IF those involved in the dubious affair of the town's now-resigned housing chairman, Councillor Mohammed Khan, being illicitly offered - by a four-person interview panel including three Labour colleagues - a £22,000-a-year post with Blackburn's Racial Equality Council while he was still its chairman perhaps consider that all is well now that he has quit as head of both the REC and the housing committee and his party pals have tendered (qualified) contrition and explanation, then I am sure that others, like me, disagree.

For though we have heard plenty from these three and from Coun Khan himself in the wake of this disturbing affair - with Coun Khan admitting an error of judgment; his deputy on the housing committee, Coun Dave Hollings, standing down and also saying he made a mistake; ex-Labour councillor Abdul Piracha claiming he opposed Coun Khan's selection; and the party's women's officer Pat Maudsley, though carping about a McCarthy-style witch-hunt, accepting naivety and misjudgment were involved - we have not heard a peep from the person who presided over this fishy business.

Why is there silence still from the chairman of this selection panel - Conservative councillor Edna Arnold?

Does she not owe an explanation to the public as to why she evidently did not consider there was anything wrong with the offer of a job paying 22,000 smackers from the public purse to a candidate who should never have applied in the first place or then been interviewed?

There is, to my mind, a deal of arrogance in the decision of Coun Khan and Coun Hollings not to resign from the council altogether in view of their integrity being put in grave doubt by their role in this affair.

But is there not an equal dollop in the silence of Coun Arnold if, as it seems, she feels she has no need to account for her actions?

Perhaps the council's Tory group, if it has a concern for its probity as a credible party of opposition in Blackburn, will speak up if she will not and tell the voters what it thinks of all this. For, surely, they deserve to be told. The Church must believe "DEARLY beloved - and especially Roger in the front pew with his terrific new nose stud; love it, Rog! - let us pray. "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son/daughter of God, eternally begotten of the Father/Mother" . . . On the third day, He/She rose again, but it takes a lot of believing . . .

I could go on, but I do not wish to give offence to devout and sincere Christians who, like me, are weary at the scorn cast on their beliefs and values by their own clerics.

For in a week when it was revealed that the Church of England charity, the Children's Society, lifted its ban on adoptions by lesbians and gay men; when it was disclosed that Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had held a "hospitality day" for homosexual activists at Lambeth Palace and when the self-same head of the Church's clergy declared that we "cannot know" that Jesus was raised from dead, it is hard to accept that the Church believes in anything at all these days, but simply goes along with everything.

Not that Dr Carey is setting a precedent - it's as long as 15 years since the batty Bishop of Durham, the Rev David Jenkins, cast doubt on the Virgin Birth and then went on the call the Resurrection a "conjuring trick with bones".

After that, the acceptance of women priests, gay priests and ones who do not even believe in God make the Archbishop's "we cannot know" seem only like a mild blurring of the Creed.

But if only the modern Church only had the courage to recite a creed that it does believe in - without all the soppy, "on the other hand" kowtowing to trendy acceptance of women's lib, gay rights and fundamental heresy - it might wonder less why its churches are empty when, surely, they are being deserted by those whose beliefs the clergy now continually mocks. It ain't half daft, chum IT'S like a cuckoo script from "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" in which the cross-dressing Gunner "Gloria" Beaumont gets a chitty for a sex-change op.

For, incredibly, in a week when the struggling NHS was ordered by crackpot Appeal Court judges to provide transsexuals with free operations to swap gender on the same basis that it treats truly sick people with life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease or cancer, we find the Ministry of Defence creating the amazing precedent of allowing a Sergeant Major undergoing treatment to become a Joanne instead of a Joe to stay in the Army. Barmy!

But now, we are told, the Army is "committed to equal opportunities". Yet, since when was it the duty of the state or the taxpayer - whether through the health service or the armed forces - to pander to the freakish desires of people to change their sex?

Surely, this is not the responsibility of any government department, but that of these no-doubt-confused individuals - and they should both pay for it and take the consequences of being no longer eligible as a result for the job for which they were hired, particularly when it comes to being that of a serviceMAN in HM Armed Forces, for we have yet to fight a war with handbags. Put teachers to the test WE have, of course, already been treated to so many doses of levelling, prizes-for-all claptrap from the teaching profession that the latest suggestion - from the supposedly-moderate Professional Association of Teachers' conference - that exams are tantamount to child abuse, should come as no surprise.

"What do exams prove? That a candidate has a reasonable memory?" asked delegate Rosemary Wright.

They do not always prove even that nowadays - not when candidates are allowed to take their textbooks with the answers in them into the examination room.

But devalued as it has become - to the extent that millions of pounds of public money are spent on "successful" A-level students going on to become undergraduates "studying" for worthless degrees in order to keep them off the "education, education, education" government's unemployment figures - one barely-remaining vestige of the examination system is that it is a test of teachers' ability, is it not?

From their profession's shrieking protests over the notion of performance-related pay, we know, of course, how fond they are of exams, but I would be grateful if they would spare us the disingenuous concern for the kiddies who come over all suicidal at the sight of an exam paper - that is, if they have not been apprised of its contents in advance - when cynical old me thinks it's the teachers who are the ones who actually get the vapours over tests and the league tables of results.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.