U-turns leading us round the S-bend

THE FRIDAY THING:

HEAVEN, if there is such a place, help us all.

The Government, not content with acrobatic U-turns in the manner of circus clowns, has flushed itself — and us with it — round the S-bend.

On every policy from welfare reform to prison sentences, the Government has suffered a kind of political Alzheimer’s, saying something on Monday morning that it has forgotten by Monday afternoon.

Anyone trying to follow a consistent policy thread will need to have a long lie-down in a darkened room.

Some of the original policies, like the crackpot idea of giving rapists and child-abusers a get-out-of-jail-free card halfway through thoroughly deserved sentences, had no place in a Tory manifesto in the first place.

A lot of folk who voted Tory last year would certainly not have done so had they had a sneaky peep into barking mad Kenneth Clarke’s policy pot.

The Pickwickian Clarke is not alone. Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms and Ian Duncan Smith’s long overdue changes to the welfare system, at last benefiting only the really deserving, have been so tinkered with and reformed that they now bear no resemblance at all to the perfectly sound policies they initially represented.

The whole fiasco has served to show us that when it comes to changing, David Cameron is right up there with a seven-shows-a-night stripper, though without the same dubious attractions of course.

Cameron is trying to represent his S-bend gymnastics as a sign that he is flexible and prepared to listen to the electorate, by which he means Tory focus groups in the shires and his supporters in the media.

When that excuse begins to look like last year’s fashions, Cameron’s dark arts team put it about that it is the coalition partners who are to blame. And that is unfair. Nick Clegg and his cronies are capable of messing things up big time without the help of Tory spin doctors (student fees anyone?).

So where does this leave us? Even Greece sounds like a good option, but take travellers’ cheques or dollars, definitely not euros; you remember the currency that was to going to lead the world. Unfortunately, they never said where it was going to lead us to. Now we know.




PUBLIC -SECTOR str-ikes are looming involving everyone from tram and train drivers to teachers and local authority staff. None of the unions involved has been able to gain support for the action from a majority of members but, not surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of that minority of members who voted, supported strike action. It was ever thus.

The strikes are mainly to do with pensions; how much the people who will draw them have to pay for their pension and at what age they can draw the cash. The union members could, of course, continue to enjoy their present benefits, but only if they paid higher pension contributions. This, of course they refuse to do, which means that if those pension entitlements are to be retained, private-sector workers, whose own pension terms and conditions are vastly inferior to their public-sector friends, will have to foot the bill out of their own, often meagre take-home pay.

Fair? Of course it isn’t fair; no fairer indeed than teachers will be to parents (most of who are on nothing like the salaries and nothing like the pensions of the strikers) who face major child-care problems because of the strikes.

So why should those who are not going to enjoy the benefits of, say, a £6,000-a-year pension, foot the bill for it?



FINAL WORD: Jim McMahon is right when he says we should be good neighbours and save the council money by picking up litter.


Not dropping it in the first place would help too.

The council spends £2 million a year trying to keep the streets clean, but will the closure of the Beal Hey recycling centre in Shaw by the waste authority, help or hinder the cause?