Peter Rhodes on locking up women, the obsession with Heathrow and a blow for equality - at last

THERE is life beyond London and I bet many of us on the blasted heath we call the provinces are puzzled at the time, money and energy spent on the future of Heathrow. How many Brits actually use the place? Since the 1970s I have flown all over the world on dozens of occasions for business, holidays and with the military but I doubt if I've used Heathrow more than two or three times. The UK has lots of other places where airliners can take off and land perfectly well, so why this obsession with cramming so many eggs into one basket?

WHITEHALL has decided not to build five new female prisons but to erect much cheaper "residential centres" instead. This reflects a view deeply held in the criminal-justice system, that men are evil but women just have syndromes.

IRONICALLY, the announcement of the new facilities came the day after Sabrina Kouiser and her boyfriend were jailed for life at the Old Bailey for the murder, after 12 days of "pitiless" torture, of their au pair. They burned the body in their garden. Pure evil may be rarer among females than males but it undeniably exists and should be locked away for years, not in some cosy semi-hotel but behind the iron bars of a good, old-fashioned jail.

BY pure chance, the struggle to get out of the clutches of the European Union coincides with events to mark the 70th anniversary of Britain embracing the National Health Service. The NHS was a step into the unknown. It divided the nation. It was opposed by many "experts" who backed down only when Nye Bevan famously "stuffed their mouths with gold." The result, in global terms, is a middling sort of health service which is not terribly expensive and is good in some parts, but poor in others. We are supposed to be very proud of it, yet we all have our horror stories about it. But on balance we're glad we took the step into the NHS. And I daresay Brexit will be much the same. Not perfect but better than what we had before.

THE Supreme Court has ruled that the law discriminates against heterosexual couples by denying them the right to the civil partnerships available to same-sex couples. Well, hallelujah. The wonder, in these equality-mad days, is that it took the system so long to recognise a glaring inequality. You simply cannot offer one form of partnership to a couple who happen to be gay and then refuse it to a straight couple. And when you then offer gay couples the choice of civil partnership or full marriage, the unfairness is compounded. Rebecca Steinfeld, 37, and Charles Keidan, 41, took on the system and beat it. Well done.

I BET we all know co-habiting couples like them who have no time for the institution of marriage but would welcome the status and security that civil partnership brings. Within reason, governments should help people live the lives they choose. So get on with it.