Ten years on and new century is still struggling to get into its stride

Has anyone noticed that we are at the end of one decade and the start of the next?

Where were you ten years ago? Terrified of the ‘Millennium Bug’? Doing something stupendous, like the last bungee jump of the century? Or, like me, spending that evening with well loved neighbours?

I wonder if the century is panning out as people expected? It seems to me it is a bit more of what we ended up with at the end of the 20th century, and the new one has not yet really discovered its stride.

Let me pick a couple of topical issues to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of the next decade.

Firstly a final personal rant at evidence of the passing of history, and the end of values in a national institution.

The very capable Mark Hughes has been sacked by Manchester City, for the crime of drawing too many matches and having his team sixth in the Premier League and in the semi-final of the League Cup.

His real crime is that his face does not fit the money men of the game, and another set of foreign owners run a British manager out of town and install a manager from abroad.

This is globalisation at work, for better or worse. The greatest players and managers of the world are here, but is the game losing its soul? Soon the only thing domestically grown will be the fans.

This cannot nor should not be halted by legislation in a world where we expect and largely benefit from free movement of goods, services and labour.

But if domestic football does not police itself it will lose its place in the heart of those who give their allegiance not to a team they have chosen off a map, or a balance sheet, but probably because it has been passed down the generations, or from where they were brought up.

Perhaps a re-think this decade?

And talking of global movement, the Eurostar mess is disappointing on one count, and uplifting on another.

If you are even moderately persuaded that climate change is real, you will be wanting to travel more by train than by air.

And if you actually love train journeys anyway, you will want continental Europe to deliver on this promise of more high speed lines so we can jump on the train in London and be in Berlin or Milan in less than twenty four hours.

If this is to happen then the blessed trains are going to have to work in all conditions, including the cold, and the ‘wrong sort of snow’ excuse just won’t do.

And I hope that those responsible for them will train their staff properly, too. The uplifting part of last weekend was the wonderful work done, unbidden and unpaid, by off-duty British police and others who saw the mess Eurostar staff were in and simply assumed responsibility, stepped up to the plate and delivered.

This quality in human life is demonstrated time and again in times of adversity, whether floods or accidents and we should continue to celebrate the everyday heroes who are all around us, in Biggleswade as much as elsewhere.

So let us thank, especially at this holiday time, all those who are still working for us, particularly our emergency services who are ready at any time to similarly cope with whatever our New Year throws at them.

I hope you had a very happy Christmas and may the New Year and the new decade be a good one for you and yours.

BY ALISTAIR BURT,

MP FOR NORTH EAST BEDFORDSHIRE