I blame the scapegoats (34 page)

'They're bluffing,' said the American
President, but Mrs Jefferson had fallen in love with the big garden with that
pretty 2000-mile river frontage onto the Mississippi. Tm going to tell them
that there's a few other properties that we're going to look at. I'll say we
might decide to buy Florida off the Spanish instead . . .'

'But, darling, we could lose it altogether -
and look at the estate agent's details: "A rare opportunity to purchase
this eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square mile estate with its own
mountain range, plains, lakes and several outbuildings." Oh darling, can
we, please, please, please . . .' she begged, staring at the picture in
Country
Life.
But, of course, when they moved in it was
nothing like the description: half of it was swamps and deserts, and the
neighbours were unfriendly and kept threatening to scalp everyone. America
sulked for a century and refused to forward all the mail. Then in 1966
President de Gaulle took France out of NATO and said all American troops should
leave French soil. ('Does that include the dead ones?' quipped an American
cynic at the time.) The US then had to find another way to install American
service personnel there, and this was the origin of Disneyland Paris. It was
very hard to argue with Ronald Reagan at the best of times, but when he had
this idea that thousands of US marines should be stationed in Northern France
hidden inside Mickey Mouse and Goofy costumes, they thought he'd finally
flipped. Battle-weary soldiers were kitted out in their new uniforms as Sneezy
or Baloo the Bear. B52 pilots were retrained to man Space Mountain and the
flying Dumbo ride, and amazingly the plan worked. The soldiers were delighted
that the locals seemed to wave and cheer them every day as they rode past on
the way to Sleeping Beauty's castle. Never before had US troops been hugged and
photographed with their arms round the native population.

But
all this is now set to change when these agents suddenly reveal themselves at
the outset of America's cunning plan to bring about regime change in Paris. The
bombing of French cities begins next month, although no doubt those obstinate
French politicians will find some reason to object to this as well. All the
White House seeks is a French President who'll back the United States, a leader
who'll support America whatever its policies. No wonder Tony Blair's been
having those extra French lessons.

2
May 2003

The
desk sergeant at Hackney police station is having a few days off. He has just
had the most stressful month of his life - every day during the month-long gun
amnesty he would look up from his paperwork to see hardened criminals striding
through the front door brandishing automatic sub-machine guns.

'Excuse me?' they would shout, waving their
Kalashnikov around at an apparently empty desk. 'Oi, mate, I can see you; it's
no good crouching down there with a computer cover on your head . . .'

And
the quivering sergeant would then stand up slowly with his hands in the air,
having passed across his wallet and the keys to all the cells.

'No,
I've come to hand my gun in - to put it in safe hands.' And then various
bystanders would say, 'So why are you giving it to the police then?'

The
Home Office's gun amnesty ended this week with over 20,000 weapons handed in at
police stations around the country. There were old shotguns, antique duelling
pistols and a 1970s Johnny Seven with all the original plastic white bullets
recovered from under the piano. However, much to the government's
disappointment, at no time did an Iraqi man with a moustache wander in and hand
over a few weapons of mass destruction that he'd forgotten were still lying
around in his attic.

It seems a bit unfair that the criminals have
been called to put their weapons permanently beyond use with no concessions
whatsoever from the other side. Shouldn't the police be made to change their
name or something? What about a truncheon amnesty? Or a promise to attempt to
recruit more officers from the criminal community (no, on second thoughts there
are quite enough already). The reality is, of course, that the weapons handed
in were not from gangland killers but from law-abiding citizens who were getting
increasingly uneasy about having Granddad's old Second World War revolver
rattling around in that kitchen drawer with the garden twine and old Allen keys
from Ikea. The idea that Interpol's most wanted villains were going to
voluntarily walk into a police station was perhaps a little naive.

'Excuse me, I was the mystery second gunman
in the Kennedy assassination and I've been meaning to get rid of this vital
clue for ages, so I thought "Where better than Scotland Yard?"'

'Right, many thanks, sir, just pop it there
next to Abu Nidal's rocket launcher.'

'Urn, that CCTV
camera is definitely switched off, is it?'

'Oh yes, we're not at all interested in the
fact that you happen to be a professional hit-man in the pay of organized
crime. As long as we've got this old gun. Mind how you go now . . .'

Apparently
drug dealers and gangsters were struggling to imagine such a scenario.

That's not to say that the gun amnesty was
not worth doing. Every gun taken out of circulation makes this country a safer
place. Of all the bills passed by this government, the ban on handguns was
surely one of the most sensible and right. Having to choose between the risk of
another Dunblane and a few sportsmen losing their pastime - there is simply no
argument. And yet former handgun owners are still moaning that their human
rights have been infringed. Why don't they just get another hobby? Take up
macrame or making amusing novelty paperweights by sticking swivelly eyes on
shiny pebbles or something? Gun ownership is simply not worth the risk. Fatal
shootings committed by Americans are now higher than ever (particularly when
unarmed Iraqi demonstrators happen to be in the vicinity).

The gun amnesty has been such a success that
they are now thinking of repeating the exercise with other dangerous objects.
Hospital casualty departments are pressing hard for a 'power tools amnesty'.
Middle-class husbands who were given electric saws, high-speed drills and nail
guns as Christmas presents and are too scared even to get them out of the packaging
will soon be able to hand them in anonymously without risk of embarrassment.

