All hail ITV reporter John Ray, as he becomes the news in Beijing

I'm woefully underwhelmed with the article on the Tibet protest in Beijing.

• To cover it was questionable to start with: it just needs a dozen foreigners who'd gone to Beijing with an agenda, and ITV fixes it for them to complete all their ambitions. Well done ITV. Something like 20 milion people in Beijing at this time, and you wanted to publicise the activities of 0.00006% of them. You made that editorial choice only because it fitted to your own agenda too.


• Your report suggests you've seen a Chinese anti-democratic, freedom-repressing activity yes-here-you've-seen-it-here-on-ITV. I have two questions:


1. Is the UK the bastion of democratic values? You have to have police permission in UK for a protest, protests are illegal altogether in certain places, and the police will be heavy-handed at certain times.


2. Are you a kind of people who respect laws of the countries you visit, or do you only obey UK laws when you're in another country?


• And the arrested reporter, sticking his head out of the police van shouting the odds: had he forgotten that police in Beijing tend to speak Chinese? He has lived in Beijing (apparently) since 2006, but he hadn't learned to say "I am a journalist" in Chinese and hadn't remembered that Chinese people speak Chinese. So that's an achievement, isn't it. Or maybe he was just acting-up for his TV news article, bless him. What do they say when reports "become the news" instead of "reporting the news"? Personally, I think the police officer showed great restraint. I think I'd have punched his lights out.


• And then a prediction about the future, as certain as from a fortune-teller in her caravan: the Chinese nationals will be detained without trial till the end of the Olympics, and the foreigners will be deported. (It's a pity we didn't hear him in Iraq, predicting that 800,000 people would die as a result of an invasion by Britain and the USA, against international law and every international security organisation.) But anyway, that's all so different than the way we do things in the UK, isn't it? Not! Did I miss the way we have same-day trials in the UK? We'd never have a trial 10 days after an arrest, would we? Oh no, we don't even have to charge people for 40 days!!! And British and Europeans never arrest foreigners caught breaking the law and deport them immediately, do they? Oh no.


• And then let's talk about Tibet itself, since that was the subject of the protest. You nicely reported unrest in Tibet when it happened, didn't you. You assumed Senegalese and Tibetan police were Chinese police and army. And then there's the real economic benefits China has brought to Tibet, which you actually perverted to some kind of mal-activity. I ask you - what's the point in using ITV's funds to go abroad? Why not just write the story you want from London, and save your company a lot of money? There's just no point in being on the ground, since you're not hampered by any desire to collect facts.

I dare say I am far more concerned than you about the right to independence of people who want it. But that doesn't say a lot, does it.

UK Inflation: On what planet does the Office for National Statistics Reside?

Inflation (as measured by the OfNS in the Consumer Price Index, has apparently gone up to a record 4.4%, we've been told. Utter poppycock. They concede that:
- Food has risen by 13.7%
- Electricity and gas have risen by 12%
- Vehicle fuel has risen by 26%
- Furniture has risen by 11.4%
- Mortgages are more expensive and less available.

This is pretty much all we buy! So how are we expected to believe that inflation is only 4.4%? Clothing, we're told, has remained steady... well, big deal. The people with least money do not buy clothes so often... and even less when they're hit with all the huge price rises of other essentials. The only way the OfNS could possibly get this result is to weight their notion of spending towards the well-healed, who spend most of their money on non-essential items.

The very least we can expect is a bit of honesty! Pay and pension rises of the poorest people in society are being made off the back of this nonsense 4.4% headline figure. We don't need the OfNS to tell us what the inflation rate is... we know it because we go to the supermarkets, go to the petrol stations, pay our mortgages, heat our houses. We know that inflation over the past year has been somewhere between 10 and 20% because we're not yet quite the imbeciles we're apparently supposed to be!