Mark Andrews: Kanye West, the doctors' strike, and shoplifters go free while hero cops go to jail (cloned)

The junior doctors are on strike again, this time demanding a 29 per cent pay rise. And why not? After all, they only got 22 per cent last year, at a time when thousands of people are resigned to the fact they will get no pay rise at all.

Dr Peter Fahey, joint chairman of the West Midlands BMA branch, reckons it is necessary to restore real-terms pay levels to what they were in 2008. Which is a bit odd, because in the next sentence he says he only qualified as a doctor five years ago. Probably wise to keep quiet about that bit, Pete.

I suppose you can’t really blame them, given how easily the Government capitulated last year. But are they really so out of touch that they think people working in the private sector, who will being asked to fund their remuneration demands, have received RPI-linked pay rises every year for the past 18 years?

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What really astounds me, though, is not the naked opportunism and entitlement of the BMA, but the Government’s economically illiterate response: to retaliate by scrapping plans to create 1,000 extra training posts. Because, as any O-level economics pupil will tell you, increasing supply drives prices down, while cutting supply drives prices up. Instead of vindictively cutting the training programme, the Government should tell junior doctors they are going to flood the market with new recruits, who will soon be ready to take their jobs for half the pay if they don’t stop being greedy.

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Did you get your refund for Wireless Festival then? I’m just hoping they’ll compensate me for the cost of the uniform I had bought, those jackboots don’t come cheap you know.

Kanye West was banned from entering the country on the grounds that his presence ‘would not be conducive to the public good’. Now about the 5,000 who have arrived so far this year on small boats....

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Channel 5 is showing a series called Fare Dodgers, following the long-suffering officials tasked with fare enforcement on the London Underground. What surprises me is not the number who travel without tickets, but the sheer indignation when they are caught, clearly believing they have done no wrong, and that the inspectors should be a bit more reasonable about the whole thing.

Then we come to Walker Smith, the security guard fired by Waitrose for having the temerity to tackle a shoplifter. There seems to be a growing attitude among the privileged chattering classes that shop theft and fare-dodging are not real crimes, but some kind of Robin Hood redistribution of wealth.

Contrast this with the sentence handed down to Pc Mark Roberts, jailed for causing death by dangerous driving while responding to a 999 call to aid a choking baby. He was sent to prison despite a plea from the victim’s daughter to spare him jail.

The court heard Roberts was ‘heartbroken’ by the accident, and had led a 'remarkable life of public service', joining the police after serving with the Army in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It cut little ice with His Honour Judge Francis Laird KC: “Your speed as you approached the junction was too high,” he said, sternly.

Something tells me his honour has never had to make an instant life-or-death situation under extreme pressure.

But it does sum up modern Britain to a tee. Open season for shoplifters and fare dodgers, while honest security guards get the sack, and hero cops go to jail.