Smileometer test for Coalition’s policies

THE FRIDAY THING: last word on the week...

IF you’re happy and you know it, vote for Dave!

Happiness is the mystery ingredient that is to be used to test all future Government policies. If it doesn’t make us happy it will just have to go.

No more will policies face tests on their economic. environmental and social impact or filtered through the politically-correct sieve of gender and race equality.

They have to make us happy and, no, Ken Dodd has not taken his tickling stick into number 10 — there are clearly enough comedians behind that shiny door already.

And it is not only the Tories who cannot wipe the smile from their faces. The chief Lib-Dem aide to Vince Cable (he looks as though he has never been happy and fears his face would fall off he so much as twitched his lips) says testing the happiness-inducing elements of policies “Could have a profound impact on how policy is formulated.”

Shades of “Let them eat cake”.

It is really no surprise that the save-the-whale Lib-Dems are seekers after eternal happiness, although a look round the council chamber reveals more faces like slapped bottoms than court jesters (maybe they are thinking about May’s local election results), but we have come to expect more from the Tories.

Can you see Margaret Thatcher putting a grin or a grimace on the face of the nation? Ask a miner, assuming you can find one outside of Poland.

You will be surprised to learn in these nothing-in-the-pocket times that the Office of National Statistics is spending £2million of the dosh we don’t have to draw up an index of the nation’s happiness. A sort of smileometer perhaps.

It is obvious how to make the nation happy: stop sacking folk, create the jobs to allow people to work; get the lazy and indolent filling potholes and cleaning up the place and last, but by no means least, stop the bankers’ bonuses and catch and prosecute the thousands of tax fiddlers and dodgers not on PAYE.

See, you’re smiling already just at the winsome thought of it, unlikely as any of it is.




SEVEN years ago bulldozers, escorted by a council backed team of so-called Pathfinders, stormed into Derker and parts of Werneth promising a new dawn of super-smart, newly-built houses, major overhauls on existing terrace homes and a new and brighter future for all.



There were always sceptics (I admit to being more sceptical than most) but hopes were high that the so-called Housing Market Renewal areas would live up to the pictures and public-relations polished words in the shiny brochures.

Some were even tempted to believe the glib promises that were made about the manifold glories of the new dawn by those who spoke only of positives and decried all doubting Thomas’s and Thomasinas as heretics.

Well, now we know. Hundreds of homes — many of them lovingly looked after and cared for by house-proud folk — were compulsorily purchased and demolished, always accompanied by honeyed words about a fresh start and a new tomorrow.

In the whole of the Oldham and Rochdale Pathfinder area, 1,500 homes were demolished, 3,500 improved but only 450 new homes built out of the 1,800 or so that were promised.

If Derker and parts of Werneth were seen as problem areas before they are now akin to disaster areas.

Maureen Walsh who, throughout this sorry saga, was a voice crying in the wilderness, has seen her worst nightmare (a nightmare that saw her branded as a trouble-maker by the smartly-suited team overseeing this fiasco) become a dreadful reality.

“The area is just a mess,” says Mrs Walsh, “and they should be ashamed of what they have left behind.”

But the people responsible for this mess feel no shame. The area has long been bandit country with thefts of stone, metal and anything that can be moved, vandalism on a grand scale and fires that rip through the lofts of empty houses.

“When I look at what has happened it makes me feel sick,” says resident Joan Diggle. “We were promised no one would be losers.”

You can bet your life that the brochure-wielders and bureaucrats on fine and fancy salaries who promoted and operated the Pathfinder scheme certainly didn’t lose out.

It really is a scandal.




FINAL WORD: As well as being the murder capital of the western world TV’s Midsomer is at the centre of a row because it does not populate some of its chocolate box villages with people who have black or Asian faces.



If it did, would there then need to be a quota of deaths from each community?

It’s no wonder Barnaby retired...