Peter Rhodes: Britain's missing policy

THE British Constitution for beginners. 1) The Speaker should not speak.

GREAT coincidences of our time. Number of houses required to meet Britain's housing needs: 300,000 per year. Net migration into Britain: 300,000 per year.

WHEN ministers talk this week of our "broken" housing programme, they need look no further than the House of Commons for someone to blame. Britain is a big and welcoming country. It could cope perfectly well with net migration of 100,000 newcomers per year. But when the UK population is allowed to grow at up to five times that rate, from 50 million to 70 million in a single lifetime, then everything, including surgeries, hospitals, schools, roads, railways and electricity, gas and water supplies, begins to creak and fall apart. There is absolutely no point in any Government brandishing a new White Paper and announcing a new housing policy unless it also has a viable population policy. We are still waiting.

AS the trial in Apple Tree Yard (BBC1) came to its climax, the foreman of the jury did not merely deliver the verdict but did so after a long pause, as seen with the Strictly Come Dancing voting, to build up the tension. It was a silly moment to insert in a serious drama but it made me wonder. In this age, when people base their language and behaviour on what they see on television, has a real-life foreman in a real-life court announced: "We find the accused (interminable pause) not guilty"? I can think of some crusty old judges who would have sent the foreman straight to the cells for contempt for turning a serious trial into a drama.

MORE on predictive texting. A reader in Wolverhampton sent a congratulatory text to the star of a tribute stage show, adding that he'd seen the original star "at the Gaumont, W'ton" 60 years earlier. In his text, W'ton appeared as Eton. A rare mistake, I guess.

BE wary, very wary of the latest Whitehall proposal that elderly folk living in big houses could be offered "incentives" to move into smaller, sheltered homes. The elderly are not stupid. If they wished to downsize they would already have done so. If they choose to rattle around in large houses it is probably because they love the family home, because they enjoy having the kids and grandchildren to stay and because every year that they hang on to it, the more valuable it becomes and the more care-home fees it may eventually provide when they feel the time is right to sell. As for offering "incentives," in situations like this, the line between carrot and stick sometimes gets blurred. Next thing you know, there's a council official waving a compulsory-purchase order and Robocops on your drive.

"FOR the record, I have never been a Lady," the shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry thundered in the Commons when Theresa May dared to address her as "Lady Nugee"the title she holds by virtue of being married to Judge Sir Christopher Nugee. Also for the record, I should point out that all adult female readers of this column are assumed to be ladies - until proved otherwise.