Picking a pocket or two

THE FRIDAY THING: SO, here’s a clever ruse: decimate public services by withdrawing money from the councils that provide them and then get the thousands of people you have made redundant to put money into charities to help them to plug the gaps left by the dumped (and the dumped on) social carers.

It is truly a masterpiece of Machiavellian double-dealing that hides its duplicity under the Big Society banner.

So now, every time you go to draw money out of the cash machine at the bank (assuming you still have any money to draw) you will be asked to make a donation to fund a charity that may well be doing your old job. Is that cunning or what?

And it doesn’t stop there. Whether you are in a shop, café, pub or restaurant, when it comes to paying the bill you will be asked to round up the sum to the nearest pound to contribute to the cause (of Big Society, no doubt).

And how’s about this for bare-faced, brass-necked cheek? People filling in the dreaded tax forms will be asked to make a contribution (as if they have not paid enough already through the all-snatching PAYE system) to fund charitable work that used to be funded (yes, you’ve guessed it) through their taxes.

In the days of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, it was the poor who dipped their grimy fingers into the pockets of the rich. Now it is the millionaire bankers and politicians who dip into the public coffers (we, after all, own the banks that lost our money by playing three-card brag with a hand comprised only of jokers.

Why does the line “Got to pick a pocket or two” begin to sound like the anthem of the decade?




WHEN did you last say grace? You know the simple: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.”



At a dinner party this week our congenial host intoned a simple thanksgiving of his own before any of us had the chance to lift a fork.

So what happened to grace? Is its fall from grace — sorry — a symbol of an apparent move to a faithless society?

Is there a growing sense that Christianity is under threat, not from some outside forces but from within, where the political correctness of the Left seems to despise what was once the cornerstone of people’s lives.

Maybe grace is not just a prayer of thanksgiving but a totem of many people’s very existence.

Or maybe it has become an anachronism because we are far too smart and too sophisticated for such hokum.




FINAL WORD: So that was 2010. Some mourn its passing, others joyful at its end. May 2011 be a year to look back on with joy.