Are you overjoyed that the Government is spending at least £9.3bn of taxpayers' money on the 2012 Olympic Games? I certainly am not. Not when it refuses to pay local authorities enough to enable their social services departments to care properly for the elderly or the handicapped in their homes.

This is a nation of seriously confused priorities. We have money to spare for a vain-glorious venture like the Olympics but not to look after our infirm people. The already inadequate levels of support provided by councils are progressively being even further downgraded, so that in many areas only those people considered to be seriously at risk will receive social-services support.

Never mind that they might desperately need help with washing, dressing, shopping, cleaning, ironing, changing their bedding, and sticking a meal in the microwave. They won't get it.

They must make do as best they can, relying on family, friends and neighbours. That is what now has become of "care in the community", sold as a way of enabling people to remain in their own homes with dignity. Once again the pessimists and sceptics have been proved right.

Meanwhile, the dreadful Tessa Jowell, Olympics Minister, is allowed to get away with standing up in the Commons to reveal that the budget of the gravy train known as the Olympic Delivery Authority is certain to rise from the £6.09bn forecast in March to more than £7bn and that the security bill for the Games has already risen to £1.2bn, six times the £200m forecast in the bid which won the Games for London.

The figures include £1.94bn for the Olympic Park in East London, £496m for the Olympic Stadium and a further £574m for other venues in the Olympic Park.

There has been no hint yet as to how the rest of the country is to benefit from these games, if at all. I suspect our role is to foot the bill for what's happening in London through cuts in the public services available to us.

But back to Jowell. Here's one of the things she had to say: "No-one can confidently predict exactly what the final amount of contingency we require will be by 2012, but all the analysis we have suggests we are in a decent position."

What this waffle seems to mean is that she'd like us to believe that it won't cost any more than these new figures (which are hugely higher than forecast in the bid) but she really can't promise.

And anyway, does she care? What do any of our politicians care, protected as they are from life's realities by fat salaries and generous pensions?

We foot the bill for those, too. It's time we, and they, remembered that.

Time for people power

You might think that with consumer confidence being in a bit of a shaky state at present, those companies which depend for their continuing prosperity on the willingness of the public to spend freely on their products would be treating them with deepest respect.

Not so. Only recently Tesco sent a stroppy letter of reprimand to an elderly couple who had spent four hours in one of its supermarkets, buying goods and eating a meal. Their car had been clocked in the car park for a period which was deemed to be excessive.

Now, it seems, people who spend longer than 45 minutes parked up at some drive-through McDonald's branches while they eat their burgers and fries face the prospect of a £125 fine from the company appointed by the fast-food giant to manage these car parks.

And if they don't pay up when the letter arrives advising them of the charge, the "fine" rises steadily and court action is threatened.

What is deeply unsettling about this is that the management company, and Tesco in the case of the elderly couple, have been able to acquire the details of the registered keepers of parked cars from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. What right has the DVLA to be handing out this information? No criminal offence has been committed. These are arbitrarily-made jobsworth rules.

What consumers need to realise is they don't have to put up with this sort of bullying. We have a huge amount of clout. Tesco would be reluctant to send another letter of reprimand to anyone else if their supermarkets had been boycotted for a week by the Great British Public. After all, there are plenty of others to shop at.

And if the same happened at drive-through McDonald's up and down the land, the firm of car-park enforcers would soon be either replaced or told not to be so high-handed.

Basically, the way these organisations treat us is down to us. And the sooner we all realise that, the better.

Blasts defy all reason

Once again the terrorists have struck, and once again (almost inevitably) it seems virtually certain that the perpetrators are Islamist extremists.

This time, as on so many other occasions, the majority of the victims are fellow Muslims, blasted as one car bomb destroyed a bus full of students in Algiers and another wrecked the UN refugee agency's HQ there - a building the North African branch of al Qaida described on its website as "the headquarters of the international infidels' den".

This agency, UNHCR, is a non-partisan organisation which works to help the dispossessed of all nations and faiths.

What blind hatred there must be in these terrorists to target it in this way, and to not care who else gets blown up in the process.

The world seems to grow less rational and more alarming by the day - which is no doubt the way they want it to be.