A MOTORBIKE is stolen in Lindley. The police ‘apprehend’ the youngsters who had fallen off it at 4am in the morning.

The bike is impounded, requiring its student owner to pay a £150 release fee. The bike is damaged because the kids who stole it broke the ignition to get it started. They also damaged it when they crashed it.

Getting the bike out of hock and putting the damage right may therefore cost more than £400.

What happened to the kids? They claimed they’d bought the bike which had been reported stolen a few hours earlier.

The police let them off with a warning.

I haven’t made this up. The truth today is often much stranger than fiction, yet we have become accustomed to not batting an eyelid.

An Examiner article last week demonstrated that car insurance quotations – if you choose to stay within the law – is pretty much a postcode lottery.

Very few people get away with less than £300 for a year’s insurance and many are charged much, much more.

Last week we also saw a man in court for driving a car without insurance. He was given a conditional discharge.

That’s no fine, no penalty, no punishment other than perhaps having your card marked.

Tell me, please, what incentive there is to drive with insurance when driving without it gets you a conditional discharge?

If those who come to Britain hanging off the back of a Eurostar train or in a packing case from Taiwan are treated better than those who, by birth or naturalisation, are already British, there’s something wrong.

If burglars can terrorise an elderly person and trick them out of large amounts of cash and are, when caught, put on probation – as has often happened in this county – there’s something wrong.

If people in prison for rape and murder are given better food, accommodation, exercise, TVs, visiting rights and medical treatment than your elderly, frail old mum in her care home, there’s something wrong.

If bankers can take the money innocent investors placed in their trust, tie it up in a rotten deal, lose it, and then get bailed out by the same tax payers they diddled in the first place, and then get a million quid bonus ... yes, you guessed the chorus, there’s something wrong.

But, in some curious way, to suggest that there is a distinct lack of justice and logic in our present topsy-turvy world marks you down as a redneck, a grumpy person, perhaps one of those awful weird people who live on the far right of the tracks and vote for dead Nazis.

Probably for this reason, most people who think about this sort of thing try to keep their heads down.

Are we anywhere near rising up as one and telling the powers over us that we’ve had enough? Are we pulling up the cobblestones to make barricades? I see no signs.

Best not to complain. Best just to make the best of it. Put the kettle on and let’s have a nice cup of tea.

I’m not sure where the blue touch paper is, but I’d love to put a match to it. This is not the kind of world I want my grandchildren to grow up in.

Care to join the revolution, dear reader?