The free movement of murderers

TOLD you so. If you celebrated October the First by chucking away your car tax disc before it expires, then hoik it out of the bin and stick it straight back on your windscreen. For it is now revealed that ANPR, the automatic number-plate recognition equipment designed to detect tax-dodgers, manages to misread about 1.2 million number plates every day.

COME to think of it, if the ANPR cameras get so many number plates wrong, how can the technology honestly be described as number-plate "recognition"? That's not recognition; it's barely a nodding acquaintance.

THE excitement of the Scottish referendum persuaded thousands of folk to get themselves on the electoral roll in order to vote. Now comes news that some councils are using this information to chase them for council tax. Typical. You think you're voting for the New Jerusalem and you end up in Dodge City.

NATURE corner. In the wee small hours of the morning, I was startled awake by what sounded like someone rapping on the door. No-one there. The noise started again. It seemed to be from the outside windowsill but if you shine a torch at a window on a pitch-black night, all you can see (or at least, all I could see) is a startled old bloke in an ill-fitting nightgown staring back. Daylight revealed a line of smashed snailshells on the windowsill. How could this be? Snails are food for thrushes or other songbirds, and birds don't go out at night. A little research reveals that mice and other rodents will also eat snails. Can you picture a more revolting spectacle than a gang of mice smashing their way into shells and gorging on snailmeat on your own windowsill? A very good reason for sleeping with the windows shut.

I REFERRED recently to paying £90 for joint membership of the National Trust. A number of readers have told me that if you are a couple aged 60-plus and living at the same address in England, you can get a big reduction on the joining fee. But it's up to you to request it. And once you've paid the full amount you can't get a refund. The NT website is vague on the subject so if anyone at NT would care to explain, I'd be thrilled to hear from them. In the meantime, £90 out of pocket, I'm wondering whether they deserve the word "Trust" in their title.

WHEN the post-war founders of the Common Market boldly proposed "the free movement of people," did they ever, in their wildest nightmares, expect it would allow a convicted murderer from Latvia being able to slip into England and start a new, unknown to the authorities? I doubt it. If you ever needed an argument for swift and drastic reform of the European Union, the murder of 14-year-old Alice Gross and the disappearance of the Latvian whom police want to question is it. The EU founders dreamed of a united Europe. But even they believed there would be frontiers of sovereign states which would have to be crossed. Today's Euro-fanatics want one huge, borderless superstate. They clearly regard the occasional murder as a price worth paying to achieve their Napoleonic fantasy. Fact: you cannot have the free movement of people without unleashing the free movement of murderers, rapists, jihadis and psychopaths.

POPE Francis urges us all to take better care of the elderly. He says putting them in care homes is sometimes "akin to a hidden form of euthanasia." The great thing about being a pope is that you'll never be a burden on your children. All being well.