As part of this pastime I call a job, I get a number of newsletter emails, usually full of stuff that is pretty dry to the normal palate but amongst today’s I discovered this wonderful gem.

The public are to be offered the chance to buy shares in new prisons under a "buy to let" scheme being considered by the Home Office, it has emerged.
The idea has been suggested in an attempt to overcome the refusal of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to find extra money for the Prison Service, specifically for 8,000 new prison places at a time when the service is at breaking point.
The plan envisages that the public can be tempted to invest in a new-style property company that would build jails and then rent them out to private prison operators. Supposedly, this would then provide investors with a guaranteed dividend from the "rental income".
Clearly the destruction at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre earlier this week – would not feature in any future prospectus.
A PCS Prison Service Group spokesperson said "With a total of 10 private prisons, Britain already has the most privatised prison system in Europe. Rather than invest in measures which we know will tackle re-offending and the record high prison population crisis, this harebrained scheme will now be another opportunity for the government to deliver more prison work to the privateers.
In the Prison Service we are told that there has to be cost savings in order to compete with the private sector – which in practice means our pay, staffing numbers and our conditions.
If staff ever needed evidence of the ‘madness of privatisation’, the threat to jobs & conditions and the need to support the national PCS campaign – this is it.

At first I had to double check my calendar for surely I have not been hibernating, winter passing me by, as April the First arrived like an express train. But no! A quick check on the Public and Commercial Services Union website and all was confirmed. Back in the 80’s, at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s mass sell-off of social housing stock, Not the Nine O’clock News included a spoof news report to the effect that “long term prisoners would be given the opportunity to buy their own cells”. What a sad indictment on New “Labour” that a throw away line in an Eighties comedy show would now become part of policy.