WHY do we have general elections? What is their point? Here's what happens. For a month before polling day, we hear almost nothing except the yakkety-yak of politicians. They clamour to appear before us, measuring every millimetre and micro-second of exposure against the space and time given to rivals. Top figures on each side are grilled every which way on seemingly every aspect of policy.

But they say nothing. In the run-up to the recent election, Michael Heseltine praised the Tories' 1979 manifesto, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power, as a model of its kind - a masterpiece of vacuity.

A black mark on my profession is that the month-long interrogation of politicans fails to prise from them a usual host of measures already firmly in mind. For always, within days, sometimes even hours, of victory, the new Government announces plans never mentioned during the election campaign.

The present Government is no exception. Top of the list of unheralded proposals is the pay rise for MPs, including a hike in staff allowance from £60,000 to £70,000. We ought to have anticipated this one. Why did no interviewer ask: "Of course one of the first things you'll do after the election will be to award yourselves a substational pay rise.''?

Now comes a plan to curb disability payments. Personally, I believe tightening up is needed. But why didn't the Government reveal its plan, to be rushed through by October, before the election? Another is a decision, revealed just a week after the election, to restrict the public's right of protest against major developments like airports, power stations and major roads. In future, the public inquiry into any scheme already approved in principle by the Government will be confined to considering "local" matters such as access or landscaping.

New limits on court sentencing, including the possibility of weekend or night-only jail terms, to allow offenders to have a day job, are yet another post-election measure kept under wraps during the campaign. So too, are new arrangements for compensation for medical negligence. If swifter settlement is the unalloyed good thing for victims that Health Secretary Alan Milburn proclaims, why did he not present it as a vote winner?

Except in broadest terms, general elections are useless as a guide to what will soon happen. At every general election, those seeking our votes set out to conceal rather than reveal. And every general election they get away with it. This is a central feature of the farce we call democracy.

Thirsk vet Anne Norton says: "If a man with a bottle of vaccine came to Thirsk we would make him a saint.''

Well, that bottle is on its way. Sadly, perhaps not in time to prevent still more foot-and-mouth devastation among the farming and wider community in and around Thirsk, but a switch by the EU from culling to vaccination is now widely expected.

Though the NFU still doggedly insists otherwise, all recent evidence suggests that vaccination stops the disease dead. It could hardly be less effective than our mass cull which, experts agree, is unlikely to stamp out the disease before the onset of autumn, seven months after the outbreak started, brings ideal conditions for it to spread vigorously again.

As Prof Verner Wheelock, former head of foot-and-mouth policy research at Bradford University, says: "The failure to vaccinate is a misjudgement of monstrous proportions.'' This column's view throughout.

WHICH city should have been awarded the 2008 Olympics? None. The games should be scrapped. Dead since at least 1936, when Hitler orchestrated the games as a showpiece for his German master race, the Olympian ideals, of sportsmanship and international brotherhood, are finally trashed by the decision to stage them in a country brutally hostile to human rights. The rival World Championships carry no Olympic baggage. They are the games for our time.

Published: 18/07/2001