Takeaway ban? Just call the food police

Well I've heard it all now.
First they ignore the views of the public over issues like secondary school re-organisation in Stoke-on-Trent. (If you don't believe me, have a chat with the families campaigning to save Trentham High School).
Now, they're sticking their noses in to people's lives and trying to tell them what they shouldn't eat.
To whom do I refer? The town hall bureaucrats at Stoke-on-Trent City Council.
Or, as they shall now be known, the food police.
For the council's health overview and scrutiny committee (snappy title, I think you'll agree) wants to limit the number of takeaways allowed within a certain area. They also want to meddle with the type of food these takeaways are offering, and only allow them within a certain distance of schools.
Why? Because we're an obese city, apparently.
Now I'm all for encouraging people to be healthy. But what happened to personal choice? What happened to entrepreneurship and businesses doing business?
If people want to eat takeaways, they should be allowed to eat takeaways. Try telling somebody in Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall or Stoke that their local chippy's licence is being revoked because it's too near a school.
What's going to happen? Black market kebabs? Illegal pies and pasties sold under the counter?
If the ordinary people of Stoke-on-Trent felt their council served them well, and had its own house in order, perhaps this wouldn't be such a bitter pill to swallow.

Just? Just not good enough...

My mates tell me I'm a loony, leftie, liberal type who'd do well to read The Daily Mail a little more closely and see the world as it really is.
But there are occasions when even I read something that takes my breath away.
In The Sentinel tonight, there's a report about paedophile Tristan Myatt, who has been jailed for five years after raping a child and sexually abusing young children.
The 20-year-old, from Waterloo Road, in Cobridge, Hanley, admitted one charge of rape and a string of sexual assaults.
Unsurprisingly, his five-year jail term has provoked a storm of protest on The Sentinel's website. People, some of them parents, are staggered that such a vile catalogue of crime can lead to such a pathetically short sentence.
The judge says he was considering jailing this man for life, but decided to give Myatt five years before he tries to convince the parole board he no longer poses a risk of re-offending.
I'm not sure that jail will do anything to address this bloke's sick behaviour, but he has to be punished. Some will say he's ill and needs help, not punishment, but that's just nonsense.
A sentence of five years is a joke, and a very sick one at that. And what happens when this man is released? How many times have you read about criminals with mental health problems being allowed back into society, only to slip through the net and murder or maim? How many times have 'agencies' (as the bureaucrats so fondly call them) failed to 'join up' and share records, allowing crims to commit yet more crime?
The big worry with a case like this is that this bloke will indeed 'convince' the parole board that he's no longer a danger and go on to reoffend.
And I can't help feeling the parents of his victims will have a problem with the copper who describes the sentence as 'just'. Five years behind bars in return for doing unspeakable things to children? That hardly sounds just to me.