Recently by Roger Clarke

AM I the only one uneasy about stripping Fred Goodwin of his knighthood? Not that I am carrying any baton for a bloke who would not look out of place adorning a lamp post but it does seem to be a bit of a witchunt with other knighted bankers now in the sights.

At the end of the day, according to the Financial Services Authority charged with investigating the RBS collapse, he didn't do anything wrong.

Mind you who in their right mind would have the same people and the same body who were supposed to be overseeing and regulating the banking sector carrying out the investigation and apportioning blame when it all goes wrong.

Its a bit like having the ex-ediors of the News of The World being put in charge of the phone hacking scandal - not likely to find themselves guilty as charged are they.

So Fred ends up as plain old mister yet we have Lords who were actually jailed for fiddling their exes - that's stealing from us - another jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice but they still have their titles, perks and privileges. Somehow it does not seem right that committing criminal offences and being jailed is somehow seen as all right while just being morally reprehensible means you lose your knighthood.

If Fred is stripped then the rest should join him.

All power to Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, for standing up against the lobbying to legalise gay marriage.

Neither I, nor the good Doctor, have any objection to same sex couples having civil unions which carry the same commitments, benefits and rights as marriage but, and this is the point we both agree on, it is not and never will be marriage.

Marriage culturally, religiously in all the major religions, traditionally and linguistically is between a man and a woman, that is what the world means and represents. That is its definition, its meaning and its usage.

Predictably the gay rights lobby are jumping up and down with professional protestor Peter Tatchell accusing the Archbishop of being a religious authoritarian adding "It is not a Christian value to demand legal discrimination against gay couples and to treat them as inferior, second-class citizens with fewer rights than everyone else."

Which shows he has missed the point as well. There is no demand for legal discrimination. The argument is not about gay couples being somehow second class, or not having the same rights as anyone else. It is about the definition and meaning of a word in use in society virtually since mankind first stood upright.

If Government passes a law that a camel is a horse, does it really mean a camel will now be a horse and everyone will accept camels and horses are the same thing? It is not Government's place to dictate the definition of words and language, to rewrite tradition or social values.

Gay couples are already free to join in a legal union and are quite free to create a word to describe the ceremony and institution of that union - but keep your hands of marriage.

When it was pointed out that the new Climate Risk Assessment Report is based on computer models that are built on theories, assumptions and in many cases false or faulty information - they are in fact unreliable at best and at worst completely wrong - some spokesman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs came up with the helpful suggestion that plans based on flawed models was better than having no plans at all.

That is about the same logic as looking at the football results predictions on a Thursday evening, working out how much you are going to wager and thus, based entirely upon what are really guesses, how much you are going to win come 5pm Saturday - and then going out and spending your winnings-to-come on Friday afternoon.

So we have our top 100 risks voted for by a panel of experts who will be long gone by the time they are proved right - or more likely wrong.

They can predict with an air of confident certainty what it will be like in, say, Brighton in 2075 - but they still cannot tell us what the weather or temperatures will be like for anyone going on holiday in three months time.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. When the Government announced that the Olympic Games in London could be paid for out of petty cash, all right £2.4 billion, I predicted that the final bill would come in at nearer £20 billion.

It seems Sky Sports has now calculated that the actual spend could be closer to £24 billion which is only 10 times the original estimate - but then there are still six months to go.

You suspect that if the Government decided to buy a packet of chocolate digestive for that morning's elevenses it would probably end up costing about £40 million, involve a couple of hundred consultants and dodgy private/public delivery companies, the order would be outsourced to a bank-financed offshore PPI biscuit consortium who would change chocolate digestive to own brand rich tea because of budget constraints and IT systems incompatibility and when the biscuits finally arrived three years late they would be soft and stale.

Oh, and the bloke in charge would get a knighthood as would the chairman of the PPI biscuit consortium who, by happy coincidence, had also donated some half a million to the party funds of whoever was in power just before the contract was awarded - and we would be told that this was the best deal possible for the taxpayer.

I see Alex Salmond is started his kilt-waving Scottish independence referendum campaign with an appeal to English voters.

With all the constitutional lawyers saying it needs to be a vote of the whole United Kingdom I wonder if anyone has worked out what happens if the Scots vote heavily in favour of remaining part of the UK while the English majority vote to chuck them out?

There is a lot of steam to puff under the bridge before Thomas the Supercharged Tank Engine has any hope of travelling from London to Birmingham in less time than it takes to boil a kettle or whatever the current claim is.

Transport Secretary Justine Greening invoked the spirit of George Stephenson and the Victorians claiming they would be proud of this new high speed line neatly missing out the fact that the people who actually invented rail travel would have been appalled at what Government had down to it in the past 30 years. We don't even make our own engines and rolling stock.

All the usual suspects are behind all this. There are the banks who, as usual, will make a fortune out of juggling the figures to raise the finance, the big four accountancy firms who will fill their boots with consultancy fees and then the consortia, with banks in that trough as well, carving up the lucrative, think of a figure and double it, contracts between them.

Other nations manage to have cheap, reasonably efficient rail travel with a mix of local, regional and national trains, stopping trains and expresses, even double decker trains to increase capacity. Italy, for example, might be broke as a nation but its railways work just fine and people can not only afford them, they use them but then again in Italy they are a public service, something we no longer bother with in this country.

