Peter Rhodes on potholes, prisoners and promises of a new Home Guard
Small world. Last week I suggested Whitehall should create the Department for Public Gullibility for announcing bonkers, pie-in-the-sky plans.
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.
