It’s political correctness gone mad. Every year at about this time we celebrate the defeat of papist terrorism with the ritual maiming of young people with fireworks.

It is a long-standing and noble British tradition on the evening of November 5 to congregate in the outpatient departments of our local hospitals to keen over teenagers who have been hurt and to comfort poor screaming toddlers with sparklers still welded to their little fingers.

It is in this wholly appropriate manner that we remember the perfidy of the Whore of Rome, after we have gathered together to chuck an effigy of the Pope on our bonfires (in some villages in Sussex I believe that a live Catholic is used, but this practice is dwindling under the usual assaults from the politically correct lobby).

Now, though, this charming expression of our heritage is under threat. In Liverpool, for example, the local fire service has devoted 100 men for the past month to the task of seizing illegal fireworks, or those which have been sold illegally to people under the age of 18.

In the weeks leading up to bonfire night the streets were once alive with the sound of adolescents jubilantly going about their traditional business - detonating bangers in their mouths, playing “catch the rocket”, throwing jumping jacks at people and nailing catherine wheels to stray cats. Sadly, not any more. The killjoys have rendered the streets boringly safe; no pensioners have, this year, been forced to extinguish the fire on their hall carpet caused by a roman candle shoved through the letterbox. All is quiet on the scouser front.

As everyone knows, illegal fireworks are the best sort, especially those you can get from Korea with ambiguous fuses which burn with the telltale eerie yellow glow of highly enriched uranium. The ones that you get from the back of a white van for 15 quid from a man called Sergei and which still have Hans Blix’s indelible signature on them.

The firemen have also been around confiscating woodpiles, so that the Liverpudlians will be deprived of burning down their neighbour’s shed with a stray firebrand. Instead they will have to go to an official fireworks display, where they probably play Handel and you can’t chant sectarian abuse.

All around the country the fire service and the health and safety monkeys have been more vigilant than ever before; there has been a clampdown.

I’ve always enjoyed bonfire night, especially the joy of eating recovered meat product and connective tissue in finger rolls and then, later, trying to hit the local police station with a rocket. But I am beginning to accept that it’s not quite on any more, in much the same way that fox hunting simply isn’t on any more, because we have learnt to put a different value upon things.

I am aware that this is a betrayal of my father who looked forward to the time each year when his coat would be set on fire by incandescent barium nitrate, as he had failed to retreat behind the apple tree quickly enough, while our dog tried to kill itself in the bedroom.

And it is perhaps evidence of the creeping propaganda that almost everything is now too dangerous for ordinary people and must be left to the experts with their risk assessment forms from the council.

I have not completely given up: the kids are still allowed out to terrorise the neighbours with firebombs to commemorate Hallowe’en - and that recent Yankee import, trick or treat - and to run the risk of the legions of paedophiles lurking in the bushes.

However, poor Guido Fawkes seems to have lost much of his allure. Some 2,000 people injured each year and usually a fatality or two as a result of celebrating the gunpowder plot? Even to an instinctive libertarian it seems excessive.

This year, for the first time, I will let someone else light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance.

+ Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the whole Ross-Brand scandal is the besmirching of the reputation of Andrew Sachs’s painfully shy and retiring granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. She is a member of the greatly respected dance ensemble Satanic Sluts and an extremely talented and morally upright young woman. We know this because we have been told so by her agent - that doughty defender of the extremely talented and morally upright, Max Clifford.

So distraught was Georgina at the terrible imprecations cast upon her by Russell Brand that she felt forced to explain to The Sun newspaper the entirety of the ins and outs, so to speak, of her relationship with him.

Wiping away the tears, she revealed that Brand was strangely obsessed with her grandad’s famous fictional character, the idiotic Spanish waiter Manuel, who he incorporated into their lovemaking, shouting “Que!” at crucial moments.

Sachs was rightly aggrieved at those messages left for him; Georgina’s detailed revelations that Brand was also a useless shag will undoubtedly have made him feel a whole lot better.

Olga, heroine of the Ukraine

Hardline commies from the former Soviet Union want the latest Bond Girl, the beautiful Olga Kurylenko, strung up from the nearest lamp-post for betraying her country by taking a part in a film which eulogises western imperialist aggression.

I suppose that they are right and Ms Kurylenko should be executed. She knew what she was getting into. We complain when British actors take part in Hollywood films which depict the second world war as a succession of American triumphs interrupted only by British incompetence. We should not complain too much when the Russians complain similarly. Except that Olga is not Russian but Ukrainian. In Kiev, Olga may be a folk hero . . .

Little green men, yes - but no monkeys

Great news: it is perfectly legal to call an Irish person a “f****** leprechaun” even if they are from a Protestant part of Northern Ireland and probably hate leprechauns for infinitely complex reasons.

Andeliza Tucker had been accused of abusing her Belfast-born neighbour, Helen Vince, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped the case because it reckoned that a conviction would not be forthcoming.

Tucker is black: it is not clear if someone - such as Vince - can call a black person a “f****** leprechaun” and get away with it. My guess is that one cannot but I think she should have a go, just to test the law.

I was once told I could not refer to a person as a “monkey” in another newspaper because the term was racist.

I pointed out that the person was white but the reply was: “Yes, but somebody might think that he’s black.”

It is good that the monkeys at the CPS test the water so we know what names we can call our neighbours.

- Another week, another new academic study designed to confuse expectant mothers. This latest suggests that pregnant women bearing a male foetus in their wombs would benefit the unborn child by drinking alcohol, because boy foetuses like the taste. Girl foetuses are pretty ambivalent - I have no info on how much you should drink if you are carrying a transgendered child or a hermaphrodite. If that’s the case, you should just sip the occasional Baileys to be on the safe side. Or do what your body is telling you to do and ignore the experts.

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