The Daily Mail - the party of the people!

It’s been an...interesting few days in the news. In the space of 72 hours, the highly efficient and probing recruitment analysis process which all aspiring police cadets have to undergo achieves a notable milestone by approving a boy racer near Mold who kills two people and is sent to jail for six years, a renowned Welsh Surgeon - Mohamed Bahaa Madkour - is struck off for lying on medical records, with the GMC noting that if you’re unlucky enough to be treated in the ear nose and throat department at Ysbyty Gwynedd, you might be better off with a short break in a Turkish prison, a Prestatyn chap is alleged to have tried to hammer his pregnant girlfriend to death while she was sleeping and an ambulance in St Asaph was stoned by yobs.

And who says North Wales isn’t a wonderful place to live?

If, however, we look at each incident dispassionately, it’s intriguing to ask if there’s any sort of commonality. The boy racer incident was stupidity, although it’s tempting to ask why the searching police application form failed to spot that they were hiring an idiot, the surgeon was lying to protect himself, his reputation and his livelihood, the alleged murderer was simply selfish, greedy and sociopathic (if it’s all true, of course) and the ambulance incident - well, curiously, that’s probably the most worrying. Putting aside the fact that the last two incidents might well have been investigated by lunatic drivers who had managed to squeeze through the somewhat flawed police recruitment process and narrowly avoided slaughtering half a dozen elderly drivers, there’s nothing new about liars, murderers and idiots; every village has one - or several, if your village has a population of more than 500, apparently.

No, it’s the yobs stoning the ambulance which paints a clearer picture of society today. Blue flashing lights apart, everything about an ambulance is designed to evince feelings of concern, compassion and worry among the community. Attacking a vehicle which may well be transporting someone near death to a place of safety and support reveals a serious weakness in the socialisation process the attackers should have undergone. But it’s these sorts of actions that lie behind several of the major national news stories in the past couple of weeks. The major political parities talk about ‘getting tough’ on ‘yob culture’, something of a misnomer in itself, and the Labour party has - finally - realised that action has to be taken in respect of teenage girls who expect to be housed, simply because they’re pregnant. The Tories, on the other hand, apparently subject everything to the ‘Daily Mail test’, which, as a tacit admission that policy is driven by one sector of the media, is also a fairly sure sign that absolutely nothing of any significance will ever get done.

Perhaps it’s time to give someone else the chance of Government.