Peter Rhodes on potholes, prisoners and promises of a new Home Guard

And behold, now comes news of a scheme to make convicted criminals repair potholes and do other socially useful things. I can't see that lasting.

While we may relish the prospect of crooks being made to repair roads, the human rights lawyers would instantly denounce it as demeaning, humiliating and possibly modern slavery, and the crims would be sent home before you can say "asphalt".

History may not repeat itself but idiocy does. A leak from Whitehall suggests Britain may recruit a new “Home Guard” to defend power plants, airports and cables. Really? So a bit like the HSF, then?

Readers may recall that a couple of months ago I described how the Home Service Force was created in 1982 and scrapped ten years later by the sort of short-sighted bean-counters who scrapped the Home Guard in 1944 and decimated the Territorial Army in 2012. 

While generations of keen young politicians have promised to maintain our defences, they have actually stripped them to the bone. And now they are seriously suggesting a new Home Guard? Stupid boys.

According to the Guardian, Downing Street is considering changes to the controversial fuel-allowance cut after “carrying out internal polling and focus groups".

I bet that was a long, intense and detailed task, based on searching questions such as: “Do we think pensioners would prefer to have a) £300, or b) nothing?”

Whether restoring some of the winter fuel cash would send voters rushing to support Labour is anyone's guess. Might people not take the view that if the Exchequer is as empty as the Chancellor claims, yet she can suddenly find £300 a head, where is she finding it from?

The panic erupting in both Labour and Conservative parties is slightly soothed by a deep-rooted believe that the electorate, having madly supported Reform UK in the local elections, will see sense and switch back to their original parties at the next general election. 

The term used by politicians and pundits to describe this process tells you all you need to know about what they really think of the electorate. They call it “returning to the fold". All together now, bah-bah-bah.