Only in politically correct Britain could a puppet known as Basil Brush (a fox who appears of kiddies' TV shows) be investigated by police for racism.
Here are seven more great articles by Richard Littlejohn which appeared in his Daily Mail column this week.
He also tells us why environMENTAList Al Gore is a fraud.....
Here's a foxhunt you never thought you'd see - Basil Brush wanted for hate crimes
17th March 2008
Daily Mail
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: FIGHTING POLITICALLLY CORRECT LOONIES (THE GOLLIWOG SQUAD), HEALTH & SAFETY NAZIS, ENVIROMENTALISTS AND MEMBERS OF THE LABOUR PARTY THROUGHOUT BRITAIN
The Golliwog Squad has claimed another scalp. Basil Brush is being investigated by police for racism.
You couldn't make it up. He's been put in the frame by someone called Joseph Jones, who styles himself vice-chairman of the Southern England Romany Gipsy and Irish Traveller Network.
Jojo has taken extreme offence at the "racist and offensive" nature of an episode broadcast on the children's digital channel CBBC.
In it, Basil's friend Mr Stephen falls under a gipsy's spell which makes him attractive to women - no mean feat, by all accounts, if the rumours about most of the other male presenters of children's TV programmes are anything to go by.
Basil's neighbour, Dame Rosie Fortune, tries to sell him pegs and lucky heather and offers to read his palm. Basil's having none of it.
He says: "I went to a fortune-teller once and he said I was going on a long journey. He stole my wallet and I had to walk all the way home."
Boom, boom!
Jojo complains: "This sort of thing happens quite regularly and we are fed up with making complaints about stereotypical comments made about us.
"When a comedian makes a joke on TV about pikeys or gippos, there's no comeback."
These days I watch very little on TV, apart from sport and reruns of New Tricks, The Sweeney, Minder and Hill Street Blues but I can't recall hearing many "gippo" jokes.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle last year over Marco Pierre White calling someone a "pikey" on one of his cookery shows, but he got away with it because of the even bigger row about Jim Davidson referring to someone else as a "shirtlifter".
Close call but I guess "homophobia" trumps "racism" - at least when the culprit is the highly paid star of the programme.
There's no show without Punch (which in some places there isn't, because councils have banned Punch and Judy for being too violent and no doubt in breach of numerous elf'n'safety directives).
Will Basil Brush be as lucky as Marco? Police officers are said to be studying the offending episode for evidence.
I can't believe I've just written that sentence. Police officers in Northamptonshire are sitting around staring at a video of a glove puppet to see whether they can bring a charge of "racism" against him.
I'm looking forward to the Press conference and "Wanted" poster.
"We are anxious to interview Mr Brush in relation to allegations made under the Race Relations Act 1976. He was last seen wearing a furry coat and sporting a bushy tail."
When soul legend Clarence Carter recorded Looking For A Fox, he couldn't have imagined that it would one day become the official theme tune of the Northamptonshire Constabulary.
Clearly they have no more sense of the ridiculous than the complainant. How did Jojo come to hear about this shocking smear against sensitive, law-abiding members of the diddicoy community?
It was first shown six years ago and has been repeated eight times since. It's also available on a DVD called Basil Unleashed. So why now?
More to the point, why didn't the Old Bill simply tell Jojo to go away and stop wasting their time?
If Basil gets his collar felt, where will it all end?
Will Northants social services take Andy Pandy into care because he's forced to live in a box with two other puppets?
Will Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb be prosecuted for operating an all-white recruitment policy at Trumpton Fire Station?
One of Jojo's complaints centres on the fact that gipsies no longer sell lucky heather and pegs for a living.
If Basil wanted to be bang up to date, he'd have Dame Rosie Fortune moving her caravan illegally onto land which doesn't belong to her and living on benefits, while supplementing her income stealing lawnmowers, dealing in scrap metal and tarmac-ing drives; running her brand new Toyota Land Cruiser on cut-price agricultural diesel; and taking six-month holidays in Goa with her latest boyfriend and eight children.
Boom, boom!
