The vilest of the vile

A READER asks, why is it that when we are young we fall but when we are old we have a fall?

MORE ill-chosen initials. After last week's item on the Advanced Radar Signals Establishment, a reader insists that West Midlands Police once planned to set up a quick-reaction force, to be called the Fast Action Response Team. They had second thoughts.

JEREMY Corbyn has appointed an adviser who once denounced a senior Labour colleague as "a vile git." No surprises there, then. It is almost impossible to succeed in Left-wing politics these days without using the v-word at least a dozen times a day. According to the dictionary, vile means highly offensive, disgusting or repulsive. It is a strong word intended to be used in extreme circumstances. But in today's hate-filled politics it has become the mildest starting point for insults. Anyone who does not share your political views is vile. Anyone who voted for the other lot is a vile Tory. Vile Tory scum covers all members of the Conservative Party while Tory MPs are vile Tory Nazi scum, except the ladies who are vile Tory Nazi bitch-scum.

SHOW me a regular user of the v-word and I'll show you an unhappy soul whose life has not turned out as they hoped. They tend to be stuck in dead-end jobs or no job at all and rage inwardly about not being recognised as the towering intellectual figure they know they are. They justify their extreme language by claiming to feel sorry for "the people" but the people have voted Tory yet again which means the people are, what's the word? Vile.

THE Institute for Fiscal Studies says pensioners are better off than ever before with average incomes now higher than the average wage. A reader describes his personal Six Ages of Man: "1940s: born, parents skint. 1950s: go to school, parents still skint. 1960s: join RAF, still skint. 1980s: divorced, skint. 1990s: remarried, retire with two good pensions, getting better. Present day: flew 41,000 miles on holidays last year, expecting the same this year." He has more money in retirement than he ever had while working and life is richer than it has ever been. The snag? It took him 71 years to get here.

HERE we go again. After a few wrongful accusations, a campaign has begun for those accused of rape and sexual assaults to be granted anonymity until they are convicted. Anonymity in such cases was the law from 1976 until 1988. Since then the internet has changed everything. If an MP, pop star or mayor were accused of rape and the courts ordered he must not be named, how long before every detail would appear on websites at home and abroad? We are talking minutes rather than hours.

I MUST be missing something on this sugar-tax row. The Government needs every penny it can get and a tax on something that causes obesity, diabetes and cancer is a tax that nobody – apart from wicked vested interests – can object to. What's more, if the masses are denied their sugar, they won't have the energy to riot about it.

WHO are these vested interests, anyway? The food and advertising industries must be in the frame, but who else? I suspect the dentists may be quietly lobbying against a tax on the substance that provides them with so many fillings. For you and me, it's a sweetener but for dentists, sugar is their bread and butter.