The problem with pigeons

I MAY not be the greatest fan of the BBC but, in tone and content, Monday evening's coverage of the hours leading to the declaration of war in 1914 was spot-on. Well done, Auntie.

NINETEEN-fourteen and all that. In the days before portable radios, soldiers were issued with carrier pigeons to send messages. Lord Montgomery of Alamein recalled an incident in the First World War when a pigeon arrived at brigade headquarters. "Give me the message!" demanded the brigadier. It was handed to him and this is what he read: "I am absolutely fed up with carrying this bloody bird around France."

AFTER last week's item on the driver in Dorset who was issued with a summons for sounding a Dixieland horn, a reader recalls an incident in Weymouth in 1973 when he was a passenger in a mate's vintage American Willys Jeep. "We were pulled over and I was given a right royal *******ing about the noise coming from the exhaust." When I pointed out that the steering wheel was on the other side and I wasn't the driver, the copper called me a smart ******* and told us to ****** off."

AND the 2014 award for services to British justice goes to the bloke who left Judge Graham White's microphone on when he thought it was off.

HAVING just listened to a tearful victim-impact statement by Geraldine and Peter McGinty whose son was stabbed to death, the judge was heard to comment: "I feel so very sorry for these families. They make these statements thinking they are going to make a difference, but they make no difference at all. Someone should tell them." Well now someone has told them and the whole monstrous deception of victims being "at the heart" of the criminal-justice system is revealed for the lie it is. If victims mattered in the slightest, do you really think we would have a system where hardened and persistent young thugs are given caution after caution before getting even the mildest punishment? Would we sentence armed robbers to 12 years, knowing they will only serve six? Would we put the wickedest and most unrepentent thugs in open prisons where they can abscond whenever they choose? Of course not. Our criminal justice system doesn't give tuppence for the victims. It is run, as it has always been run, to suit politicians who never build enough prisons, judges who have never understood the effects of crime on working-class neighbourhoods and liberal-lefty academics and shrinks who believe that criminals are really victims with all sorts of problems who shouldn't be punished at all. Well done, Judge White, for shining a light into a dark and shameful corner. Pity it happened by accident but it's still welcome.

WE may soon be dropping like flies with ebola fever, but somehow I doubt it. The history of health scares, from bird flu to Sars, from Aids to swine flu, is full of horror scenarios of foreign plagues sweeping across the UK and killing millions. So far it hasn't happened. But we humans are born to worry and each threat, no matter how illogical, gives us something, anything, to worry about. A few years ago councils became so frit about the unspeakable dangers within cemeteries that they laid thousands of gravestones flat and put tape barriers around the others. It was a sort of collective madness suddenly erupting among perfectly rational people. Such panics come, they go. They rarely last long.

SIR – I await with interest the first report of road rage between two driverless cars. (Letter to Daily Telegraph)