It is simply uncharitable to outlaw beggars

What about people who drive around in open-top convertibles blasting out Eurotrash at full pitch?

My immediate reaction to the latest government White Paper on anti-social behaviour, parts of which were leaked to this very newspaper yesterday, is that it doesn't go nearly far enough. By all means, fine noisy neighbours who play excessively loud music late at night £100 on the spot but what about people who drive around in open-top convertibles, their all-round-sound stereo systems blasting out Eurotrash or cheesy J.Lo at full pitch? By the time you've phoned your local noise abatement officer they're half-way up the M1.

The obvious solution is the short sharp shock deterrent. This has nothing to do with Willie Whitelaw's proposal to deal with young offenders when he was Home Secretary in the Thatcher government 20 years ago. I'm talking about a short sharp blow to the bonnet of the offending vehicle, preferably with something sharp and pointed that would leave a permanent dent. Ideally this would be administered by a policeman but since bobbies on the beat are an endangered species, traffic wardens who appear to proliferate faster than rabbits could be authorised to implement the new procedures.

Children who ride bicycles on pavements would also, according to the White Paper's recommendations, be subject to on-the-spot fines. But no mention is made of children on fold-up scooters bashing into your shins and, worst of all, people driving the new small motorised buggies that have taken over from wheelchairs.

Before you bombard me with hate mail, let me say that I know how much they have done for the mobility and independence of disabled people. This does not, however, automatically give them carte blanche to hurtle round the corner of biscuits and soft drinks in Tesco's at 40mph knocking innocent shoppers like me for six. A friend tells me that a Porsche with a disabled sticker occupies one of the two disabled parking spaces outside her station every day. As far as she can tell, apart from a huge beer gut, the driver looks perfectly able bodied. He can certainly run for a train, she said sourly.

Who else is on the anti-social hit list? Too bad W S Gilbert isn't around to add them to his, along with all those people with flabby hands and irritating laughs and children who are up on history and floor you with dates. The White Paper suggests that anyone offending public decency by urinating in the street should also be penalised. I'll go along with that. We live opposite a pub, most of whose customers use our doorstep as the gents.

"There's a perfectly good drain next to that parking meter," I said to a skinhead zipping himself up when I came home late one night. I was trying not to get my shoes wet as I fumbled for my key. I won't tell you what he said but the funny thing is that when it was an old-fashioned spit-and-sawdust pub 20 years ago, frequented exclusively by old gaffers in cloth caps reading Racing Post, this never used to happen. Is it just that old men hold their drink better or that the young men who drink across the road, now that it has become a famous football pub with six giant TV screens, can't read the word "gents"? Far more effective than on-the-spot fines would be to confiscate their trousers, spray their moving parts with luminous orange paint and send them back into the bar.

There is one White Paper recommendation with which I definitely do not agree: outlawing beggars. Aside from the obvious considerations – overloading the already groaning legal system, adding to our overcrowded prisons, etc – whatever happened to charity? Faced with a well-dressed woman in tweeds shaking a collection box for Christian Aid or a small boy with a cap collecting on behalf of an even smaller girl playing the violin on the Tube, I know where I'd rather put my 50p.

Maybe I'm a woolly liberal or maybe I'm just remembering my Burmese roots. Every morning at dawn, the monks from the monastery at the top of the road where my grandmother lived in Taung-gyi would come out with their begging bowls. Taking care not to tread on their shadows, because it's bad luck, the Taung-gyi residents would put rice, vegetables, whatever they had into the black lacquered bowls. It's the accepted way of life. Outlawing beggars because it's bad for tourism isn't solving the problem. It's merely brushing it under the carpet and sooner or later we're going to trip over the bumps.