MR PENDLE: How is the Government going to everyone of us happy?

There will be, we are told, household surveys carried out up to four times a year with questions devised for us by the Office of National Statistics.

The idea comes from Nobel Prize-winning economists and has been latched on to by the Prime Minister.

But what exactly is the Government going to do to achieve the impossible task of ensuring that every single one of us is happy?

And what are the all-important questions that we will be asked to assess our happiness?

Will they be biased so as to show that our happiness levels are higher than they really are?

Or, conversely, will they be designed to show us all to be miserable old curmudgeons when the complete opposite is the truth and so give people with nothing better to do the excuse to start dreaming up ways of trying to make us feel better?

A Downing Street spokesman simply said we will have to wait and see.

Mr Pendle knows one thing already, though.

He will be far from happy if next spring, he starts to be surveyed every three months, either by post or by telephone, by Nanny State interferers wanting to know how happy he is.

He will become increasingly irritated at being asked for the same old answers to the same old questions time and time again - and will not hesitate in letting his interrogators know exactly how he is feeling.

HOW many of those who became embroiled in last week’s violence in Westminster during the protests over increased university tuition fees were actually students?

And how many were rent-a-mob anarchists who had emerged from under their stones to use the protest as a cover for an altercation with the police?

Mr Pendle believes the majority of the troublemakers to be of the latter group - and here’s why.

A peaceful protester, for example, would not feel the need to wear a balaclava hiding their face unless he or she was intent to causing damage to people or property.

A peaceful protester would not hurl jagged lumps of concrete with pieces of metal protruding from them at the police with the specific intent of causing injury.

And a peaceful protester would not damage their cause by daubing offensive graffiti on buildings and monuments and attacking a car carrying the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall.

The yobs who carried out the mindless vandalism had no interest in the students and their cause.

They were simply after furthering their own extremist ends in front of the TV cameras.

They must be hunted down - and made to feel the full force of the law.