessary junket. The last Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was the first in the history of this once great nation to be interviewed by the police thanks to the cash for honours scandal and the Fat Controller himself was recently rapped over the knuckles by the Statistics Commission for lying to the House of Commons. This is the position after 10 years of a Labour government that was elected on the back of so much hope. Pretty awful, wouldn’t you think? Absolutely.

So what does the once Great British public think? A recent opinion poll in The Guardian gave Labour an eight per cent lead over the Conservatives. So when the Fat Controller cuts and runs for a snap autumn election, the British will no doubt return him and continue to receive the sort of government they so richly deserve. Aren’t you now just a little sorry for all of those Maltese gangsters who decided to make their home in Soho? I think I might be.

Cosmopolitan at the hairdressers

I was having my hair cut on the King’s Road in London the other day by an Italian guy at a Lebanese-owned hairdresser when an American artist walked in and said that Antonio, who was half Italian, half Spanish, had promised to display her pictures in his restaurant next door. “But he isn’t either – he’s Iranian,” said the Italian. “He is Spanish/Italian,” insisted the American. “Rubbish. He can’t speak a word of either language,” interrupted the Chinese manicurist.

The artist left to find out but returned almost immediately to report that Antonio wasn’t there but she had asked a waitress with a thick Polish accent about it. Apparently, the girl looked vacant so the artist asked her again in Polish but the girl had replied that she couldn’t understand a word because she was English.

“Why is he denying coming from Iran? He should be proud of it,” asked the curious American.

“Well he obviously isn’t,” replied the Italian while chopping away at my hair. “Perhaps he’s a terrorist,” chipped in the Chinese. “Perhaps, but why did the waitress say she was English when I know she isn’t?” asked the Italian. “OK, I’ve got it. They are all illegal immigrants,” concluded the Yank. “Yeah, that’s it,” they all nodded.

So perhaps watch out Sliema – if the good old “Gonzo Dog Do Ba Band” doesn’t deliver on frontier security, this could be your Toni and Guy at the Hilton conversation in a year’s time.

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