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| With signposts like this… |
Have you seen the news this week? Yes. What’s going on? The more I see, the more I do that “this is crazy, what’s the world coming to?” shrug thing.
It started well enough with the unflappable Alex Crawford reporting on the rebels’ arrival in Tripoli. She provided the best coverage and I was awestruck by her calm, professional approach. I also did a quiet internal dance of celebration that a working mother in her late 40s was showing everyone else how the job should be done.
But then things went down hill. Reporter after reporter has told of evidence of atrocity and corruption at every turn. It creates a bilious sense of outrage. How can this have been allowed to happen? No, really? Why wasn’t this stopped?
Outrage is also the reaction to the news that Edinburgh’s tram debacle just keeps getting worse. £700million so far and what has the Capital got to show for it? Just mayhem and waste. How hard can it be to plan and execute a project, even a big one? This is embarrassing and wasteful. The parliament building was bad enough, now this. What must the rest of the world think of us?
It certainly doesn’t help the rest of the world make sense of the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison. The fact that the conviction of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was made under Scots Law condoned at the time by the world, means that the decision to release him under licence was one for Scotland alone, however ill-advised and badly executed. Don’t you see? A country that can’t install a decent tram system in it’s main city doesn’t look like one that should be trusted to deal such a delicate international situation.
Sticking with justice, the law and asses. On the one hand we have the Scottish system locking up Naked Rambler Stephen Gough again for refusing to put his pants on, while South of the Border one of the killers of Baby P is freed and rushed off to a secret location for his own protection.
All Gough had to do is to put some knickers on, but he didn’t and presumably he has his reasons. However, when you think that when he was first arrested in 2005, Peter Connolly’s short life hadn’t even begun. This can’t be right.
And don’t get me started on a country that has higher than ever levels of obesity, while another one has a famine that everyone has largely got bored of talking about…