The John Blunt column

NOT all the ideas from Brussels are barmy. For Yorkshire Euro-MP Barry Seal wants a levy imposed on chewing gum manufacturers to pay for cleaning up all the gobbets left behind on pavements.

Quite rightly, he points out that the £800 it cost Bradford Council to remove disgusting splodges of gum from just one city-centre square, might have been spent on something far better - such as six months' home-help for someone.

It's the same everywhere. Hardly had the new fancy-brick paving been laid a few weeks ago in King William Street and New Market Street in Blackburn town-centre than it was caked in discarded gum.

And if Sherlock Holmes followed this path of filth in search of the culprits, it would not take him long to arrive at Blackburn College and its students.

Plainly, the lip-service paid by the gum manufacturers to public cleanliness, in the form of the microscopic "Chew it, Wrap it, Bin It" pictograms they now put on their packets, does not work.

And while Mr Seal's idea for a Europe-wide clean-up levy would be a sensible start, it still would not stop mindless morons from spitting out gum all over the place. It would be better if Europe or our own government took a leaf out of no-nonsense Singapore's book and banned chewing gum and spitting altogether.

Let's end this sky lark

HARD on the heels of the disclosure of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, taking his wife with him to a conference in the Caribbean at a cost of £9,251 to taxpayers, comes the revelation of Trade Minister Margaret Beckett's husband joining her on a 10-day "invest-in-Britain" tour of the Far East, with you and me picking up a bill of some £3,603 just for his air fares - business class, naturally.

And if Tony Blair hadn't stopped the adulterous Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, from taking his mistress abroad with him at our expense, we would be even greater reluctant participants in a frequent-flyer scheme for the overseas jaunts of Cabinet members and their partners.

But what beats me is that, in the case of spouses accompanying ministers on these foreign missions, no rules are being broken when the tab is passed to the taxpayer.

Yet, what do we get for it?

Damn all, I'd say - apart from a sense of outrage.

But if this lark is not against the rules, it is high time the rules were changed. If, quite rightly, the rules are being changed to stop scroungers having free rides on the welfare state, the paid-for jollies for ministers' husbands, wives and floosies should be banned as well. For, isn't that scrounging, too?

Heritage sell-out over museum

ODD, isn't it, that the Blackburn with Darwen junta can find £300,000 to pile perks of personal computers, mobile phones, free newspapers and so forth on themselves as councillors, but cannot afford a piffling £10,000 to keep the town's Lewis Textile Museum open?

The business of saving £10,000 is a red herring, of course. The council could save that much elsewhere in the blink of an eye if it wanted.

No, what's afoot is more of the deluded "think big" outlook that has afflicted the town hall every since unitary status was won.

First, we had the notion that councillors should have bigger expenses because they are doing a "bigger" job.

Next, this over-inflated sense of importance demanded that they get those mobile phones, personal organisers and computers (though, admittedly, it is beyond dispute that some do need a spell-checker).

Now, because Blackburn with Darwen is "big," the town hall needs more offices. And wouldn't the nearby old Lewis Museum, minus its exhibits, be ever so handy? What about the town's heritage? Well, as most of that has been buried by the council under ugly reinforced concrete, we can hardly expect these big-time councillors to be concerned with the bits that are left, can we?

And not when, even before they were bitten by the bigness bug, their concern for what pieces of it are preserved in the town's museums was such that, two years ago, they churlishly cut the opening hours by two thirds and sacked half the staff.

But, surely, they are plumbing new depths when they won't preserve the very heritage on which Blackburn was built - its textile history. And that, too, when the Lewis Textile Museum was given to the town for that purpose alone in the first place.

Are they big enough to explain?

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

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