If we don’t have enough health inspectors, whose fault is that? Do you blame Council Tax-payers; or central government?

Or do you blame Croydon Council for spending our money badly; for blowing more than £3 million on furniture in its new crystal palace of offices, but not employing enough inspectors to ensure our cafes, restaurants and takeaways are safe places to eat?

Salmonella kills: public health is far more important than feeding councillors’ egos.

Collective plurals are acceptable in British English, although arguably these days they’re used mostly in informal contexts (e.g. sports teams). Having done a quick Google to check this, I wonder if it’s a journalism/style-guide thing? Anyway, as you were…

The key question is, are there enough to do the wide range of jobs they are expected to carry out? How many of them are there? How many posts have been cut over the last five years?

I wonder how many health inspectors Croydon currently has and how many have been shed in the last five years? There may not be enough to do the job they would themselves would expect to be able to do. It may be that the inspectors should blitz one of the lowest scoring areas in the borough; and then leaflet all the rest of the takeaways with the results, advice and warnings.

The other approach is to hold a series of hygiene sessions in each area for owners and staff to help them get their acts together.

In particular, I hope someone will take the borough’s health inspectors to task for their apparently sloppy work. What’s the point of having food hygiene regulations in place if local authorities can’t be bothered to enforce them.

It’s not as if Which? set the bar particularly high – just three out of five, or a little over 50 per cent is deemed to be satisfactory.

If Birmingham can achieve 4.9, so can we. Which? is right to demand that hygiene scores should be prominently displayed.

And Croydon should be closing any food outlet that doesn’t score four out of five in surprise inspections – that would concentrate the minds of those food retailers whose grubby habits are a menace to everyone else.

The link’s there to the source material. Crush a grape, but can’t click a link?

The report is from Which?, the Consumer’s Association as was. No one’s ever accused them of conflicts of interest before, either. They are well regarded for solid research, and lobbying for a range of legislation on behalf of consumers.

The read-between-the-lines message, surely, is to check whether the place where you’ve just bought that piece of cooked food actually displays an up-to-date hygiene rating. Responsible traders with nothing to hide will do so.

And there is a link to the report – you need to pay a fee to access it.

UKIP says it’ll stage referenda almost to decide what day of the week it is, perhaps because they can’t manage to put forward, in all honesty, a proper schedule of policies when seeking election.

Meanwhile the two “main”, real, parties shy away from stating their true positions on Europe in their manifestos. Why? Can’t they just decide, “We’ll stay in the EU”, or “We’ll come out”? To stand for election and not state a position on this issue is just dishonest.

And dishonesty lies at the heart of Britain’s relationship with Europe.

After all, Ted Heath’s Conservatives sought power and won an election in 1970, on the promise of having a referendum before Britain would go into the Common Market. Hey ho, quelle surprise, as Charles de Gaulle might have said, and the Tories broke an election promise. It has scarred this nation ever since, and divides their own party at regular intervals.

By the time Harold Wilson’s Labour, with a 1974 manifesto promise to hold a referendum, got round to putting the issue to the electorate, the question had changed: no longer was it “shall we go in?”, by then it was effectively “should we pull out?”

And the answer was profoundly different.

Heath’s duplicitous move meant that Britain abandoned its long-time trading partnerships with Australia, Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth, in favour of our new “partners” in Europe. Since when the Tories, in particular, have yielded power and influence from Westminster to Brussels.

Now here is a first. I’m with Richard Ottaway on this one. We’re in now. We’ve been in for more than 40 years. Coming out would create untold problems and costs for Britain. Let’s accept that we’re in, get over it and let’s lead in Europe.

It’s about time our political leaders showed some leadership on the European issue, and stopped pretending that a referendum – in which the resources for the “stay-in” option will, just as it did in 1975, overwhelm those arguing to pull out – will change at all the status quo. As Silvio Berlusconi, or Francis Rossi, might say.

Gavin Barwell’s position seems to me to be perfectly reasonable . He thinks the public should have the right to vote on the issue, but hopes the referendum comes down on the side of the “yes to Europe” campaign. Those of us who witnessed the 1975 referendum remember how much money and propaganda was produced by the pro-Europe lobby, to secure a “yes” result on that occasion, so Gavin’s objective is not pie in the sky.

As to Labour’s position, there are a number of us in the Party who believe it’s wrong to deny the public a vote, especially as we’ve been promised a referendum by all 3 main parties in recent years but it has never materialised. The issue won’t go away, so it should be put to the people. My own view is that the EU is undemocratic and bureaucratic and does not, generally speaking, advance the interests of working people. We should have an internationalist outlook, but not be part of the EU.