Recently by Roger Clarke

George Osborne's speech to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was a bit worrying.

Not so much about the impending doom of the Euro crisis but that bit where he told them "As the storms of the Eurozone crisis gather, there is a risk that some of the good work of the last 20 years in building a stable financial sector and creating jobs and prosperity is unwound."

How he kept a straight face is beyond me. If our chancellor actually believes that the Euro crisis is threatening a stable financial sector, then we are all in trouble.

This is the bloke in charge of the country's finances remember and does not seem to have worked out that the Euro crisis came about precisely because we did not have a stable financial sector. It is not so much chicken and egg as chicken and scrambled mess.

Banks around the world were bankrupt after having made squillions for years trading in cobbled together derivatives that were worthless with money that did not actually exist; and that was thanks in a large part to light touch (as in no one ever felt it) financial regulation in London. That was not so much building a strong financial sector as letting the banks and financial institutions do what they liked as long as they were making money.

Northern Rock, of the 125 per cent mortgages fame - was the appetiser for the banking meltdown and when someone finally spotted the emperor had no clothes then Lehman brothers, who had been fooling the market with some cosmetic accounting, went belly up for the biggest bankruptcy in US history. When the first domino fell the rest of the line started to tumble.

Without hugely expensive bail-outs many British, American and European banks would have been bankrupt and we would have been reduced to a barter economy of hunter gatherers.

As for creating jobs. The ill-fated takeover of the toxic HBOS by LloydsTSB, said to have been done as a favour by Lloyds chairman Sir Victor Blank to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has so far cost somewhere in the region of 45,000 jobs - and that has nothing to do with the Euro - while well in excess of 100,000 jobs have gone in the financial sector since the banking crisis began.

If George Osborne thinks that is a stable financial sector then we are in more trouble than anyone imagined.

You might have thought that with the Murdoch empire under threat on all sides and the Sun well in the firing line that the powers that be in Wapping might just have thought it might be a good idea not to stick one's head too far above the parapet.

But no. This is the same organisation that gave you Gotcha when we sunk an Argentine cruiser with the loss of 323 lives and whose campaign of naming and shaming paedophiles led to a paediatrician being driven from her home by illiterate vigilante readers (read being used in its loosest possible sense).

So how did they greet the appointment of Roy Hodgson as new England manager? With and pretty crude and remarkable unfunny attack on both him and rhotacism, the difficulty in saying Rs.

It is a condition which affects thousands of people in Britain, including Sun readers, but has about as much to do with their ability to do their job or what sort of people they are as the colour of their eyes.

It courted controversy when there was none there to court, upset thousands of people who have the condition and who probably had to suffer a day of cruel micky taking, antagonised the FA and, I suspect, did not exactly endear them to the new England manager - and for what?

But when the England games start and we head off to Euro 2012, all the Sun sports' staff will be there, recorders in hand, expecting Roy, or Woy in Sunspeak, to give them all the low-down, exclusives and inside info for their weaders, sorry, readers.

Luckily the Sun should not have any problems understanding the two word response Hodgson really ought to give them - first word four letters and second word three and not an R to be seen.

Apparently GPs have being threatened with legal acton under the all things to all lawyers human rights legislation if they don't treat illegal immigrants.

According to Pulse, the GPs' trade mag, one doctor was threatened with legal action by a solicitor, on legal aid of course, if he did not re-register a family of failed asylum seekers who were not entitled to free NHS treatment and the local hospitals had refused to take any referrals concerning one of the family made by the GP.

This is not a new situation. Pulse reported it last year and official figures reveal that free treatment worth around £40 million was given to people not entitled to it in the past three years.

That could well be higher. I know of someone quite high up in the health service who tells of patients given quite expensive treatment for non-emergency conditions with no one asking too closely about their entitlement to free NHS treatment for fear of being called racist or threatened with legal action.

I only mention this because my mother-in-law is currently in hospital with a broken hip, the plague of the elderly, and we have all seen leaflets in hospitals and doctors' surgeries with information about who to call for various entitlements, help, benefits and so on, all in a dozen languages.

Go on to the NHS direct website and you will find you can translate the information there into 12 languages, no problem.

