I have to say that on this occasion I have a measure of sympathy with the view expressed by Rob Duhamel, the chairman of the Environment Scrutiny panel, who quite properly, in my view, warned that approval of a new incinerator – the cost of which has increased by two-thirds in eight years – would crowd out recycling initiatives.

I have that degree of sympathy not because I am convinced that a new incinerator is probably necessary but simply because yet again our elected representatives appear to have got themselves in a situation in which they’ve left themselves insufficient time to consider any alternatives.

Had they done what they should have done when they kicked a new incinerator scheme into touch in 2000 – too busy thinking up excuses why they shouldn’t or couldn’t provide the public with a millennium park, I shouldn’t wonder – and created an environment in which people were both properly educated and encouraged, even with the sort of financial incentives which would have been cheap in the long run, to recycle, I doubt that we (I say ‘we’ deliberately, because it’s our money they spend – they don’t have any) would have been shelling out all those readies.

As it is, it’s going to cost the equivalent of every man, woman and child living here at the last count lobbing £22.65 every week in the direction of the ground floor of Cyril Le Marquand House for the next 12 months to pay for this lack of foresight.

It’s yet another boat that’s been missed, just like the far-sighted report on water resources produced 30 or more years ago by Sir Giles Guthrie and his colleagues. Had all the measures for conservation – a concept not that far removed from recycling, in that it encourages the best use being made of available resources – been implemented, then I doubt that a reservoir the size of Queen’s Valley would have been necessary.

I refer to this simply because without looking at a generation’s election results, the vast majority of our elected representatives didn’t even know where the Big House was at the time the Guthrie Report was produced, never mind commissioned.

Might I suggest that those of them interested in learning from past mistakes – something we should all do but rarely get round to – find the attic where that cobweb-covered document is hidden and spend an evening studying it. As Alf Garnett used to say, if they did so they might learn something.

How long, I wonder, before we’re being told to tighten our belts, so to speak, in relation to water if the needs of our near-to-exploding population policy continues?

I see that something called the Air Transport Users Council has added its weight to the condemnation of what seems to many to be a lack of compassion, not to mention common sense, on the part of airlines when customers make simple but very understandable mistakes when booking seats on the internet.

I notice also that the practice of headlining so called ‘cheap’ fares without telling customers immediately that there are additional to taxes and other charges – baggage and using a credit card, to name but a couple – has attracted the attention of no less a body than the European Parliament.

That august body – which until I read about this fell squarely into my category of things like personnel departments and counsellors, which, if they have a function, manage to conceal it from all but themselves – last week decided to make the practice unlawful.

Many air travellers will applaud their action. However, wouldn’t it be nice if all the airlines who indulge in this nasty little game took action to discontinue it before they are required so to do by law?

I see that the boy Breckon and his Consumer Council have highlighted the increase of seven per cent in prices at supermarket check-outs since GST was introduced just a couple of months ago.

Part of the problem of getting anything meaningful done about what is by any standards a substantial increase – reminiscent of the bad old days of galloping inflation in the early and mid-70s, when it was necessary to review wage agreements several times a year – is that in a place where the majority of people are affluent, the impact on those at the other end of wage and salary scales can easily be ignored.

Put another way, what to some is the price of a meal for four at one of those ‘fashionable’ restaurants where people go because others will see them is to others what they budget to feed a family of four for a fortnight.

In common with most people, I am in no position to judge whether the new tax is vital to the wellbeing of our public and social services and so I cannot condemn its introduction. Only time and figures in the Budget will do that.

However, what I can say is that I strongly suspect that had our elected representatives decreed that the three per cent tax could only be added to a final bill – and not to each individual item on the shelves – that impact might not have reached the level identified by Alan Breckon and his colleagues.

As far as I’m concerned, it shouldn’t be too late to change it.

And finally, to those who would dabble with our elected representatives’ pay, might I suggest that the simple solution would be not to vote for those who don’t earn it?

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