__________________________________________________________________
Unfit to be an MP? On the contrary, Lib Dem MP, Lemsip, shows all the symtoms of being an ideal candidate
Cheeky girl Sian writes Lemsip's obit
If you dump your fiancée and run off with a Cheeky Girl half her age and several frock sizes thinner, you must expect a bucketload from the woman scorned.
Yet Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik is whining about a book written by his ex, TV weather girl Sian Lloyd, in which she paints a vivid picture of him as a drunken fantasist, who seems to have convinced himself he's going to end up in Downing Street.
Lying in the gutter outside Number 10, if Miss Lloyd is to be believed.
I've met him a few times, and he's always struck me as barking. Last time was when we were fellow panellists on a Question Time-style event in aid of a cancer charity.
Lemsip arrived late, barged past everyone to take to the stage first, sat where he liked and then walked out halfway through, saying he had to vote in a terribly important division.
Talk about pig ignorance.
Miss Lloyd suggests Lemsip isn't fit to be a politician. I'd say that's precisely what he's fit for.
__________________________________________________________________
'Global warming scare a sham': Meteorologists want to see Al Gore in court
Eco-loonies reject an inconvenient truth
Here's a story you won't have heard about. The founder of the Weather Channel in the U.S. says Al Gore should be sued for fraud.
John Coleman says that's the only way all the evidence about "climate change" can be properly challenged.
He insists the great global warming scare is a huge scam, and says he has scientific proof to back him up.
Coleman doesn't deny that weather cycles change, and he admits that carbon emissions are higher than they were, say, 300 years ago.
But he says carbon in the atmosphere amounts to only 38 particles in 100,000. And far from "global warming", the Earth is actually in a cooling-down phase.
If all the available evidence on both sides was presented to a court, rationally and soberly, he's convinced he would win the argument.
Coleman made his remarks on Fox News after speaking at a conference on climate change in New York.
None of the major networks touched the story, and neither did the big city papers, which buy the Gore line wholesale.
There's been little or no coverage here, since the broadcast media, in particular, has taken leave of its senses over "climate change".
Most news bulletins these days are little more than party political broadcasts by Greenpeace, who put the "mental" in environmentalists.
They're like the lunatics who walk up and down Oxford Street wearing sandwich boards and screaming that The End Of The World Is Nigh.
Politicians have a vested interest in peddling this swindle. It's the latest way of bullying us and picking our pockets.
Coleman insists that in a couple of years most of us will wake up and realise that we've been had.
It's fair to assume he has some idea of what he's talking about, since - unlike most of the hysterical doom-mongers - he's been a meteorologist all his life.
Sometimes you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
If the eco-loonies and climate change fascists are convinced they're right, why not let their theories be tested forensically in court? Surely they're not afraid of an inconvenient truth?
__________________________________________________________________
This time last week, I told you that it would be Friday before the real nastiness in the Budget became apparent.
In the event, it was Saturday before we learned that Alistair Darling has slipped through a £500 tax increase on the low paid, without actually mentioning it to the Commons.
And far from "most" motorists being better off under the new Save The Polar Bears tax, it has emerged that nine out of ten of us will be hammered - even owners of seven-year-old Rovers, who will be paying more in road tax than their car's actually worth.
This sleight of hand had the Man Who Stole Your Old Age written all over it.
Does anyone still doubt that Darling is Gordon's Glove Puppet? __________________________________________________________________
Nie cottaginzski
Banging on about Britishness, the Government says everyone who lives here should have to speak English.
So why, wonders Mail reader Jutta Jones, are instructions on using the new public toilets in Ashford, Kent, printed in Polish?
I wonder what's Polish for "No cottaging..."
__________________________________________________________________
Paul McCartney has had to pay his wife, former call girl Heather Mills, a staggering £24.3million in their divorce settlement. He'd have been better off renting her by the hour. __________________________________________________________________
It's Balls, Ed
One phrase leapt out of Peter Oborne's demolition of the preposterous Ed Balls on Saturday.
It was Mister Ed's claim that his disgraceful allegation that schools were soliciting bribes from prospective parents was due to "unverified desk research".
In other words, he made it up - what we in the trade call "lies".
