An Unexpected Joy?

Ignore his shilling for the egregious Norway Option, the only thing worse than staying in the EU, and read instead these wise words of Peter Hitchens: 

Stupid people keep saying that supporters of railway renationalisation can’t remember what British Rail was like. Oh, yes I can. 

And if BR had been given the money poured into the pockets of the privatised rail pirates, it would now be running far, far better services than we currently have. 

On Friday, I was late for work because it had been windy the night before – and this on a line where privatised operators have had the benefit of more than £1 billion in modernisation. 

Parts of this have already cost three times what was planned, everything is years behind time and will probably never be finished. 

Nationalised BR completed a similar scheme only eight weeks late and within £15 million of its predicted budget. 

And:

I am going to keep saying this. 

Most of the supposed Islamist terror attacks in Europe (and many of the non-Islamist massacres elsewhere) involve people who have been taking either marijuana, steroids or so-called ‘antidepressants’. 

The inquest into the Westminster outrage shows clearly that the killer Khalid Masood, a violent criminal, took steroids and suffered from the terrifying ‘roid rage’, which apologists for these dangerous drugs claim is a myth. 

Other mass killers who took steroids include the very non-Muslim Anders Breivik.

And:

I didn't expect or even want to like the new BBC series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer as a distractingly beautiful embodiment of pure evil. The trailers put me off. 

But the programme itself is an unexpected joy, looking and sounding witty, refusing to treat viewers as idiots, and, actually, a lot better than the overrated Bodyguard. 

And:

The PM has started to be nice about social housing, or council housing as we used to call it. 

She says: ‘I want to see social housing that is so good people are proud to call it their home… Our friends and neighbours who live in social housing are not second-rate citizens.’ 

Good, though anyone who recalls the council housing of the 1960s and 1970s (I was myself briefly a council tenant in the 1970s) would say that most council house residents were house-proud and often very pleased to have a secure well-maintained place to live. 

I am sick of people saying the great sell-off of council homes was a good thing. 

It flooded the housing market with taxpayers’ money and sent prices spinning upwards forever. It broke up communities. 

And it began the expensive, wasteful disaster of housing benefit which, the last time I looked, cost more than the RAF every year. 

I don’t know if we can ever put this right again, but admitting we made a mistake by breaking up the old council estates would be good.