What planet are you on, Mr Cameron?

The Friday Thing

LAST WORD ON THE WEEK:

DAVID (we’re all in the “it” together) Cameron has re-launched his Big Society battleship this week but as it still has more holes than a colander it will go the way of the first empty vessel and finish up on the ocean bed of bad ideas.

Will the captain do the noble thing and go down with his ship? Will he load it with political scapegoats — or at least Eric Pickles — to ensure a speedy descent to oblivion? Of course he won’t.

Because he is not of this world, not the real world occupied by the majority of we mere mortals, he cannot understand that at a time when the cost of just about everything except breathing is climbing steeply, people simply cannot afford to get together and do good deeds — deeds that should be underpinned and paid for by our council tax and taxes.

Most ordinary folk need all their wits and all their energy to simply get by but because the likes of Cameron and Osborne are not ordinary folk they will never see it that way. They just don’t get it,

The state of the economy may not be Cameron’s fault but he will not divert those who do the shopping and pay the domestic bills to keep body, soul and home together from focusing their energy on their own families with very little energy or money left to lavish on doing good deeds.

Despite all the words that have been thrown at Big Society who among us actually understands what it means, what it is?

The thought grows that it is no more than a slogan, a sound bite that is every bit as useful and meaningful as Nero’s fiddle.

PARKING — for those who still have enough money to fill the car at £1.30 a litre and climbing — has become a big issue all over the borough with parking spaces that used to be free now being rented by the hour.

The thinking behind the scheme — of course I presume here that someone has actually thought about it as there truly is a first time for everything — that shoppers will use short-stay car parks to do their shopping and help to keep local businesses in, well, business.

But the business owners are angry, not at the promise of a sudden rush of customers, but because neither they nor their staff will be able to park all day for nothing and will effectively be paying to go to work.

This is a tricky one indeed. To encourage businesses to set up in an area has the local authority got a duty to provide free parking for them? But if business owners and their staff are parked in the available spaces all day won’t would-be customers simply drive to the nearest supermarket where they can park for nothing?

Here’s the conundrum: no parking spaces, no businesses setting up; no parking spaces no customers using those businesses.

Maybe the answer is buried somewhere in the Big Idea.

FINAL WORD: Manchester City Council — which has £1million in the bank, spends money on daft statues and pays its senior staff more than most of its residents earn in a lifetime — has launched a slash-and-burn strategy of cuts to poke a political finger in the Government’s eye. Among the cuts are the city’s public toilets with all but one being closed. The queue will start at Failsworth.