I am going to have to be careful with this column. Last week I got accused of baiting councillors.

Can’t be having that, can we?

This week, I’ll try to steer off politics, but it’s very hard, for as they say, “all politics is local”.

Have I missed the enactment of a new local by-law that excludes taxis from heeding the speed limit or indeed the rules of the road?

I live in Newchurch Road, Rawtenstall, if you hear a car screaming along you can bet your bottom dollar it is a car with a taxi sign on top.

Were I a councillor (I can’t leave them alone) I would consider phasing in the advanced driver qualification before you could be licensed.

In fact, I would make it compulsory for all of us who hold a licence.

Now let me turn to the morons who really make me mad (not councillors) – it’s the half-wits who drive around without their kids strapped in with a safety belt.

It never ceases to amaze me, to see them sitting in the front, with a child on their lap.

I want to run out and slap a huge sticker on the car: “My child doesn’t matter”.

What we really need is the police to run initiatives focusing on issues such as these.

The problem is that the police service rarely carry out this type of action any more.

They are such a strange, politically-correct, target-driven bureaucratic, behemoth that they make the council look like the height of efficiency. Blast, there I go again, baiting authority.

If I carp on like this, I’ll find myself banged up in deepest Whitworth, in Rossendale’s version of a Gulag.

I wonder if there is a by-law about councillor baiting. It does seem cruel and inhuman.

Mind you, “if you want a friend in politics, buy a dog”!