Common sense need not apply.

Why should a man convicted of kidnapping and murdering an 8 year-old girl get legal aid? Why should he ever have the possibility of getting out of prison? Why doesn't he get a life sentence, with life meaning life in prison, end of? That is, after all, the length of the sentence that Roy Whitling gave the parents of Sarah Payne when he murdered their daughter.

The fact that this disgusting human being has had ten years slashed off his sentence via legal aid funded by the taxpayer really indicates just how nuts things have become in our criminal justice system. Even if realistically a reduction of 50 to 40 years means that Whitling will still never get out of prison, this is a needless and I suspect painful blow to a family that have already suffered more than any family should ever have to.

Public sector saving? Start with vice-chancellors.

There have been hysterics by some on the left at the thought of the government taking a hatchet to public sector spending. I don't know why. There is plenty of money to be saved.

Lets just take the Vice-Chancellor of my Uni, the UEA. That's one employee of one University. The base wage for the UEA Vice-Chancellor is £254,000, more than the Prime Minister. That doesn't include pension contributions or bonuses. The Vice-Chancellor that just stood down from UEA got £265,000 in an "additional pensionable service". It gets worse: in the last 4 or 5 years the number of people earning over £100,000 at UEA has risen by 30%. There's plenty more where that came from, have a look.

We're talking massive amounts of cash here and this is just one example. It seems perverse that University bosses are talking of falling standards and the requirement for tuition fees to rise to upwards of £10k a year when in 2008 - 2009 the salaries of the heads of institutions rose by nearly 7%. They clearly aren't willing to lead by example, it's time for a government with guts and common sense to start the savings.

Hate to say we told you so but..

One of the most annoying things in politics is to be dismissed as loony because you have the foresight to predict things that may not seem obvious to most at the time. Many economically sound people in UKIP, including former MEP and Economics Lecturer Dr. John Whittaker, have been explaining how it was inevitable that Greece, followed by the likes of Portugal, Italy and Spain, would one day have to leave the euro. That it was bound to end up hurting their respective economies just too much to remain viable. That the political idealism behind this strand of the EU superstate building project would prove to be too costly. And that it didn't matter what the EU said or did, such suffering and fallout would be inevitable, sooner or later.

Today the Greek government are being advised by the Centre for Economics and Business Research in London to leave the euro so that they can devalue their currency as is badly required to boost their dismal export market. Perhaps one day such economists will come to another conclusion, a conclusion that those in UKIP drew before anybody else: that Britain would be far more prosperous outside of the European Union.