Justice on the cheap

Last Monday, All Fool’s Day. And if you are a judge or a sheriff you’d be a mug to ignore the “guidance” from the head of Scotland’s judiciary which came into force on April 1. Guidance from Lord Carloway is like a three-line whip, an encyclical from the Pope, or an instruction to mix the cement pronto from the capo di tutti capi all rolled into one. His subordinates gulped, dusted their wigs and reluctantly got into line. For the bus or the train.

Carloway’s instruct – er, guidance – was over travel, and, of course, how costs could be cut. Out, for a start, went the £4.90 for lunch they get if sitting at another court.

Public transport should be used for preference, the noble lord laid down, but, more than that, if the judge or sheriff was getting the bus to court, and they should, and were over 60 then they were “strongly encouraged” to get a bus pass. So then there’d be no charge on the public purse.Travelling by train? Well first class is out, unless you’ve a bad back, or are injured or infirm – or pregnant – or indeed all of them.

So if you’re on public transport and you see a guy in a long, black frock coat and neat white shirt hanging on a strap it probably isn’t an undertaker and it’s probably best to give up your seat.

What a contrast with Zimbabwe, which we imagined was desperately impoverished, but where they’re splashing out on their judiciary. They’ve just put in a £120,000 order to a London wigmaker for horsehair syrups at 2k a pop.

An April Fool and his money

Another April Fool’s command came into force, this one from the Gambling Commission, and it’s the reduction of the stakes on fixed-odds betting terminals – FOBTs as they’re known – in bookies’ shops from £100 a go to £2. But the cunning bookies have had six months to plan how to react and have come up with their own wheezes to make up the shortfall and keep people hooked.

On Monday, an acquaintance who works for one of the firms told me about a video game the company has introduced that day which appears to flout the new law by mimicking the FOBTs. Roulette is the most popular video game on the machines and the new one imitates it, except it’s a cycling pursuit on a numbered track and when the leader is caught the number stopped on is the jackpot. The stake can be up to £500 a turn.

First thing on Tuesday I called the commission to ask if this is legal. An hour later the game is pulled, which I am taking credit for and denying there is a coincidence.

But it doesn’t stop there. Another bookie has a lottery-based video game, Lucky 6, with a new event and chance to bet every three minutes, through every hour the shop is open, where the limit appears to be £20 a time, but you could multiply that, against diminishing returns, into 210 bets, or over £4,000. You can also fill in the slip for up to 25 separate three-minute splurges, times 210 if you desire, the total of which is too vast for my brain to process. A call to the commission elicits a refusal to comment. All of this legislative tinkering completely ignores the major problem, online gambling, where you can bet everything you can’t afford without restriction.

Why did the chicken cross the Channel?

The curious case of the chicken. How is it that one bought in a French Lidl store is twice the price of one bought in its shops in Scotland? Tough luck on the French, you might say, but if this Brexit fandango actually happens it may be a pertinent concern because prices are surely not going to go down as a result of our exit.

It’s not just chicken, prices for identical produce in Lidl France to those here are almost all more expensive, even factoring in the drop in the pound, but it is on meat, and the aforementioned slaughtered fowl, that it is most marked. A bird which would cost around £3 here is the equivalent of £7 or more there, as I found out last week.

I asked Lidl to justify the difference and whether we could expect hikes when we leave the EU (if ever) and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they haven’t got back to me.

So I’ll try on their behalf. Corporation tax there is 28% against 19% here (although no-one seems to pay it) as are social costs – employers’ contributions are generally higher for better benefits the employee enjoys. France is the largest agricultural producer in the EU. So, is it that the French farmer is less efficient? Well, only if you believe that small family farms, encouraged and supported there and by the Common Agricultural Policy, should be razed and turned into the mega farms that dominate large parts of our countryside.

In the UK, over 90% of chickens are grown indoors in industrialised conditions; in France, with its three categories of quality, more than 20% are grown outside. Then there is the strong demand for traditional typical food products – cultural snobbery you might churlishly call it – no doubt linked to the belief that they have the best chefs and cuisine in the world. So they are prepared to pay more. Does the expensive Lidl French chicken taste different, or any better than the home-produced one? Not to my jaded, taste buds.

A life sentence

Exhausted by this three-year-long guddle over finding a Brexit solution? Relax. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Research group has been worrying at it for 26 years. You’d think they’d have it sorted out by now.

Westminster rules, OK?

What strange rules and allowances they have at Westminster. Labour MP Fiona Onasanya, who was convicted of perverting the course of justice, is able to vote, yet if she had been guilty of the civil offence of bankruptcy (where debts are wiped after a year) she’d have been disqualified from sitting in the House of Commons. On Wednesday, the bill to delay Brexit went through with a majority of one and without Onasanya’s vote, made shuffling past the tellers in the voting lobby wearing an electronic tag, it would not have passed.

Justice? There’s SFA!

There’s been more contumely over Scott Brown’s crucifixion pose in the Old Firm game than the post-match fracas where at least three people were stabbed.

And what’s all the fuss about this Rangers oik Alfredo Morelos patting the cheeks of opponents and getting sent off five times in one season? Very old readers and football historians may recall the Ibrox club’s centre-half Willie Woodburn in the fifties who was the last professional footballer in the UK to be suspended sine die. And he ran up just four red cards (although technically they didn’t have them then) in a 17-year career.

The last and fateful one, in 1954, was for nutting a Stirling Albion player. An SFA disciplinary panel took four minutes to come up with the verdict and it was on the casting vote of John Robbie of Aberdeen, which may go some way to explaining the hatred between the clubs which lasts until this day.

It’s unimaginable now that someone could be deprived of their livelihood in such a way. The ban was eventually rescinded but by then Woodburn was 37 and too old to return. He became a football reporter for the News Of The World. You wouldn’t have wanted to argue with him in the press box.