It’s hopping mad

It's not so much a glorious British seaside resort; more a traffic-choked, poverty-ridden, junkie-infested, benefits-claiming wasteland. This is not the West Country of Mousehole and Port Isaac; this is the West Country of Dodge City and Tombstone.

The only good thing that's happened to the place in years is the cellophane factory in nearby Bridgewater closing.

Yes, a lot of people lost their jobs, but at least you can now pop out to score your crack without wearing a smog mask to fend off the fumes.

Bad as it is, there aren't groups of wannabe 15-year-old gangsters stabbing each other to death in school playgrounds but, even so, you would imagine that the local police are kept reasonably busy dealing with the indigenous scrotes.

So, one can understand the surprise of 30-year-old Mrs Lisa Badland (yes, I know) when two police officers turned up outside her house to caution her five-year-old son for alleged criminal damage.

And little Ryan's crime? Torching a kebab shop or keying an Alfa in response to this nation's recent humiliations abroad? Nothing so patriotic.

The little terror and his accomplices had been grassed up by a neighbour for chalking a hopscotch grid in the street.

And if that kind of antisocial behaviour wasn't enough, what was the child doing out in the street in the first place? Perhaps we should have a word with social services, madam.

Luckily, God intervened, it rained, and all evidence was washed away. But what have we come to when children daring to play in the street attract the attention of the forces of law and disorder?

I thought we were awash with fat kids because the lazy, lardy delinquents didn't do exercise anymore?

If we're going to force them indoors during the holidays, there soon won't be enough of those newly-launched 52-inch school blazers to go around.

* SPEAKING of fat people, we must reluctantly return to mother-of-one and former hostage Faye Turney - not least because she simply won't go away.

(Am I alone in thinking that the crew of HMS Cornwall must have eaten rather well during the time that the Fayster was banged up?) As I was unable to buy a copy of The Sun on Bank Holiday Monday, I sadly missed the Page 3 pictures of her in her bra and knickers, which must surely have been there.

I also managed to miss the blubbing young boy's story in The Mirror, and Sir Trevor McDonut's misty-eyed interrogation that night. So there's around £200,000 of media money wasted.

It's perhaps a good job the Iranians didn't realise how desperate their captives were to become celebrities, otherwise they'd have set up a Torture Idol TV show, where you had to phone in and vote for the hostage you wanted released this week.

I suppose we shouldn't entirely blame the namby-pamby apologists masquerading as soldiers and sailors for their abject performances.

The real culprits are the Defence department apparatchiks and the politicians who control them.

Allowing the hostages to sell their stories was a cheap and effective way to get Government propaganda into the press in the face of Iran's overwhelming PR victory.

Let's face it, we don't believe what the MoD says and we don't believe what our political leaders say. But we might believe the "victims".

Pretending to then ban personnel from selling stories in future was a typical piece of bare-faced lying from the Blah administration. It's got to the stage that no one notices anymore.

It's about time we said See you, Jimmy'

OF COURSE, our lives would be much enhanced if we didn't have Scotch politicians interfering in our domestic matters while their mates back home are busy spending English money like a well like a drunk Scotchman.

Happily, the rise of the SNP north of the border looks like making full independence a hot topic. And about time too.

In my humble opinion, we've generally pampered, looked after and baby-sat the red-headed, pasty-faced weaklings for long enough and, it has to be said, with little in the way of gratitude from the be-skirted freeloaders.

It's time to cut the apron strings and let them go and make their own way in the world, as we English have been for centuries.

Anyway, if we take away their cosy seats in Westminster, what's left in terms of gainful employment for an ex-pat Porridge Wog?

Times have changed. They used to have the lucrative begging franchise in our shopping malls and town centre precincts, but that's now been taken over by Eastern Europeans and the Jocks can't get a look-in.

And let's face it, a wild-eyed, drunken Glaswegian clutching a can of Special Brew while wobbling about as if he'd got one foot nailed to the floor is always going to lose out to a pitiful young Romanian mother with six children and one leg.

According to the back of my fag packet, the Jocks make up about eight per cent of the UK population yet manage to blag double that in benefit claims alone. And I'm tired of paying for it. (We'll not even mention the free prescriptions in Wales).

So it's time to go. As that terrible dirge of an anthem goes, "But we can still rise now, And be the nation again". Well there's the door, Jimmy. See you.