On the app, on your smart speaker, talk radio and talk TV.

Good morning and welcome back to the Independent Republic of Mike Graham right here on Talk TV.

It's a lovely summer's day out there, which shouldn't be that surprising.

I mean, it's not yet quite the middle of September, but certainly the hot days, the dog days of summer, have seemingly passed away.

If you managed to get through the weekend without boiling, as per the weather reports would have you believe, well done. And welcome

to yet another part of the United Kingdom, which actually is beginning to look rather similar

to a failing state. I mean, I know that we've now got Baroness Kennedy talking about how lawyers are being put upon in such a way in this country that it's almost like living in a dictatorship.

She's obviously never lived in an actual dictatorship, otherwise you wouldn't say anything quite so stupid.

But coming up, talking of common sense, Peter Hitchens joins us, Column to the mail on Sunday, of course.

He's written an elegy for town clerks.

He's going to be telling us what went wrong

with our local government. And it certainly seems to be going wrong at quite a pace. We've got

a story this morning in which there's a village in the new forest. We talked about this a little bit

earlier, where people feel so abandoned by the police. They're turning to vigilante

reports and vigilante displays, I should say, and vigilante patrols to try and

stop the plague of shoplifting that's going on in what looks to be a very typically

British little sort of town, little village, which looks idyllic in the new forest, a lovely

little part of the world, and yet they seem to have no hope or faith

in the way the police will police it for them, and it's in the hands basically of criminals.

We've seen the devil dog conversation we just had in the last hour where these dogs are running

about ex-l bullies, you know, attacking people at random. It just seems absolutely ludicrous.

But let us kick things off in this hour with Peter Hitchens. Peter Hitchens. A very good morning, to you know, attacking people at random. It just seemed absolutely ludicrous. But let us kick things off in this hour with Peter Hitchens.

...