The spectre of 'EU education'

TONY Benn's legacy is the one thing he wanted to avoid – our membership of the European Union. Back in the 1970s when the Government held a referendum on whether to stay in the Common Market, the two most prominent politicians in the Out campaign were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. A lot of us took the view that if those two barm-pots were against the Common Market, we ought to vote for it.

AND now, 40 years on, a political group within the European Parliament is demanding "EU education in schools." How long before British school pupils are required to recite an oath of allegiance to the EU each morning and pledge themselves to a Thousand Year Reich?

GENEALOGISTS say Prince Harry's girlfriend, Cressida Bonas, is a distant cousin of Princess Diana. So what? We are all distant cousins. It goes with living on an island. An unkind American commentator once pointed out that the serried ranks of the entire extended Windsor dynasty contain only six different faces, and two of those belong to the corgis.

NOW it can be told. Back in September a young Muslim man was detained at Stansted as he tried to leave the UK, allegedly to fight in the Syrian civil war. You might image the authorities would publicise this incident to reassure us that anti-terrorism measures are working. Not at all. Nothing more was heard until a few days ago when it was revealed at the Old Bailey that the young man in question was on licence from prison. He had been jailed in 2009 for his part in the notorious plot to destroy seven airliners with suicide bombs of liquid explosives. Do the maths. He was jailed for eight years - five years ago. We all know that most thieves, fraudsters, muggers and dodgy politicians serve only half their sentence. But were you aware that the same bleeding-heart generosity also applies to religious fanatics hell-bent on slaughtering thousands? If you were running a criminal-justice system like that, wouldn't you want to keep the Stansted arrest quiet?

AH, the joys of computer-guided spelling. In the previous item I was only a keystroke away from my PC's preferred version: "the Syrian civil warrington." If Tolstoy had used a computer he might have given us Warrington and Peace.

A READER asks: "Can any national company be more inaccessible than BT?" Well, that depends what you mean by company. The Mafia is fairly hard to have a conversation with, as are the higher levels of Freemasonry and some hospital executives. But BT runs a pretty close fourth (or fifth, if you count al Qaeda). Our phone line is crackling like a convention of food whisks and we keep losing broadband. I phoned the BT helpline (euphemism) to be told that I could hang on if I wished, "however, there will be a very long delay in answering your call." Try to sort it out online and BT at first insists there is no fault before giving this message, with a missing apostrophe: "Sorry we cant complete your request at the moment due to technical error. Please try again." In my dealings with BT, I have come to the conclusion that customers are a bit of an inconvenience, to be attended to only when there is nothing better to do.

IT goes without saying that BT is one of those organisations "committed to quality" and is an "Investor in People." They always are, aren't they?

IT TAKES the licence fees of one million viewers to pay the cost of collecting the other 24 million licence fees. Claim by Noel Edmonds, unveiling his plan to buy the BBC.