On yer bike, John!

JUST picture it - there's a harassed mum, struggling with both hands full of heavy, bulging carrier bags, a fractious kid in a pushchair and it's pouring down.

And as she fumbles for the keys for her car, along comes New Labour's transport and environment supremo John Prescott who snatches them off her and orders her to catch a bus instead.

Ridiculous?

No more absurd, I'd say, than the notion we are told he's working on to force people to stop using their cars and climb aboard unreliable, frequently filthy public transport instead - by letting the cranky council car-haters slap yet another swingeing tax on motorists.

Here's the wonder plan: charging drivers up to £400 a year for parking on their firm's car park and making supermarkets and out-of-town stores pay fees for the parking spaces they provide.

The benefit? Less congestion and pollution and a pile of extra money for improving buses and trains, we are told.

Pie in the sky!

If only a small fraction of Britain's 26 million drivers switched to buses and trains tomorrow, the system could not cope.

The fact is that public transport needs billions spending on it to expand and improve it before motorists will be tempted to use it. And even then, why should they?

The fact is that drivers have worked hard for their cars and are robbed blind already with taxes and charges for the privilege of using them. And Mr Prescott's "green" guff cannot hide the obnoxious Soviet-style thou-shalt outlook in his proposals to tax them more, mainly for the benefit of others.

And most ironic of all is the idea of giving the town hall wallahs the right to impose and collect these new parking taxes - when they are experts at providing themselves with plum parking places and not paying a penny for it.

Birth control by the benefit cuts method

IT is hard to imagine middle-class voters chaining themselves to the railings outside Downing Street in the same way that disabled protesters did in their over-the-top demonstration over benefits cuts.

But we can nonetheless expect some yelps of anguish from the well-heeled "poor" as, not before time, the Government moves to cut that ridiculous £7billion drain on taxpayers called Child Benefit - which really ought to be known as the suburban voters' holiday fund.

Just why is it that millions of families light years away from poverty should be picking up state handouts of £1,000 a year and more in many cases and squandering them on luxuries?

There is no good reason.

But while Chancellor Gordon Brown toys with taxing the benefit paid to families in the higher income tax bracket, if the Government is really serious about welfare reform and reducing the country's £100billion benefits bill, it would scrap Child Benefit for all but those on the breadline - and then only make it payable for the first child.

Such a step would not only be the contraceptive and self-reliance stimulus that the promiscuous and scrounging underclass needs, it would do away with the costly and bureaucratic nonsense of one government department giving away unneeded money to other sectors of society and another department clawing some of it back in the form of tax.

Dare New Labour do that? If it means what it says about taking tough decisions, it should - even at the risk of losing the precious votes of the middle class claimants.

Heaven protect us from the protectors

WHAT the Government is thinking of in calling in militant homosexual rights activist Peter Tatchell - elected by nobody and roundly shunned by voters on the occasion he did stand for Parliament - to draft amendments to the Crime and Disorder Bill, I just do not know.

But it seems it needs the benefit of Mr Tatchell's advice in framing proposals to punish hate-motivated attacks on gays with harsher sentences.

That homosexuals have a right to the law's protection from assault - though no more than anyone else, I'd say - cannot be disputed.

But Mr Tatchell, as head of the gay pressure group OutRage, has advocated sex among children as young as 14. He wants to change the law so that homosexuals can go to bed with under-age boys. Many ordinary people might therefore think that, rather than his ilk needing special protection, it is society that needs protection from those who would collude with paedophiles and from a government which colludes with their repellent friends.

Chewing over the fat

THE preachy muesli munchers and carrot crunchers were given fresh food for thought this week when scientists declared that a vegetarian diet won't cut the risk of heart disease. For a 13-year study carried out by Oxford University boffins found that the difference in heart disease levels between meat-eaters and vegetarians was "statistically insignificant".

And this came just days after research in America found that eating frowned-on fat can help prevent strokes.

But just who do you believe these days over what's safe or healthy to eat - when, so often, "expert" advice is contradictory?

In this case, I can only suggest the play-safe compromise of chips...done in dripping.

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

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