In the coffee bar in the hospital where my mother-in-law was being treated is a poster warning customers that they may have to pay for NHS treatment if they are not entitled to a free service. The poster, aimed exclusively at foreign tourists and non-EU citizens was in just one language - English.

Apparently another dry winter could mean standpipes in the streets according to the Government and, despite IKEA selling out of flatpack DIY Noah's Ark kits, people in some areas will have to be careful they don't breach the hosepipe ban as they pump out floodwater from their homes. The ban could stay until Christmas.

Even April rains of Biblical proportions have failed to top up water supplies apparently and we are still in trouble and in a drought - according to some spokesman from a water company whose knowledge of the English language, or at least the meaning of its words, seems to be in doubt.

Part of our water problems come from development over the years. Modern roads do not allow water through to the earth below like the cobbles of old and we now have large areas of concrete from car parks to factories to even domestic drives where water rather than being absorbed in the ground is channelled off through enclosed drains to rivers and waterourses making topping up the water tables below our feet a much slower process.

Then, since our water supplies were flogged off, which meant of course shareholders became vastly more important than customers, little seems to have been done in terms of repairing leaking pipes, which is one major contributor to shortages.

And as for flooding? Much of that can be laid at the door of successive Governments for ignoring basic, simple geography.

There is a reason why some tracts of land near rivers are called flood plains, or water meadows. They are the natural overflows, the natural safety valves against flooding, taking up the excess when rivers cannot cope. In times when we worked with nature rather than constantly being at war with it, the flood plains and water meadows provided fertile agricultural land in summer and protected the majority of a river's course from being swamped every few months.

Yet for years we have allowed development on flood plains and, not surprisingly, many are were still prone to flooding so expensive flood defences are built which shift what was a natural occurrence, but has now become problem, further downstream making the any flooding there much worse. Build more flood defences and either upstream or downstream you build in more flooding.

Anyone else get an e-mail from the AA today inviting them to go out picking up litter to tidy the old country up in time for the Olympics?

Now I thought that was what I was paying my Council Tax for - and not just for the Olympics.

Mind you it would help if people could be told that it is not actually illegal to take rubbish home with you and an open car window is not classed as a litter bin.

And if people do take up the AA invitation you can bet your house on the fact that none of them will be the people who dropped any of it in the first place.

There is lots of gnashing of teeth at George Osborne's "attack" on charities by capping tax relief on donations and just about everyone agrees he is going about it in the wrong way.

The cap in its current form will hit a lot of legitimate and much needed fundraising by worthwhile charities and it is likely that it will be kicked into the long grass but that should not stop the Charity Commissioners and HMRC looking at some of the rather dodgy charities, foundations and charitable trusts set up by the remarkably wealthy.

These are seen as being above board and have reassuring names including terms such as arts foundation or trust in their title to make them seem solid and dependable - yet the only beneficiaries seem to be the person who set them up and their families. Now that is something that could be looked at without touching donations to the likes of Save the Children by a single penny.

Don't hold your breath though when we are lumbered with a millionaire chancellor who said this month: "I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it's within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don't think that's right."

Now to my mind that either means our chancellor is so stupid one wonders how he manages to breathe in and breathe out at different times without prompting, or much more likely, he thinks we are so stupid that we will believe him. Either way we would be mad to trust the man.

WE now have a nationwide petrol shortage.

It has nothing to do with Unite, union militants, the firms employing the tanker drivers or the petrol companies. It is all down to the brain deads who rushed off to fill their tanks and any petrol container - legal or otherwise - they could find in a lemming like panic. The madness of the mob.

The most worrying thing is that mindless prats like that can actually vote which does make you wander if democracy is such a good idea after all.

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, doesn't need to call a strike: all he needs to do is mention one in passing every couple of weeks and the obliging public will create the same effect without his members striking or losing a penny in pay.

While we are at it perhaps the suggestions by Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, Energy Secretary Ed Davey and anyone else in Government that people should fill up their tanks, thus causing the panic and empty pumps, should be taken as novel letters of resignation and accepted.