But as Balls himself would say: so what?
dailymail.co.uk
Here are seven more great articles by Richard Littlejohn which appeared in his Daily Mail column this week.
He also tells us why environMENTAList Al Gore is a fraud.....
Here's a foxhunt you never thought you'd see - Basil Brush wanted for hate crimes
17th March 2008
Daily Mail
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: FIGHTING POLITICALLLY CORRECT LOONIES (THE GOLLIWOG SQUAD), HEALTH & SAFETY NAZIS, ENVIROMENTALISTS AND MEMBERS OF THE LABOUR PARTY THROUGHOUT BRITAIN
The Golliwog Squad has claimed another scalp. Basil Brush is being investigated by police for racism.
You couldn't make it up. He's been put in the frame by someone called Joseph Jones, who styles himself vice-chairman of the Southern England Romany Gipsy and Irish Traveller Network.
Jojo has taken extreme offence at the "racist and offensive" nature of an episode broadcast on the children's digital channel CBBC.
In it, Basil's friend Mr Stephen falls under a gipsy's spell which makes him attractive to women - no mean feat, by all accounts, if the rumours about most of the other male presenters of children's TV programmes are anything to go by.
Basil's neighbour, Dame Rosie Fortune, tries to sell him pegs and lucky heather and offers to read his palm. Basil's having none of it.
He says: "I went to a fortune-teller once and he said I was going on a long journey. He stole my wallet and I had to walk all the way home."
Boom, boom!
Jojo complains: "This sort of thing happens quite regularly and we are fed up with making complaints about stereotypical comments made about us.
"When a comedian makes a joke on TV about pikeys or gippos, there's no comeback."
These days I watch very little on TV, apart from sport and reruns of New Tricks, The Sweeney, Minder and Hill Street Blues but I can't recall hearing many "gippo" jokes.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle last year over Marco Pierre White calling someone a "pikey" on one of his cookery shows, but he got away with it because of the even bigger row about Jim Davidson referring to someone else as a "shirtlifter".
Close call but I guess "homophobia" trumps "racism" - at least when the culprit is the highly paid star of the programme.
There's no show without Punch (which in some places there isn't, because councils have banned Punch and Judy for being too violent and no doubt in breach of numerous elf'n'safety directives).
Will Basil Brush be as lucky as Marco? Police officers are said to be studying the offending episode for evidence.
I can't believe I've just written that sentence. Police officers in Northamptonshire are sitting around staring at a video of a glove puppet to see whether they can bring a charge of "racism" against him.
I'm looking forward to the Press conference and "Wanted" poster.
"We are anxious to interview Mr Brush in relation to allegations made under the Race Relations Act 1976. He was last seen wearing a furry coat and sporting a bushy tail."
When soul legend Clarence Carter recorded Looking For A Fox, he couldn't have imagined that it would one day become the official theme tune of the Northamptonshire Constabulary.
Clearly they have no more sense of the ridiculous than the complainant. How did Jojo come to hear about this shocking smear against sensitive, law-abiding members of the diddicoy community?
It was first shown six years ago and has been repeated eight times since. It's also available on a DVD called Basil Unleashed. So why now?
More to the point, why didn't the Old Bill simply tell Jojo to go away and stop wasting their time?
If Basil gets his collar felt, where will it all end?
Will Northants social services take Andy Pandy into care because he's forced to live in a box with two other puppets?
Will Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb be prosecuted for operating an all-white recruitment policy at Trumpton Fire Station?
One of Jojo's complaints centres on the fact that gipsies no longer sell lucky heather and pegs for a living.
If Basil wanted to be bang up to date, he'd have Dame Rosie Fortune moving her caravan illegally onto land which doesn't belong to her and living on benefits, while supplementing her income stealing lawnmowers, dealing in scrap metal and tarmac-ing drives; running her brand new Toyota Land Cruiser on cut-price agricultural diesel; and taking six-month holidays in Goa with her latest boyfriend and eight children.
Boom, boom!
