Guilty, Yet Deserving

Some serial offenders from one of London's more disreputable districts have received more than £100,000 in legal aid from the taxpayer, despite being repeatedly found guilty of mass poisoning, negligence and sloth. The recidivists are, of course, minor gang members of the greenest government ever, which has persistently broken the law on air pollution and therefore stands complicit in up to forty thousand premature deaths every year, according to its own figures. The supreme court ordered the miscreants to buck up their ideas, to which Elizabeth Truss' Department for Fracking and Whatever responded, eventually, with a sneering declaration that it might get around to cutting pollution in a decade or so. Four years ago Truss co-authored (or perhaps had co-authored for her) a pamphlet which described British workers as being among the world's worst idlers; so we must all applaud her obvious desire to lead by example. Meanwhile, annual funding for improving air quality has been cut by eighty-four per cent, thanks largely to Owen Paterson and his little yellow enablers during the Conservative administration of 2010-15; but at least we can rest assured that £105,000 of the money saved has been spent in a good cause.