In the meantime, the government is now left
with the problem of what to do with thousands of knackered old revolvers and
shotguns, so look out for a Junior Minister of Trade explaining that we
only-export such arms to Third World dictatorships who intend to use the
weapons for peaceful purposes. Perhaps the firearms should be melted down to
make a symbolic statue for the 'Lefty-Council Peace Garden'. When it was
discussed in cabinet it transpired that many of the guns are rusted up or
jammed.

'Perfect,' said the Minister of Defence.
'Then why don't we just issue them to Britain's front-line soldiers?'

9
May 2003

This
week a headteacher was reprimanded for cheating during his pupils' SATS exams.
He was made to wait outside the office of the General Teaching Council and when
he was finally told to enter, he knew he was in really big trouble because his
mum and dad had been called in too.

'We're not angry with you, David, just
disappointed . . .' said the officials. 'You know, you're only cheating
yourself, aren't you?'

And
the disgraced headteacher mumbled 'Yes, miss' while staring open-mouthed at the
floor.

This
month hundreds of thousands of pupils will be sitting SATS tests, and teachers
will have to find more sophisticated ways of improving their school's
performance. As their pens hover over the multiple-choice questions, pupils
will suddenly hear some carefully timed coughing from the headteacher looking
over their shoulder. Despite the fact that the vast majority of teachers are
against the national testing of seven-, eleven- and fourteen-year-olds, the
government refuses to abolish Standardized Assessment Tests. Because let's face
it, without SATS we would have no way of discovering which schools are
concentrating on the SATS. Without these tables we'd never know that those
middle-class kids at the village school in Surrey were doing much better than
children who had English as a second language in that run-down estate in Tower
Hamlets.

This
is surely the whole point of academic league tables. Parents of the posh kids
got fed up with their kids losing football matches 13-0 to the tough boys from
the school on the estate, so another sort of league table was devised where
they wouldn't always come last. Of course, more progressive newspapers like the
Guardian
print the schools in
alphabetical order so as not to imply any sort of order of merit, although
Aardvark Primary in Abbas Coombe still boasts about being top. (Arsenal have
just contacted the sports desk to see if they might adopt the same policy for
the Premiership.)

Apart
from the undoubted stress placed on staff and pupils, the tables are misleading
because there are so many variables that generally do not get taken into
account. For example, in one-class-entry schools each child represents over 3
per cent, so a few low-achieving pupils in a particular year group can make it
seem as if the school has slipped back drastically in twelve months. Say just
four children in a class of thirty had numeracy problems, then that's four
times 3.3 recurring, which makes, um, twelve, no, thirteen point something -
er, well, anyway, these numeracy skills are overrated.

Many liberal middle classes are instinctively
against testing children at such a young age: 'Oh, I mean, it's ridiculous,
putting children under that much pressure,' they say, as they drive their
children round to the private tutors. 'I mean, there's enough pressure on
children already. Jennifer's got her grade four cello test, her gymkhana,
ballet, Brownies and bridge lessons - frankly, school ought to be the one
chance they have to relax a bit.' You see these over-keen parents running
behind their children in places like the Science Museum. As their kids are
maniacally pressing buttons and pulling levers, Mummy and Daddy are standing
behind them desperately attempting to precis the explanatory notes: 'You see,
darling, that's called "refraction" and there, you see the light
breaking into different colours, that's because um . . .' But it's too late,
because little Timothy has already dashed off and is barging his little sister
off the plasma lamp. At least if the government introduced tests for neurosis
we could guarantee those scores would get higher every year.

Maybe
it would be fairer if children were able to choose the subjects on which they
were tested. Ofsted reports would be far more positive: 'Students were
stimulated and focused with a majority of them attaining Level Seven or higher
in Mortal Kombat on their Nintendo GameBoys. There was also genuine progress
amongst the boys in the standard DFES test for seeing who could wee the
highest.'

It
seems that the only way to make things fair would be to introduce testing and
league tables for government ministers. Critics of this idea might argue that
it would only increase stress for our front-benchers, and that ministers' mums
and dads might have them tutored in advance. 'It takes no account of the
intake,' they'll say. 'How can a working-class kid like John Prescott be
expected to do as well at verbal reasoning as a privately educated pupil like
Tony Blair?' And what would it do for the morale of ministers, to see
themselves near the bottom of the cabinet league table just because they failed
a minor numeracy test such as balancing their departmental budget?

'Okay, we'll have to publish the cabinet
league tables in alphabetical order,' says Tony Blair. 'Oh, and tell Hilary
Armstrong she's sacked . . .'

16
May 2002

It's
always the same in every group: there's always one bloody leftie stirring
things up and spoiling the atmosphere for everyone else. Take Britain's farms,
for example - apparently there's one cow going around claiming that the humans
keep animals so they can sell them for slaughter.

'It's true, I tell you, the farmer gets paid
to let other humans murder us all,' she says, failing to sell a single copy of
her radical newspaper as all the other animals wink at each other because the
nutter with the conspiracy theories is off again.

'Don't be ridiculous, Daisy, humans like
animals; why would they want to murder us?'