July 2008 Archives

You have got to hand it to this Government as they think up more and more inventive ways to screw more money out of us in the name of saving the treasury . . . sorry, planet.

A Cabinet Office review has come up with the cunning stunt of proposing that we should all pay extra for farm goods that generate large amounts of greenhouse gasses - anything involving livestock or fertiliser -as well as slagging off buy-one-get-one free in supermarkets which they claim leads to waste. Nice to see that the well oiled No 10 machine with its 1,000 staff or more is doing all it can to cut our shopping bills.

The Food Matters report is dressed up with a coat of the usual pseudo scientific eco-babble that is plastered over anything remotely associated with gospel of global warming, this time in the hope that we will all feel suitably embarrassed about how we are destroying the planet by eating bread, drinking milk and eating beef and will want to pay a penance in the form of a levy to the exchequer.

I am an eco-sceptic in that I don't think the puny efforts man can make more than a marginal difference to what is a natural cycle in the life of the Earth not that any dissenter to the eco-cause will ever be heard by Governments who know a nice little earner when they see one.

In the pipeline are higher gas and electricity charges to subsidise green options, higher road and fuel taxes for environmental reasons and now higher food prices to cover the gastric expressionism of cattle. The only green that matters seems to appear out of wallets.

Apparently our police carried out 1.87 million stops in 2006-07, the old " Hello, hello, hello and where do you think you are off to, sunshine?"

Now each time the police stop anyone they have to fill in some form or other which takes an average of about seven minutes to complete.

Just as a matter of interest I did some quick calculations and the equivalent of 130 policemen are employed every year just to fill in forms, one every seven minutes for 37 and a half hours a week without a break, to record someone has been stopped. That does not include the man hours on top of that for an army of people to collate the said information to tell us which ethnic group was top of the stops and which group are moving up and down in the stop charts.

I am sure I am not alone in thinking there are much more useful ways of employing 130 coppers a year?

Anyone remember those black and white public information films about how to brew tea and the like? I am sure there must have been one about not wasting food that Gordon could wheel out to be played between programmes on state television.

It is now almost cheaper to run your car on Chanel 5 than petrol, by the time you have pushed your trolley twice round the supermarket the prices have gone up, we have some poor kid knifed every day and the best the Government can come up with is don't waste food.

To back up this "first boil your water" style of advice the Cabinet Office reckons we throw away £10 billion worth of food each year which begs the question of how do they know? I suspect that it is like all Government statistics and figures which seem to owe more to shoe repairers than accurate research. Pluck a figure from the air to prove a point.

Anyhow with Gordon's one man war on waste I hope he enjoyed his 14 - that's right FOURTEEN - course lunch at the G8 summit. Raise a glass to that as you enjoy your reheated leftovers.

I have been away for a few days in the Yorkshire Dales where life is a bit slower. In the Midlands we have a few, for want of a better phrase, sweetshop boutiques where Uncle Joe's Mintballs and Sherbet Lemons are sold in trendy retro shops.

In the Dales and around places such as Skipton these sweetshops never seem to have gone away, they are still there among the corner shops. There also seem to be at least one tea shop for each person on the electoral roll.

If you are ever up in that neck of the woods and are feeling fair clemmed (a northern expression for feeling hungry to get you in the swing of things) then I can heartily recommend the The Cavendish Arms at Embsay just outside Skipton, Friendly staff, good food, good prices and well kept ale

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that a fair old proportion of these sites proposed for eco-towns are former airfields or other ministry of defence sites in the middle of nowhere which the Government would love to flog off to boost the flagging coffers but are all but worthless - unless of course they happen to get planning permission for huge housing developments?

Not that anyone would actually give planning permission unless of course the green card was played and eco was added to the title so that any objection could be seen as tantamount to destroying the planet.