UNLESS memory deceives me, a most popular blow in Margaret Thatcher's bashing of the trades unions was a ban on secondary picketing - the deployment of strikers away from their own place of work.

Perhaps someone will explain the vital difference between that and the blockading of oil refineries and storage depots by farmers and hauliers. The fact that their cause, too, is popular does not prevent their action from being an unwarranted restriction on other people's freedom of movement, not least of course the tanker drivers, who are prevented from doing their jobs.

While there are some causes - causes of high humanity - that justify seriously breaking the law, I personally wouldn't put a campaign for cheaper fuel among them. And it's worth pointing out that the oft-quoted cheaper fuel prices on the continent are offset for many, including most hauliers and holiday makers, by motorway tolls.

Of course the proper, ultimate answer to high fuel costs is to have less transport. It was Fritz Schumacher, of "small is beautiful" fame, who sagely and brilliantly observed that a Martian would conclude that biscuits needed to mature for eight hours in a large container thundering from one end of the country to the other to be ready for human consumption. A long-term project it might be, but our now nearly-absolute dependence on motor vehicles needs to be hugely reduced.

MO Mowlam believes No Smoking signs are an infringement of civil liberties. Presumably she also believes that forcing, or at any rate obliging, someone else to breathe in a smoker's smoke is not an infringement.

Incidentally, there has been much speculation on why Mo resigned. No doubt it is an unworthy thought, but a consequence, if not a reason for her resignation, is that it paves the way for her to proceed with her book and collect the publisher's hefty advance - £350,000, wasn't it? Remember that Mo said she put feelers out about the book because she and her merchant banker husband were a little strapped for cash in the wake of hubby's redundancy.

Despite Mo's warmth and rapport with the public, I wonder if there is truth in suggestions that she is not quite up to Government. In her resignation interviews she let slip the date of the next general election: "When I go in May''. Then there is her idea that the Queen should move out of Buckingham Palace into a new home for a new century. The logic of this dictates that the monarch would have a new home every century - at public cost of course.

BECAUSE demand for soap has plunged through the rise of shower gels, facial washes and moisturing bars, Lever brothers is ending soap production after 150 years. God help me, here is more evidence that I do not belong in today's world. Preferring a bath to a shower, I have never used a shower gel. And I haven't the faintest idea what facial washes and moisturing bars are.

ATTRACTING bags of publicity when it was launched last year with a thigh-revealing picture of Joanna Lumley, Clickmango, a natural health website, now follows Boo, the on-line fashion retailer, and Efdex, an internet exchange which traded food prices for big buyers like restaurants, on to the mounting dotcom scrap heap. Perhaps all would have fared better if their names had given a hint of what they did.

ADMITTED by the chairman of its parent company, Punch Taverns, to be "a knackered concept'', the Firkin pub brand-name is about to disappear. Perhaps we can look forward to the demise of those other unappealingly-named modern pub chains - Slug and Lettuce and, particularly vile-sounding, Tap and Spile