This little piggie sells at a loss

ON A glorious sunny morning yesterday, we went down to Parliament Square to see Winnie the Pig, snorting and snuffling in her straw underneath the statue of Sir Winston Churchill. The beautiful sow had never before produced a litter, but having camped out in Parliament Square - such is the "hothouse atmosphere" of Westminster so dreaded by MPs' wives, she has now become pregnant (by artificial insemination). The reason that the pig is there will be obvious to anyone who has been to Westminster lately - namely that the pig farmers of this country have been reduced to bankruptcy and despair by the policies of the present Government. They have two major complaints. First, disgusting foreign pork and bacon is imported, and then packed in the UK. It is sold in the supermarkets as British pork.

This is surely an iniquity which should stop forthwith.

Secondly - since the BSE scare, British pork farmers have been compelled to bring in all sorts of highly expensive changes into the way that pigs are reared and fed, creating a further nine per cent costs for them each year. I asked the farmers who are demonstrating down in Parliament Square and sleeping there with Winnie the Pig , in a sty of their own in the straw - "So this eats into your profit?" They smiled politely but pityingly. "No British pig farmer has made a profit in the last 18 months," they told me. "A third of British pig farmers have given up pig farming altogether in the last year and many have gone bust."

There is nothing more delicious than roast pork with apple sauce, or well cured British bacon with eggs. Let us all resolve to eat nothing else for a year. Alas, the pig farmers aren't a chic or influential "minority". The placards they carry are true - Blair doesn't care.

As a publicity stunt yesterday, Alastair Campbell, or some other whizzkid, got the gardener from Number 10 Downing Street to go and fetch some of Winnie's manure for the Prime Minister's roses, as though it was all a tremendous joke. The obliging Sun newspaper was on hand to photograph the jape - to demonstrate the untruth that Tony's a sport. How incredibly polite we are in this country. In France, the pig farmers would certainly have delivered the pig dung in person, and it would not have reached the Prime Minister's roses before it touched down on the head of his Press Secretary.

Shine a light on dark matters ONE of the strangest experiences of my life was to sit through every day of the trial of Rosemary West at Winchester Crown Court. Her counsel did not plead diminished responsibility - which would have been an understandable defence, given her unhappy childhood, and the fact she was married to a murderer.

Both Mr Ferguson QC and Miss Wass fervently believed in Rose's innocence.

So did Brian Masters - of all those observers who sat in on the trial, the most experienced in the ways of serial killing as the author of studies on Dennis Nilsen and Rosemary West. At the time, I was so nauseated by all that we had heard about Fred West and his house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester that I wanted someone to suffer for it, and persuaded myself that Rose was indeed Fred's accomplice. I still think it overwhelmingly likely that she had something to do with the death of West's infant daughter by his previous woman.

But this murder, of a child, was different in kind from the others.

Now Rosemary West is appealing against her conviction, and her lawyer claims that new evidence has come to light.

The police deny the existence of such evidence.

The fact is - that no direct evidence - not one shred, was produced in the course of a long trial to link Rose West with any of the murders. There was no direct evidence that she had even so much as met most of the young women.

Maybe Rose is right to appeal.

Sentimentality is busting out al l over

ON MOST days, if I am lucky, I spend some time in the magnificent new British Library. On one side of its huge piazza broods the enormous Paolozzi statue of Blake's Newton. It was designed to scale and it has great power. On the other side, put up with private money, is a poorly executed, half life-size bust of Anne Frank.

As far as I know, Anne Frank was not a reader at the old British Museum Reading Room. Now that Mr Neville Lawrence has compared the fate of his poor son with that of Anne Frank, we shall presumably soon be seeing a statue of Stephen Lawrence in the British Library. Sentimentality is always to be resisted.

There have been hundreds of great Jews who have used our National library, from Karl Marx to Francis Palgrave, of Golden Treasury fame, to Niklaus Pevsner.

Let them be honoured - by the removal of the sentimental and tasteless little bust of Anne Frank.

Saddam sanctions are only giving pai n to innocent thousands

WHILE Tony decides whether to prevent foxes being hunted, and while he knowingly ruins the pig farmers, he seems to have no scruples about killing Iraqi men, women and children in large numbers every week.

Almost daily, as the journalist John Pilger reminds us, Iraq is bombed by Anglo-American planes. The British taxpayer is spending something like 60 million per annum on this murderous scheme. Depleted Uranium, illegally dumped by Britain and America across the southern battlefields in the Gulf War is leading to widespread cancer.

We - one has to say we, though it makes me blush to do so - are imposing the strictest sanctions on the people of Iraq; not merely a ban on mechanical spare parts, but on necessary medicines, and even on books. This is our ethical foreign policy. The former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN Denis Halliday, says: "Saddam Hussein is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents through untreated water."

Think of this before you vote for any of the mainstream politicians in another election. This is the kind of misery imposed on the rest of the world by Blair and his caring, sharing team of misfits.

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