For the last year I have been banging on about the fact that a deep and most unpleasant recession would bring much unhappiness and hardship across the world in 2008 and that it would last for some time – perhaps until 2010 or beyond. The spoilt folk of North America and Europe won’t starve but they will see living standards drastically fall and unemployment drastically rise along with bankruptcy and home repossession. People in Africa will starve in their tens of thousands, indeed some already are starving. The human misery there is immense and will become unbearable. To my amazement, politicians, readers of this paper and even friends thought I had got it wrong and that my articles were far too glum. Sadly, I was completely right. As I write, stock markets are crashing and at last people who should have known better are waking up to how serious this all is.

So what will happen now? Bankers, stock brokers and politicians will all claim that lessons must and will be learned. Of course they will not, and when the next generation of greedy clowns takes control, the whole process will be repeated. It always is. In the meantime, Messrs Bush, Brown, Sarkozy and co. will finish this week’s G8 summit with a load of promises about how to tackle the recession, protect the environment, stop terrorism, end child starvation, get rid of people like Robert Mugabe and reduce third world debt. They will then go home, look after number one and fail to act on any of it.

Yes, this recession is inevitable and it will be bad – except that is for the Arab oil states and the ghastly Russian

government, which will be gleefully watching the EU’s increasing dependency on its pipelines of natural gas. Worse, the economic problems that we are just about to face will only increase the environmental issues and religious and

cultural tensions that already make the world a dangerous and all too often unpleasant place.

The continuing saga of basket case Britain

When the peculiar haircut of Boris Johnson mopped its way into the London Mayoral job it created a vacancy in his Henley-on-Thames constituency and thus forced a by-election. Perhaps this could be a chance for Premier Brown and his red brick university 1960s hapless imbeciles to stage a fight back and show “call me Dave” Cameron and the other Old Etonian public school boys who run the Tory opposition that the British public still had faith in their recipe of politically correct dogma and corrupt and totally incompetent government together with closet gays, inept women and dour Scots.

So the Henley electorate was forced to digest the latest concoction of social policy and awful news in order to make up their minds about whom to vote for. There was the usual story of a teenager being stabbed to death in London – the 18th this year – so there will definitely be a new record again in 2008 to mark the complete failure of the Labour 1997 election slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. However, this all too predictable news event went almost unnoticed, unlike the 17th occasion which was spiced up by the fact that the victim was a brother of an ex soap star and so the ghastly tabloid press was all over her like a bad facial rash. While penning this piece in London, news has just come through that a 19th family of a teenage boy will also be calling on the undertaker – so that’s three in a little over a week.

And what are the police doing to stop this explosion of violence? Not a lot, apparently, as they don’t have the time, morale or discipline. A report into the workings of the world’s first and most famous police force has concluded that police sergeants spend nearly 50 per cent of their time filling in paper work and the remainder either fiddling figures to hit government targets or worrying about telling constables what to do in case they are accused of bullying them. As a result, the constables now bully the sergeants and even the once immaculate dress code has fallen by the wayside. So the government’s cancer of politically correct indiscipline has turned the police into a rather scruffy bureaucratic rabble who fear everybody except the law-abiding middle-class woman motorist – whom they all bully as it helps the conviction figures.

Meanwhile, Labour’s rather chubby leader in Scotland resigned, despite pleas not to from the increasingly isolated PM in London. Wendy Alexander, who was part of the “McMafia” that helped kick out disgraced Tony Blair in favour of Mr Brown, was forced to fall on her sword due to the fact that she had failed to declare £8,000 in donations. The Tories have recently suffered the same sort of embarrassment themselves. However, “call me Dave” has condemned any such dishonesty immediately, which is in sharp contrast to “Calamity Brown”, who thought that Wendy should have tried to ride out the media storm – just as he has attempted to do for the last 11 years.

Not to be outdone in this climate of institutional madness Lloyds-TSB, once a bank of common sense, decided to mail debit cards direct to children as young as 11 without telling their parents. This has resulted in them being able to buy cheap cigarettes, Viagra, pornography and fake adult IDs, etc., on line. Could this happen anywhere but in basket case Britain, do I hear you ask? You know the answer.

So the by-election scene was now set: in the red corner we have the collapsed housing market, failing banks and pensions, the prospect of deep economic recession, 10-year-old drunks running amok, 11-year-old girls getting pregnant to secure a council flat, domestic violence of epidemic proportions, daily knife crime in every town, gun crime and murder so common they don’t always get reported in the press, drug related muggings that are too numerous for the police to bother with, a useless and demoralised police force failing everywhere, prisons overflowing, criminals getting reduced sentences for any reason – including escape, human rights for thugs and terrorists but none for victims, uncontrolled immigration, social benefit fraud as common as anything, hospitals that regularly kill patients with MSRA and girls so drunk every Friday night that they lie all over the town centres in their own vomit. This is New Labour’s Britain and the question was, do the people still want it?