Here we have a pricing and ticketing structure that needs a PhD in applied maths to work out, artificially reduced capacity putting profits before passengers and prices which are eye-wateringly expensive. It is cheaper to hire a car and pay London parking than travel by train. If there are four of you travelling first class return it is £1016!

But back to HS2. I have still to see any argument as to why it is going to make us the richest and most progressive nation on earth, creating 40,000 jobs, untold wealth and all the other spurious and unquantifiable figures belched out by the Government machine if it takes half an hour less to travel from Birmingham to London or in years to come 40 minutes less from Newcastle or an hour less from Edinburgh.

What are people going to do with the extra 30 minutes that is so important and cannot be done now? Am I not alone in thinking if all this money is available it would be better spent getting our existing rail network up to the level where it could once more be called a service.

Don't you just love politicians. They think hypocrite is a compliment.

Take Alex Salmond - and many people wish somebody would. He is huffing and puffing like a dragon with asthma because the British Parliament has the temerity to tell him and his nationalists cronies that it is up to the parliament of the United Kingdom to decide on whether a referendum is held on Scottish independence, when it is held, who can vote and what the question will be.

Old Alex ideally wants to hold it on the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn on June 24 in 2014 which was won by the Scots even though they lost the return.

He is jumping up and down about Westminster inter fence in his blue faced, kilted plans and is claiming: "The issue is the entirely unacceptable Tory attempt to impose London strings on Scotland's referendum, from a Westminster Government with absolutely no mandate for these matters."

This idea of mandate and only voting and debating on things that concern you stuff is a new departure for Mr Salmond and indeed all the Scottish MPs - remember Salmond was a Westminster MP from 1987 to 2010.

Salmond happily voted on matters which were of no concern to Scotland whatsoever but had major effects on England, matters which were of no concern to the Scottish Nationalist Party whatsoever but votes that might have brought a few hidden concessions on the you scratch my back principle - one of the few principles that still exists in Westminster.

The real danger for Salmond of course is that an early referendum on independence - and only independence - before everyone has been given a copy of Braveheart and a lesson in selected Scottish history is that the Scots will vote to remain part of the Union.

Why would they want to be a minor blob in Europe, forced to apply for EU membership and into using the Euro and be left with with similar influence to Andorra? And if he loses then more important for Salmond is that the purpose of the Scottish Nationalist Party is called into question.

Still if Salmond wants to be sure of winning an independence vote all he needs to do is to open the voting up to the English.

Leaving aside why Ed Miliband felt it necessary to tweet about the death of Bob Holness or asking who on earth would be interested in his views on the demise of a former compare of a TV game show I do feel a bit sorry for the lad.

He tweeted "Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters".

The error was spotted and changed to Blockbusters within moments. Now in the real world that is a typo, a spelling error, it might even be that curse of the mobile scribe, predictive text. It is not a crime or even uncommon. I will probably have at least two typos before posting this blog - or even finishing this sentence.

But in the fantasy world inhabited by the London Press and politicians it was not so much a typo as some sort of divine indication that Miliband and the Labour party were still fretting about racisim and Diane Abbott.

Perhaps Ed's next tweet should be about fishing, and particularly pollocks . . .

Everyone knows that footballers should be kept away from Twitter and now Diane Abbott must realise that it is a good idea for MPs to #avoidtwitter as they say.

MPs are not known for using one word when they think they can impress us with several hundred so a limit of 140 characters is not so much a challenge as a near fatal handicap.

It seems to me that Twitter is for people who actually believe there are sad souls out there who are actually interested in the minutia of their lives, otherwise why tell the world #having a cup of tea, #had a bacon sarnie, #1-2-3-breathe, 1-2-3- breathe and so on.

So with a system designed for little more than soundbites, which does not even allow the space to write a decent sentence, trying to have any sort of meaningful discussion is doomed from the outset.

Because she is both an MP and black, Ms Abbott's remarks have created a predicatable firestorm. She has apologised for any offence caused and let's be honest anyone who really disagreed with what she said was free to argue directly with her on Twitter and I am sure she would have welcomed their views.

Personally, as a white person, I was not offended by her remarks about white people. They were not aimed at me personally or white people in general and to be honest she did not really explain what she meant but in truth having read the whole of that particular exchange I really don't care. I have many more important things to worry about, such as cooking a bacon sandwich and breathing 1-2-3

The fact people are desperately trying to turn her remarks into some sort of major race row worthy of resignation - or are rushing to distance themselves - shows both how pathetically juvenile our political system is and, more important, just how frightened people really are about having an honest discussion about race and how we are forcing everyone to walk on eggshells rather than discover, accept and embrace differences.

There is lots of huffing and puffing and theatrical indignation about her using offensive terms, causing offence and the like but let's be honest, to be offensive someone has to be offended and can anyone really claim someone, somewhere was genuinely offended by what she said? Keep searching.

You do wonder what planet Philip Hammond is on. Our esteemed defence secretary has warned Iran that any attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz will risk military action.

That must have had Iran quaking in their Doc Martens. We are stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, are making half our servicemen redundant and we had to attack Libya from Italy because we have flogged off our aircraft carriers, not that we have any carrier aircraft any more.

Someone ought to tell our Phil that if you want to play gun boat diplomacy you first need a gun boat . . .