Mark Andrews: Jellied eels or Greggs, guvnor? Civil service recruitment policy is patronising and unfair

In future, all Whitehall interns must come from working-class backgrounds, says Pat McFadden, the Black Country MP and PM's right-hand man.

If only the scriptwriters of Yes, Minister had thought of it first. We could have had Jim Hacker installing a pigeon loft in Downing Street, Sir Humphrey being made to walk his whippet in a flat cap and muffler, and young Bernard scoffing his face with pork pie and jellied eels. It would have been comedy gold.

My initial thought on hearing about the plan was what the criteria for defining 'working-class' would be. Will there be an official list of preferred regional accents? Will graduates be asked whether they say 'napkin' or 'serviette'? Khazi or loo? Maybe there will be an entrance exam, testing candidates' knowledge of soap operas and the pasty range at Greggs. 

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Sadly, it's nothing so creative. Would-be interns will instead be vetted according to the jobs their parents did at the age of 14, which seems incredibly unfair. Mr McFadden says it is important the civil service 'harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country', and I'm all for giving people outside the usual metropolitan, Guardian-reading, politically-correct, pro-EU stereotype a fair crack of the whip. 

But how can you possibly broaden the range of talent at your disposal by crushing kids' career hopes on the grounds Mum and Dad got too many O-levels? Would it really be too radical to try giving every young person an equal opportunity, and select them on merit rather than social background?

This policy manages to simultaneously discriminate against middle-class kids and patronise the working classes. Which is something of an achievement. Sir Humphrey would be proud.

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Aldi says it wants to open a new supermarket every week between now and Christmas. I suppose it was inevitable, really, given the shortage of Aldi branches in the UK. Would you believe it, there are some villages where you may have to walk up ot a mile to visit your nearest Aldi.

Meanwhile, our town centres face seemingly terminal decline, and our greenbelt will be redefined the 'greybelt' to meet government housing targets. Oh, and of course there are all those half-baked plans to 'repurpose' boarded-up shops and offices into housing into bleak bedsits and hostels, many of which come to nothing anyway.

Well here's an idea. Why not beef up our planning laws so that new supermarkets can only be built in town centres? And I mean proper towns only, none of those out-of-town retail parks which have put up a few signs to get round the planning laws. Let's restrict it to towns which have had market charters for at least 200 years.

Then, instead of building supermarkets in every neighbourhood, we could develop those sites for housing. Preserving the character of our villages, preventing suburbia from being over-run with traffic congestion, and encouraging people back into town. 

And providing proper housing in the areas where people would actually want to live.

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And since I'm in a problem-solving mood, here's and idea for tackling the small-boat crisis. Forget towing the boats back to France, which anyone with half a brain knows is fanciful, but why not try pulling in the boat captains instead? It can't be that hard for the Royal Navy to detain a few of them, and dish out some stiff jail time. I would have thought the gangmasters would suffer something of a recruitment crisis once word got out they were on a one-way ticket to the chokey.