Mark Andrews: Trigger-happy TV, Rayner comes up short, and why it's right to spend more on defence

Well no, this time the broadcaster has deemed fit to issue a trigger warning for... Terry & June. Yes, the gentle suburban comedy starring Terry Scott and June Whitfield has been deemed a bit too edgy for the easily offended. Apparently some Terry Medford expressed less than progressive views on Zimbabwean independence, and joked that he once used a vacuum cleaner to freshen up his cat. There must be some seriously thin-skinned people around if either of those things can cause them distress.

The irony is, in targeting those two episodes, they appear to have missed the one that genuinely does make you cringe today: the one when they cast Derek Griffiths, an actor of Ghanaian descent, in the role of an Arab sheikh.

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The irony is that Terry & June is about the very last thing that Generation Trigger Warning would actually watch. Let's be honest, it seemed a little quaint 40 years ago. It is a throwback to the days when comedy didn't need to be hip, clever, and didn't need to have a message – but it did have to be funny. Which is why the Millennials wouldn't understand it.

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Besides, if we're going to start targetting classic comedies, surely the place for a trigger warning would be Only Fools and Horses.

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Similarly, I can't join in the confected fury about Angela Rayner calling Rishi Sunak a 'pint-sized loser' during PM's questions this week. I was going to say he's big enough to take it, but then again, maybe not.

She did herself any favours, though. This was Mrs Rayner's chance to put the Government on the spot, to ask the hardest question she could possibly think of. And instead she used it to make a childish insult about somebody's height.

It's not big. And it's definitely not clever.

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I doubt it will help him much, but Rishi Sunak was bang on the money this week when he pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

Indeed, the question should really be about whether 2.5 per cent is actually enough. Defence spending was at three per cent as recently as the late 1980s, and does anybody honestly think the world is a safer place now than it was then?

Making the case to cut spending on public services to finance tanks, guns and rockets in times of relative peace, is never going to be an easy sell, which was why a complacent and decadent Europe neglected the need for defence spending in the roaring 1920s. But building up strong defences is not about starting wars, it is about preventing them. And the short-term hardship needed to maintain credible defences will pale into insignificance compared to the cost, both financial and human, of a future world war.