An Ipsos MORI poll has found that only 49% of politicians trust that their fellow politicians tell the truth.

This figure is optimistically high however, compared to the percentage of the general public who believe politicians – just 18% on last years MORI figures.

Apparently a staggeringly high number of politicians,18% of them, still trust bankers, and this obviously includes the dopey ones who gave the totally untrustworthy Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) £45 billion of taxpayers money six years ago, to see it all lost in excessive salaries, bonuses and fines for dishonest dealings with its customers.

Whoever said that politicians and nappies should, for the same reason, be changed often had it about right.

Food fraud is now more attractive to organised crime than trafficking drugs – with the potential profits the same, the likelihood of being caught much less and lighter penalties for the few who do.

This is the conclusion, featured in the Daily Telegraph, of a new 18-month investigation and recent report on the findings from Prof Chris Elliott of Belfast Queens University, who points to the driving down of prices by supermarkets as incentivising processors to cut corners, and the cutting of local authority enforcement services to dangerously ineffective levels as being other contributing factors.

The worryingly poor performance of the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) is also cited. In the ten years before last years horse-meat scandal broke the FSA had not tested any product for adulteration with horse, and missed the inclusion of an illegal cancer-causing dye in hundreds of food items in 2003, something that French and Italian laboratories picked up.

Good to see that the nice people at TV Licensing, collecting the increasingly invidious and questionable license fee for the BBC, continue to get a well-deserved kicking from MPs and campaigners for the heavy-handed way they try to bully money out of people who don’t need a licence, the better to bolster the £3.7 billion they get in annual funding, and to make excessive pay-offs to former BBC executives.

The author’s own experience, following a few months when a TV was installed at his office for an editing job and the licence fee was paid for that year, is no doubt typical – 35 wasteful letters from various (fictional?) nonentities at TV Licensing in the 12 years since, threatening visits and detector vans. When they have been advised, in 2001 and 2004, that no TV equals no licence requirement they have written back to advise that a percentage of the criminals they deal with lie about this and that they will therefore be investigating anyway.

Time was, prior to commercial TV, Freeview and the internet the BBC might have deserved their easy money in compulsory and legally-backed licence fees but the model now needs an overhaul.

From the fashion experts who launched, and withdrew, handbags adorned with swastikas in 2007 comes another gem.

This time it’s a baby top looking like the uniform worn by Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Nazi concentration camps – a black and white horizontally striped T-shirt with a yellow six-pointed star on the left breast, evoking the star of David that Jewish prisoners were forced to wear.

Following criticisms of insensitivity, thoughtlessness and a lack of education and awareness from Jewish organisations the Spanish chain quickly withdrew the product and pledged to destroy all the stock, apologising for offence caused but claiming that the design was inspired by Westerns and part of its Cowboy Collection for kids.

Encouraging to hear that marketeers at Air New Zealand have finally listened to some good sense from their passengers and belatedly scrapped the safety video featuring bikini-clad models demonstrating seat belts, life jackets and oxygen masks.

The move follows more than 11,000 complaints since its launch in February that it was made using serious safety matters as an excuse for some naff and inappropriate sexualisation, which was giving wrong messages to children on flights, and offending those with religious beliefs and body issues.

Meaning that the all-important safety messages were being undermined by the distraction of the content, a useful caveat for all us clever marketeers who can sometimes lose sight of the objectives…