FEW pictures tell as many stories as the one we carried on page six on Monday. At first glance, the photograph seems innocent enough. It shows North Yorkshire Chief Fire Officer Eric Clark, York Firefighter Nigel Woods and businessman Roy Lunn, crouching in front of the building site that will soon be Clifton Moor's new fire station.

But look again. For those of us convinced the entire world is now run as a capitalist conspiracy - and that's a fair few, judging by the turn-out at Genoa - it is brimming with dark symbolism.

There's Mr Clark, one hand clutching an axe, the other resting ominously on Firefighter Woods' shoulder. What could better represent Mr Clark's sorry history of service cutbacks, courtesy of Government under-funding?

Mr Lunn, meanwhile, leans on a silver shovel, which signifies the excavation of yet more of York's Green Belt.

Most telling of all is the mobile advert for frozen food merchants McCain in the picture's background. This doubles up as a fire engine.

What a fantastic example of sponsorship that is. Imagine: you're standing outside the inferno that has engulfed your house, clutching your frightened family. Around the corner tears a North Yorkshire fire engine. You glance up and all at once your fear and despair vanish. "Hmm," you think. "I could murder a chip butty."

Of course the McCain's deal is small potatoes compared to what our public services are now compelled to do to maintain a decent service. Fire brigades, hospitals and schools are being forced into hock to big business thanks to Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs).

When it comes to dumb Government schemes, the PFIs have it. They prevent ministers from having to spend any of the billions they have sloshing around the Treasury. Instead, business consortia put the cash up front. We then have to pay and pay as our health, education and fire authorities lease back their buildings at private market rates for 25 or 30 years.

Tony Blair trumpets PFI because it should introduce dynamic, private sector thinking into our supposedly lumbering public services.

So how's it working so far?

Ask Gerry Steinberg, MP for Durham. A PFI-funded hospital opened in his constituency recently. In the Commons earlier this month, he asked if the Government was aware that "patients are being ripped off by the consortium, with extortionate charges being made for television and telephone usage, and that they even have to hire vases for flowers?

"Unbelievably," he went on, "many patients suffer the indignity of having to walk from their ward to the theatre for their operation, because the private consortium charges £30 for a portering service."

And that's not to mention the fact that the ambulance bays outside casualty are too small and the hospital was built without enough beds.

If York's gleaming new PFI fire station followed this pattern, firefighters would be charged rental on their helmets, fire engines would be clamped in their parking bays and householders rescued from upstairs windows would be billed for ladder usage. It is, as our headline said, a "brave new world" for the fire service.

WHAT to think about Lord Archer? Last week, the media he manipulated, lied to and gagged for so many years were dancing in the street at his prison sentence. Now, they are telling us off for doing just that. Keith Waterhouse in the Mail attacks "the scoffing middle class equivalent of the mob" (ie Daily Mail readers) for delighting in Archer's downfall; and Lord Hattersley berates us in the Guardian for enjoying it "for quite the wrong reasons".

Knickers to both. I've never touched a drop of the cheating peer's free champagne, so I'm allowed to celebrate his comeuppance.