It’s election time —are you bothered?

THE FRIDAY THING: LOCAL election time nears and a bunch of strange beggars (you can change the first vowel if you like) could soon come knocking on your door asking you to vote for them on May 5. So what do you do?

Well, you can hide under the kitchen table until they have gone away; you can open the door and ask what have they ever done for you (the answer to that shouldn’t take long); you can ask what are they going to do about problems in your neighbourhood, bin collections, graffiti, broken windows and her down the street who plays music all night; or you can engage in a Prime Minister’s question time-like discussion and trade insults on the doorstep.

Or, of course, you could smile sweetly, take their proffered leaflet and throw it in the bin.

How many people, I wonder, actually know who their local councillors are as we are all blessed with at least three each, lucky us?

You could vote for the councillor who you have actually seen (apart from at election time) in the last couple of years but that would leave us with a record low turn out and candidates with no votes at all.

Actually that’s quite appealing.

Oldham has been in the hands of the Lib-Dems and the dubious but fashionable Lib-Dem-Tory coalition for the last few years and we are still here with some things better than they were, others worse and the vast majority hardly changed at all.

I know we have lost the so-called iconic Mumps bridge and turned the area into a wasteland but we are assured it will all be worthwhile once the trams glide almost noiselessly into Oldham. They’ll be gliding out, too.

Labour group leader Jim McMahon waits in the political wings (it could turn into the wilderness if he loses his own seat in Failsworth East, a volatile corner of the borough) clutching his new budget and vision of turning us back into a socialist republic.

And if you thought that was exciting we also have looming the Alternative Vote referendum where we vote about voting, not just once but five or six times. How many will vote not to bother?


OUR generosity knows no bounds. Here we are, selling off the family silver and on the way to the pawn shop as national debts mount, but David Cameron has dipped into our pockets and purses and found £650 million (yes, million) lying about to give to Pakistan so that it can build schools. On top of that, of course we will be helping Portugal by making a contribution to help it to pay off its national debt in the surely doomed euro and, of course, maintaining our vast overseas aid budget.

Pakistan is, of course, hard up but has what might be deemed dubious priorities. There are, for instance some 17 million children in Pakistan who get no schooling while, at the same time, the government is spending billions on submarines and fighter aircraft.

Meanwhile, we look to make cuts in our academy programme — staff in Oldham are in danger of losing their jobs — because there is not enough money to finance the original plans.

And how can we guarantee that money given in bucket loads to other countries will be well spent? We can’t. Fraud and corruption are rife and we are effectively putting money into the pockets of thieves and villains.

Is all of this generous, humane or simply bonkers? We should ask the newly jobless to vote on it.


FINAL WORD: One of the joys of being in the boy scouts was the collection of badges, things like sports, community work and camp cook (and no, that doesn’t mean wearing a mini skirt, false wig and makeup to burn the breakfast toast). Scouts are soon to have lessons on matters sexual and one wonders just what the sexual achievement badge will look like.