Rewriting history

Full Council in Gateshead last week and, as usual, Labour were blaming the Lib Dems for everything that was bad. Labour's approach is to blame others and regard history as starting in 2010. Labour deputy leader Catherine Donovan blamed the Lib Dems for the bedroom tax, claiming that it was invented by the Lib Dems in the coalition government. What she forgot to mention was that the bedroom tax was invented by the last Labour government who introduced it for private sector tenants. The Coalition, rightly or wrongly, extended Labour's creation to cover social housing as well. And before 2010, I never heard a peep out of Catherine and her "socialist comrades" about the Labour bedroom tax. Labour's selective memory is in full flow.

11 billion

11 billion - that's the number of wet wipes used and thrown away in the UK in the past year, according to BBC News. They are one of the main causes of blocked sewers. 90% of wet wipes contain plastic. In other words, they are single-use plastic products and we use an unbelievable number of them. But do we really need to use them in our homes? I'm old enough to remember using a wet rag. Literally, it was an old bit of fabric dipped in water and applied to the tasks that are now done by wet wipes. Instead of throwing them in the bin or down the loo, we put them into the washing and used them again. Is it really too much to ask people to go back to doing that instead of using environmentally damaging wet wipes?