__________________________________________________________________
Unfit to be an MP? On the contrary, Lib Dem MP, Lemsip, shows all the symtoms of being an ideal candidate
Cheeky girl Sian writes Lemsip's obit
If you dump your fiancée and run off with a Cheeky Girl half her age and several frock sizes thinner, you must expect a bucketload from the woman scorned.
Yet Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik is whining about a book written by his ex, TV weather girl Sian Lloyd, in which she paints a vivid picture of him as a drunken fantasist, who seems to have convinced himself he's going to end up in Downing Street.
Lying in the gutter outside Number 10, if Miss Lloyd is to be believed.
I've met him a few times, and he's always struck me as barking. Last time was when we were fellow panellists on a Question Time-style event in aid of a cancer charity.
Lemsip arrived late, barged past everyone to take to the stage first, sat where he liked and then walked out halfway through, saying he had to vote in a terribly important division.
Talk about pig ignorance.
Miss Lloyd suggests Lemsip isn't fit to be a politician. I'd say that's precisely what he's fit for.
__________________________________________________________________
'Global warming scare a sham': Meteorologists want to see Al Gore in court
Eco-loonies reject an inconvenient truth
Here's a story you won't have heard about. The founder of the Weather Channel in the U.S. says Al Gore should be sued for fraud.
John Coleman says that's the only way all the evidence about "climate change" can be properly challenged.
He insists the great global warming scare is a huge scam, and says he has scientific proof to back him up.
Coleman doesn't deny that weather cycles change, and he admits that carbon emissions are higher than they were, say, 300 years ago.
But he says carbon in the atmosphere amounts to only 38 particles in 100,000. And far from "global warming", the Earth is actually in a cooling-down phase.
If all the available evidence on both sides was presented to a court, rationally and soberly, he's convinced he would win the argument.
Coleman made his remarks on Fox News after speaking at a conference on climate change in New York.
None of the major networks touched the story, and neither did the big city papers, which buy the Gore line wholesale.
There's been little or no coverage here, since the broadcast media, in particular, has taken leave of its senses over "climate change".
Most news bulletins these days are little more than party political broadcasts by Greenpeace, who put the "mental" in environmentalists.
They're like the lunatics who walk up and down Oxford Street wearing sandwich boards and screaming that The End Of The World Is Nigh.
Politicians have a vested interest in peddling this swindle. It's the latest way of bullying us and picking our pockets.
Coleman insists that in a couple of years most of us will wake up and realise that we've been had.
It's fair to assume he has some idea of what he's talking about, since - unlike most of the hysterical doom-mongers - he's been a meteorologist all his life.
Sometimes you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
If the eco-loonies and climate change fascists are convinced they're right, why not let their theories be tested forensically in court? Surely they're not afraid of an inconvenient truth?
__________________________________________________________________
This time last week, I told you that it would be Friday before the real nastiness in the Budget became apparent.
In the event, it was Saturday before we learned that Alistair Darling has slipped through a £500 tax increase on the low paid, without actually mentioning it to the Commons.
And far from "most" motorists being better off under the new Save The Polar Bears tax, it has emerged that nine out of ten of us will be hammered - even owners of seven-year-old Rovers, who will be paying more in road tax than their car's actually worth.
This sleight of hand had the Man Who Stole Your Old Age written all over it.
Does anyone still doubt that Darling is Gordon's Glove Puppet? __________________________________________________________________
Nie cottaginzski
Banging on about Britishness, the Government says everyone who lives here should have to speak English.
So why, wonders Mail reader Jutta Jones, are instructions on using the new public toilets in Ashford, Kent, printed in Polish?
I wonder what's Polish for "No cottaging..."
__________________________________________________________________
Paul McCartney has had to pay his wife, former call girl Heather Mills, a staggering £24.3million in their divorce settlement. He'd have been better off renting her by the hour. __________________________________________________________________
It's Balls, Ed
One phrase leapt out of Peter Oborne's demolition of the preposterous Ed Balls on Saturday.
It was Mister Ed's claim that his disgraceful allegation that schools were soliciting bribes from prospective parents was due to "unverified desk research".
In other words, he made it up - what we in the trade call "lies".
But as Balls himself would say: so what?
dailymail.co.uk