They have turned an industrial dispute which had little or nothing to do with Government into a political battleground and they, along with the mindless mob, are the reason some poor woman in York ended up with 40 per cent burns trying to pour petrol in her kitchen.

She might have been stupid but it was the criminal stupidity of others who led her down that particular path.

Liam Stacey is a prat, a 24 carat, gold plated prat. But he is also 21. Prince Harry was 20 when he appeared on the front pages in his Nazi regalia in another storm which hardly fitted the crime.

They are, or were in Harry's case, at an age when young men are no longer boys and are not quite men and it is an age when most are prats. It is part of growing up, part of gaining experience, part of seeing sense, common or otherwise.

Stacey, for those who don't know, was the lad who claims he was drunk after celebrating the Wales Grand Slam victory who made an unpleasant comment on Twitter about Bolton's Fabrice Muamba collapsing in the game against Spurs.

There was then an exchange of unsavoury and racist tweets and this week he ended up in court charged with inciting racial hatred and was jailed for 56 days while his university, Swansea is considering his expulsion which would mean he would miss his finals this summer.

Now I am not defending Stacey but jail? For 56 days? Expulsion? The lad is a prat, he may well go through life being a total prat, but if that was a reason for jailing people there would hardly be anybody left on the streets. As it is we pick up the tab for two months B&B and the lad will learn nothing other than don't tweet when you are drunk, or even better, don't tweet.

A mugging, assault or burglary he would probably have got no more than a caution.

LIKE most industrial disputes unless you are actually involved you are unlikely to get the full picture.

Take the tanker drivers' dispute. The fact that the majority of fuel deliveries have been outsourced, a world where maximised profits for minimum costs is a mantra, tends to nudge my sympathies towards the drivers.

And, I have to be honest, Government claims that a fuel strike will make us look bad in the eyes of the world at the Olympics is not the strongest negotiating ploy I have heard.

But we only hear selected snatches of what the dispute is all about usually painted in the colours of whatever union, management or political spokesman is providing the information which is then coloured even further by the interpretation of the newspaper or broadcaster relaying the views.

One thing I do know through is that if you lose public support in a dispute you become the baddy and someone ought to have a word in the ear of Unite general secretary Len McCluskey who does not seem to have the nous for a job in public relations if this one does not work out.

The majority of the population, those who are not bankers, senior civil servants and the like, or union leaders for that matter, have had a rough couple of years and Easter is their first chance of an extended break with families with a promise of half decent weather this year. Screw that up with a fuel shortage and any sympathy will evaporate faster than a petrol spill in a heat wave.

I REALLY can't see why anyone would get hot under the collar about Tory co-treasurer Peter Cruddas telling it like it is.

Bung enough into the party coffers sunshine and the Government is your oyster so to speak. In Nigeria, Russia the Middle East or wherever we tut tut and call it bribery and corruption - here we call it politics.

For Labour to jump up and down is the height of hypocrisy. They were flogging favours faster than an ice cream van selling 99s on a summer scorcher on Blackpool prom. And while we are at it the Unions are not exactly funding New Labour without expecting something in return.

Anyone who can put away party prejudice - and I distrust them all equally before anyone asks - should ask themselves why any firm or individual would give large donations to a political party, and in some cases make donations to more than one party?

It is not like the British Legion selling poppies, or an RNLI flag day where you get something to bung in your lapel to show how caring you are.

People who can afford to give bungs to political parties did not make enough money to be able to afford to give thousands, or even millions to political parties with no prospect of anything in return. Altrusim is not in their lexicon. Equally the large consultancy firms don't donate staff to help out in Downing Street, Whitehall departments or Ministers' offices for nothing. There is always a price to be paid.

They all want to be close to and to influence policy and the more they pay the more they expect in return whether it is lower taxes or tax breaks, contracts, helpful policies, letters and assistance with foreign Governments, citizenship or the more basic self-aggrandisement of gongs and honours. A seat at the table with Cameron or Osborne is only the start of it. They have put money in the pot and expect to be dealt in the game.

Far from condemning Cruddas he should be applauded for at least being an honest politician although he did spoil it somewhat by trying to retract what he had said once the Tory suits had explained what a terrible thing he had done - i.e. got caught flogging access and influence.