I SPENT a fair amount of time earlier this year reporting on the activities of Allhallows Parish Council.

It is one of those authorities to which the Prime Minister wants to hand over greater responsibility. The trouble is, most parish councils in Kent are self-perpetuating oligarchies.

They have insufficient candidates and select from friends and "interested" individuals. It rapidly opens the way to abuse of the system as I immediately discovered the minute I turned up for my first meeting.

"Who are you?" and "What do you want?" were rapidly followed by a refusal to make available papers to which any member of the public is legally entitled - agendas, minutes and any reports.

The problem in the village of Allhallows was the youth club had become a very popular attraction for the local kids who had nowhere else to go.

A couple of recently-appointed councillors had got to grips with the problem, taken over The Brimp (a tatty old builders' hut complex), roused local support from kids, parents and assorted adults, and transformed it.

That upset the Old School of Benevolents who handed out grants, ran a handful of activities and claimed the praise for so doing. They tried to shut it.

They were up against some angry residents.

The most disgraceful thing (for any observer or believer - however jaded - in democracy) was the way the local police support officer was ticked off in public by a councillor for having the temerity to praise the club for the work it was doing with the young people..

Several residents decided to force an election last May.

Hate and abuse messages started to fly through the ethernet, by phone, through whispering campaigns and even at this blog.

The election went ahead, and most of the old school was turfed out.

I raise this issue five months later because in the past few days the newlook parish council has won two of the top five awards in this year's Kent Village of the Year competition.

One was for best newcomer.

The other was for The Brimp - taking the best Social Action award.

It pays over £3,000 a year as a mayoral allowance, it still has a mayor's chain, and the recipient of the mayoral thousands wears the civic bling.

It simply lacks a mayor.

The man appointed to the position, Cllr Tony Searles, decided off his own bat to drop the title - and become the council's chairman.

No one seems to have approved the decision, consulted on it, or bothered to tell the person who runs their website which introduces Swanley Town Council with these words: "It is essentially a parish council but has adopted town status which means the chairman of the town cCouncil is designated mayor."

I was soaking up the sun in the Eastern Desert last week when the scale of the impact of Britain's summer of discontent became clear.

Earlier in the day my wife and I had watched the BBC World Service showing the scenes in Croydon, Tottenham and various other London locations a couple of days before we were due to fly home.

Now Egyptians from our hotel were concerned that we were about to return to "lawless Britain" risking life and limb. It was, for them, a matter of major concern.

Never mind that in Cairo and elsewhere that thousands of Egyptians have been forcefully demonstrating against the old Mubarak regime and the replacement arrmy government.

Nor that Coptic (Christian) churches were regularly being bombed and burned by militants.

All are symptoms of Northern Hemisphere 2011.

Watching from 2,500 miles away, it appeared to us there was little action by the police. It bore a striking resemblance to that which greeted the Egyptians when they decided to end the Mubarak regime.

The holidaymakers were more concerned about relaxing than rioting.

What strikes me as different is that this time there were incidents in dozens of places.

And politicians seemed to have their own ways of explaining it.

To the BNP it was race riots.

To David Cameron and the Lib Dems it was a sign of a sick society.

To Labour it was - well, something with which to beat the Tory smoothies with their featherduster of vitriol.

To the police it was an opportunity to demonstrate that cuts in funding were having a detrimental impact.

To the public? - well, it was a chance to voice their own preferences (and in some cases to misbehave).

Of course for the courts it was an opportunity to demonstrate they are not under the thumb of the politicians - just give 'em back the power to use the birch.

Now I have returned home, and having seen that across our green and pleasant land trouble seems to have broken out everywhere ranging from Manchester and Liverpool through the Midlands to London's destruction and the bonfires in Rainham, it was somewhat unsurprising to this scribe.

Every 15 years or so there is some sort of misbehaviour in Britain. Tottenham, Handsworth, Merseyside .... the list goes on.

Regrettably, it will go on in future years.

Hose reels, evictions, arming the police, bussing them into London from South Wales to provide mobs of bobbies on every corner, kicking the police authorities because in a few months there were be elected police commissioners  ....

It's largely playing to the gallery.

What is needed is firmness, fairness and fast action when problems break out.

There is one lesson that can be learned from August 2011's thefts, firebombings and destruction.: leave them alone for a few hours and the mobs will always get the upper hand.

***

The last thing I thought when we visited El Gouna was that we would be constantly reminded of the Member of Parliament for Gillingham and Rainham.

But it was impossible to escape Mr Chishti - or at least echoes of him.

It was all caused by two Pakistani buses that had joined a small fleet of Egyptian saloons to provide the public transport around the holiday resort.

Flamboyant in the extreme, the buses had rockets on their roofs, mirrors on the inside coving and numerous images of plants, stars and symbols.

Why was Mr Chishti constantly brought to mind?

Because both buses had been built in Karachi by a bodybuilder named G N Chishti.

One thing I have to concede was that they were considerably more comfortable than the locally-built buses. They had upholstered seats. The locals had wooden slats...