COMMENT: Westwell of Ely by Rosemary Westwell

Where’s the security?

The troubles in Germany recently seemed to have been caused by lack of common sense. If you invite a lot of people of different cultures and personalities into your home, you need to have plans to support them into integrating seamlessly into your way of life.

The visitors should be expected to do this, for why else have they come? In any large group of people there will be a few who do not respect the law.

These people should be stopped from their anti-social or criminal behaviour immediately. Of course this will take more staff – you know, the chaps that are being made redundant at the moment because of the cuts?

It was not surprising to learn that over sixty thousand small aircraft and boats have been using our smaller aerodromes and ports without being checked.

When I came through Stansted recently the immigration inspections seemed minimal. A private firm assists the process, so an employee quite happily told me that the delays weren’t caused by out-of-order machines, it was because there wasn’t enough immigration staff.

It’s time we stopped hearing about cuts; we should hear more about our tax money going towards providing support for our security and the smooth integration of the new immigrants already promised entry.

Still want to be community spirited?

An incident in Bedfordshire makes one wonder whether the police that we have are blessed with common sense. A teenager found a machete in Luton and phoned the police.

He phoned three times but could not get a sensible answer, so he decided to take the machete into the police station.

He was subsequently arrested for carrying a dangerous weapon and slung into jail. How’s that for rewarding someone trying to help the community? It took three months before it came to court when the poor lad was exonerated.

Self protection

Ah but some of our judges are seeing the light. One has ruled that we can now protect ourselves and our property with whatever force is needed without fear of being arrested ourselves.

Let’s hope this doesn’t mean that we are now abandoned and left to do this on our own without police support, for some of us are not exactly the muscle-bound hefty lads that are needed to do the job.

Experts beware

So, another massive black hole has been discovered in the Milky Way. It goes to show that our experts can never claim to know everything; there is so much more to discover.

This became painfully obvious recently when people were reported to have been brain damaged after taking trial drugs in France.

Will we never learn? Do I need to mention thalidomide - you know the drug that was claimed to be safe for pregnant women to alleviate morning sickness only to find that their babies were found damaged at birth? Nowadays, ‘experts’ are squabbling over whether it is safe or not to take statins.

Only recently, I noticed that a medicine had ‘death’ listed as a side effect. Fortunately the person taking the medicine lived after taking it. Since then ‘death’ has been taken off the side-effect list, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Gobbledygook

Sometimes I despair of the gobbledygook that our councils pour out. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect they were trying to cover up what they are doing so we can’t complain.

I recently read: ‘the Future CIC has been awarded the contract to deliver Signpost 2 Skills on behalf of the Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and the Greater Cambridge City Deal’. Pardon? What a mouthful! Are they trying to say that they are paying someone else to provide courses for school students to prepare for work?

Why not say so? Surely schools might be able to do this at no extra cost? Some teachers are actually able to prepare students for all kinds of things in later life, even work.

So you’d like to emigrate to Australia?

You might want to think again. I don’t know what you have under your fridge, but one Aussie found a lethal snake’s eggs under hers!