I guess the highlight of the week was seeing the leader of the BNP humiliate himself on BBC1’s Question Time. This sad but nasty thug failed totally to present himself as the moderate face of right-wing politics, as was his claimed intention. Instead he came over as a shifty, shallow character whose racist views are both vile and dangerous but based on such a stupid rationale that it was difficult to know whether to cry or laugh. He claimed those of us who look like his ‘indigenous British or English’ are the ‘aborigines’ who have been around for 17,000 years. Well, 17,000 years ago the inhabitants of these islands lived in caves and were not English, nor Irish, nor Scottish nor Welsh!

Yet there is a message for those whom Mr Griffin would attack as ‘middle class liberals’. Get to grips with a society increasingly divided between have and have-nots and understand the fears of those who might be attracted to the BNP because they think Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories don’t care about them. But that doesn’t mean pandering to the prejudices that the BNP exists to exploit.

Uttlesford’s council meeting on Tuesday was a strange event. The Council agreed without dissent to continue to pursue merging the tax collection and benefit payment sections of this council with South Cambridgeshire District Council’s. The main word of caution from me was to avoid fragmenting the council into so many pieces that what is an attempt at more efficient service delivery becomes the cause of a different type of inefficiency as the council becomes unmanageable. Then the right solution will probably be a larger unitary authority such as Bedfordshire recently introduced by merging district and county county councils.      

The Conservative leader opposed a motion from the Lib Dems to sign up to the 10:10 climate change, carbon reduction campaign on the grounds that UDC was already making progress and didn’t need to be associated with campaigns that are for beginners and non-starters. Where’s the community leadership?

Then there was a debate in private about an offer from Sainsbury’s to do a land swap with the council so that the planned museum heritage centre can be built on a different plot and the supermarket giant can push ahead with a planning application for Saffron Walden’s third supermarket. The Lib Dems opposed the deal. Mostly Tories voted for in a recorded vote so the deal was approved. Those opposed felt it pre-empted a pending planning application and compromised the council’s planning position. Assurances to the contrary did not convince me. I suspect there is more to come out about what has been going on behind closed doors that may fuel the inevitable controversy.