Bumper To Bumper

With all the dangerous things happening in the wider world much of the UK media is spending a lot of the time looking at each other or giving blanket coverage to issues of little or no real importance except to themselves and their political servants.

A committee of the House of Commons spent hours with full coverage on the question of why the England football chiefs, with the Prime Minister and Prince William in tow, failed to have a football competition put on in a few years time. In a more robust age the advisers to the PM and the Prince would now have their heads spiked on London Bridge.

The answer to this was money and benefits and who bid the most. Instead of applauding this application of free market principles in a changing world we have heavy duty whining about the lack of moral fibre of Johnny Foreigner.

But the whole exercise may be a front for someone from somewhere to put in hand a breakaway from FIFA and set up another world football body. If England can rope in both the USA interests and their creditor Chinese they could be in with a shout. I will not name names but mutter quietly about TV rights being the key.

Meanwhile, the world economy is beginning to resemble the old Dodgems rink at Great Yarmouth in the happy days before Health and Safety. There a mechanic had discovered the means of upping the speed and bounce of the cars and it could be quite exciting, like football, if you were on the winning side.

But there will not be much attention paid to Parliament this summer because it will not be functioning much and when it does will be spending its time avoiding all the difficult issues. A major worry is that there are going to enough media frenzy news items coming that will cover all the announcements that the government or others do not really want us to know about but have to publish.

At present nothing makes any real sense and there is no indication that the people allegedly in charge are any wiser. The reason for this may be that those who make the real decisions and control the strings to the money bags are neither elected nor answerable to anyone.

But their world view is very narrow and critically they have little concept of how or why their actions can have consequences that damage both themselves and the rest of us. There are enough of them out there all going their own way to cause some really serious damage if they are not very careful.

Just like when one of the Great Yarmouth dodgems side swiped another, careered into one of the main pillars and the roof fell in. At the time, I believe, the mechanic was playing the hit record through the Tannoy called “Rock Around The Clock”.