The following Notebook of mine is in today's Times:

Saturday is the 150th anniversary of Sir Edward Elgar’s birth. That’s Elgar as in the greatest British composer of the past 250 years. The composer of the finest cello concerto in the repertory, two magisterial symphonies, the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. . . the list of Elgar’s immortal pieces goes on.

But ask Arts Council England what it thinks of arguably the greatest British artist per se of modern times, and it’ll blow a great big raspberry in your face. The Elgar Society asked Arts Council England for a paltry £174,000 to organise a series of concerts for young people around the anniversary of Elgar’s birth. You might have thought that the buzz-word “youth” would have been enough to tick the funding box.

No. Because what one should always remember is that arts subsidy is not about making possible performances that the public want hear. It is, in reality, a conspiracy to take money from us through our taxes and to spend it on the tastes of a tiny clique.

And Elgar, with his mass popularity and his unforgivable sin of patriotism, is anathema to the cultural commissars who run the arts subsidy racket.

So while £174,000 for Elgar is a no-no, “commissioning 50 new, specially made ring tones, for all the telephones on the Arts Council system, [which] celebrates the relocation of the south west regional office to Southernhay in Exeter” is a yes-yes.

The Arts Council say that the Elgar Society’s bid failed to meet any of the criteria by which applications are judged – a glorious piece of circular reasoning that enables them to give £12,000 to an “artist” in the East Midlands to kick an empty curry box along a street because it meets its criteria and at the same time to refuse to contribute towards concerts that celebrate the life of one of our greatest artists.

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Motoring organisations are in a huff that only 354 of the 90,000 policemen and women caught on camera speeding or jumping red lights have been punished. Only 0.5 per cent of police have been fined or given points, compared with 84 per cent of the rest of us.

Dianne Ferreira of the road safety charity Brake offers this thought: “Police officers should not be speeding in the first place. They should be setting an example and they should have to face the force of the law like everybody else when they break the rules.”

Edmund King, of the RAC Foundation, says: “Speed cameras are there for a reason and they should apply to all motorists.” And Paul Smith of Safespeed argues that: “It’s one rule for them and another for the rest of us.”

Hello? Of course it’s a different rule for them. They are the police. Can you imagine the outcry if they trundled along at 30mph rather than chasing after criminals? Isn’t the real complaint that they don’t get to crime scenes quickly enough?