Peter Rhodes: Pale, Stale and Male

THE columnist and author Simon Jenkins, a middle-aged, middle-class Englishman, protests that his sort of people have become "the last group that it's okay to vilify." His comments follow a series of attacks on sport, politics and local government for being "pale, stale and male." PSM has become the latest pariah group.

BUT it's not the only group that can still be abused. People of a reddish hue are also fair game. Only a few days ago the BBC2 comedy Two Doors Down which is set in Scotland had one character warning darkly that if a pregnant woman drank Irn Bru, she'd have a ginger baby.

THE College of Policing (no, I'd never heard of it either) has announced that from 2020 all new police officers in England and Wales will have to be educated to degree standard. This will allegedly ensure high-grade officers are at hand to tackle sophisticated cyber-crime and suchlike. Quite how a working knowledge of Chaucer or Descartes will assist in collaring a drunken, machete wielding thug in a dark alley at 3am is not explained. A more serious point is that virtually all graduates emerge from university owing £40,000 or more in tuition fees. And if no-one has considered the potential dangers of having thousands of cops who are heavily in debt, and could really use a few extra quid, then the sooner they do, the better.

WRITING in the Times, Deborah Ross describes her experience on the driver-awareness course she attended in lieu of a fine and penalty points after jumping a red light. She assumed, as most folk assume, that these courses produce better drivers. Not so. The first thing she discovered was that her insurance premium shot up from £500 to £750. Her insurer explained that drivers who attend a speed awareness course are "more likely to have an accident in the next 12 months than drivers who have not committed a speeding offence in the first place." Next, she discovered that, although these courses have been running for 10 years, they have never been properly evaluated. All of which confirms my long-held view that the courses exist solely because some enterprising folk have found a way of tinkering with the legal process in order to make a profit. It's the sort of issue you'd think any MP worth his or her salt would investigate. Ten years and many millions of pounds later, we're still waiting.

IN these days when every big charity seems to be in the data-gathering business, it can seem almost impossible to give them a penny without having to sign a direct debt or divulge your name, address,email, tax status and so on. A reader tells me she sends a simple old-fashioned cheque to the charity's postal address - and they are always cashed.

CONTINUING this week's thread of forgotten jokes, I am still haunted by a disconnected punchline. The joke it belongs to slipped out of memory years ago but it definitely involved a parrot and an owl. It ends with the owl asking "Whoooo?" and the parrot replying: "Not you, you flat-faced twerp." Any help gratefully received.