LET’S play a game called: “Sometimes I …” What you have to do is utter those two words and then introduce an unlikely notion.

So here goes: “Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for James Alexander.”

Not many people will share this view of York’s council leader, but here is my explanation. Mr Alexander is right to point out that the Government is placing huge pressure on local councils, with £10 million-plus needed to be saved in York this year and next, and a further £12 million-plus the year after. Hence job losses at the council and a council tax rise of 1.9 per cent.

What happens with cuts is that the Government withdraws the money, but passes the pain down the line, so a local council, health trust or even the much-maligned Environment Agency has to deal with the damage.

This way, cuts are ordered by ministers but carried out by someone else, because then it appears not to be the Government’s doing.

So it was that the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, could go on television at the weekend and attack the behaviour of the Environment Agency – while forgetting to mention that the agency had to abide by spending limits laid down by the Treasury.

Pickles later backtracked, praised the agency and attempted to kiss and make up with the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, who had been annoyed by his clumsy intervention.

Pickles said he and Paterson were “two peas in a pod”, to which you can only say it must have been a bit of a squeeze in there.

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Eric Pickles… ah, sorry, no – this game can only go so far.

But I do sympathise with Mr Alexander, as he cannot mention a single thing in York without annoying several hundred very grumpy people. Then again, he does bring it on himself, thanks to assorted policies (take your pick, plenty to choose from) and the way he goes about with his fingers in his ears.

As for the cuts in York, so far I have been irritated by the closure of our local tip and the green bins nonsense. Now residents may lose their free parking badge for the evenings.

This isn’t a huge change, yet it is a very annoying one – trailed just as the council introduced a one-off free parking exercise/spot of headline-generating gimmickry (delete as applicable).

The free parking at night is a good fringe benefit – especially if you live three miles out, as we do, along with others in the ranks of the suburban displaced.

Now I don’t even complain about the council tax going up, as these things happen. But if the charge keeps rising and people feel they receive little benefit then the whole social fabric starts to fray.

The underlying message at the moment is: pay more and get less, which isn’t much of a sell.


SOMETIMES I… wonder if climate change is caused by the very people who believe it doesn’t exist.

After all, the deniers do get very hot under the collar and all that heat from their red faces must go somewhere. It’s quite an attractive theory if you think about it. Cross people generate heat which then rises into the atmosphere and causes the very thing they believe isn’t happening.

This is not an entirely serious hypothesis.

But it is only as potty as all those climate-change deniers who refuse to believe the mass of scientific evidence pointing to a changing climate, preferring instead to adhere to hot-headed conspiracy theories.

And I don’t even count myself as green, but you do have to wonder if all those scientists might not be on to something.


SOMETIMES I… wonder if common sense isn’t what it seems. In this wet winter, everyone says dredging rivers is the answer to flooding. My half-educated guess is that dredging can help occasionally but also risks channelling water on to cause problems further downstream.

Funnily enough, those who call loudest for dredging seem to be the very people who insist that climate change doesn’t exist. Sometimes I wonder about that, too.