In the blue corner, the opposition is “call me Dave” who is charming and highly critical of New Labour while being slightly shy of boasting about his own solutions to Britain’s problems – perhaps due to the fact that every time he makes a sensible suggestion the clueless brigade who run the asylum try to nick it. However, it is known that Dave stands for, among other things, encouraging enterprise and meritocracy, cutting waste and bureaucracy in public services, attacking the assumption that a life on permanent social benefit is acceptable, eventually cutting taxes, possibly repealing the European Human Rights Act, building new prisons, cleaning up the social moral bankruptcy by

recreating a decent police force and allowing local people to act without centralised Soviet targets and taking a definitive stand on both legal and illegal immigration.

And what was the result of this little test of public opinion following on from Labour’s crushing defeat at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election last month? Dave and co. doubled their majority while the Labour candidate came fifth – behind the useless Liberals, who yet again failed to benefit from Labour’s plight, the Green Party and the thuggish British National Party – and even lost his deposit in the process.

So maybe there are enough sane people left to rescue basket case Britain after all. Let it be!

Maltese born judge savages government policy

The Maltese childhood school chum of Mdina’s film director Michael Bonello, Sir Igor Judge, who was educated at St Edward’s College, Cottonera, is President of the Queen’s Bench and today is one of Britain’s most senior judges, has joined me in attacking the British government’s handling of the prison crisis. He has deemed it to be “absolutely catastrophic!” He was referring, of course, to Justice Minister Jack Straw’s instruction to judges not to send certain offenders to prison because the prisons are already full.

Like me, he feels that this latest panic-stricken move betrays the law-abiding while rewarding serial burglars, muggers, drug-dealers and even murderers who are then free to continue their assaults of the innocent, the weak, the young and the old alike.

In addition, Sir Igor, who is due to become Lord Chief Justice in October this year, has written to all magistrates and informed them that he expects them to impose a custodial sentence on all young people found in possession of a knife. I agree. However, it does beg the question of where they are going to be housed if the prisons are so full that even the most serious criminals are being let out ridiculously early. What a mess!

The Labour Party deserves the support of the criminal classes because it has truly aided them in their chosen careers. I’m certain it can rely on their vote at the next election. However, having betrayed every decent man, woman and child of what-ever race, colour or religion across the land for over a decade, Labour is only just discovering the serious effect this is likely to have on its re-election chances.

Do any of you still think that Britain is just all about champagne concerts in Hyde Park? And aren’t you glad you didn’t elect your own version of this tripe last March?

All you need is love

We are permanently being told by politicians the world over that poverty is the real cause of crime. However, the poor are not bad people really but commit crime because they are poor and thus it is assumed that they have no choice. So give them nice things and all will be well. I have rarely heard so much rubbish in my life.

Firstly, millions of genuinely poor Chinese, Indian, Burmese, Sudanese and so on the world over are thoroughly decent, law-abiding people who often can’t feed their children as much as they would like and yet don’t revert to a life of crime as a result. Their poverty, just as that of the Jarrow marchers on their way to London all those years ago, didn’t lead them into a trail of rape, pillage and plunder. To label the poor as natural criminals is as insulting to them as it is

wholly inaccurate.

Secondly, the 10-year-old delinquents who grow up in most European countries to become muggers, murderers and drug dealers are not poor in the financial sense. They are usually well fed to the point of obesity, wear expensive jeans and trainers and sit in front of expensive televisions or computers when not forming gangs with knives and plans to “teach respect” to some poor bullied child whose face doesn’t fit.

However, they are poor in love. Usually, they don’t have a decent dad or, even more likely, they have an absent father. Their mother therefore may be single but either way her cigarettes, booze and fun time come first. And so a dysfunctional generation begets another and even a worse one and so on. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and it is almost as hard to teach a teenager brought up poorly how to love, cherish, respect and obey.

And that is the real poverty of the criminal classes – a lack of love and decent example and nothing to do with financial wealth. For show me a poor boy with no mountain bike or designer trainers but loving parents and I will show you a lucky little man, richer than he may ever know and far richer in the things that humanity is made of than a kid with a television the size of his bedroom wall in a loveless home full of drink, drugs, violence and plain poor example.

[email protected]