Recently in General Category

A debate in the Commons on Members' Allowances this week conjured up the unlikely image of Westminster's finest jostling in the aisles with the bargain hunters of Kings Heath. Sure enough, the MPs could be shopping locally as they seek out tellies and tumble dryers for their London pads without incurring the wrath of the electorate.

It's good to see our Midlands MPs doing their best to support local business, but perhaps Lynne Jones had her tongue slightly in cheek when she implied the infamous John Lewis list might be replaced by one from International Stock.

The owner of the Kings Heath discount warehouse, John Cullen, though was totally unphased by her remarks.

"We have supplied London apartments and we do a delivery service," he said, claiming his customers already included some of the great and good from far and wide. "We've had MPs, councillors, titled people all purchase things from this warehouse."

It's certainly a new line in advertising for Mr Cullen to consider: "As seen in Hansard."

To help us save the planet, what we need is lots of really heavy rubbish.

Go on. Start throwing it in the recycling bin. The more it weighs, the better.

That's nonsense of course - so why do we give our local councils recycling targets measured by the tonnes of waste collected?

As part of it's recent Climate Change Festival, Birmingham City Council challenged all residents "to increase the amount of waste they recycle over the coming months by at least 20 kg per person."

I was discussing the issue with someone who knows the waste management industry pretty thoroughly (someone who journalists writing about fortnightly bin collections would call 'an industry insider').

We've heard suggestions before that the London Olympics is going to suck money out of the regions.

Our own market square project for Kings Heath could be the sort of minor victim if, as one voice suggested at a recent meeting, all the Lottery money is going to pay for the spiralling Olympic costs. Without this it would have come our way for local regeneration projects of course (?)

There's also the suggestion I've heard that the massive construction projects in East London, as well as CrossRail etc, will increase the demand for labour and building materials so that the price for other UK projects (such as New Street Station?) are forced upwards.

If anyone has got any ideas whether either of these will actually materialise, please let me know.

But here's a new one on me. The global cost of steel is, I'm told, being forced up by the Beijing Olympics, now only a few months away.

All of us doing business in Birmingham are tied up, whether we like it or not, with the reputation of the city. We help create it and we are measured by it.

Your address is a part of your company image. That's presumably why big corporates like tall buildings (and why helicopter shots of Canary Wharf feature in the title sequence of 'The Apprentice' even though Sir Alan Sugar's office is miles away in Brentwood.

Or it's why traditional craft industries like to use pictures of country cottages and rural workshops in their literature.

This week David Cameron laid into Regional Development Agencies. The Tories, it now seems, would strip RDAs of their transport and planning powers and might even scrap some of them completely, aiming to unravel Labour's regional agenda "piece by piece'.

Cameron went on to say that "the whole experiment with regional assemblies has been a complete mistake. The halfway house we've now got, where RDAs are being given planning powers, is a disaster too... there's a very strong case, at least in parts of the country, that RDAs should go altogether".

Hang on a minute. Scrapping RDAs could well lead to a recentralisation of policy making and delivery in London. Do the Tories really think that this will help the West Midlands economy?

Rather, this proposal seems to miss the point; a lot of good has actually been done by developing policies at the regional and local level rather than in Whitehall, and in providing strategic oversight regionally.

I still can't quite believe that the Baggies have won promotion by ending up as Champions, whilst also reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup where 'we' (you can see I'm a Baggies fan) put in a very creditable performance.

In fact, we haven't won anything for ages, and the chance for an open-top civic victory parade and party to celebrate our dizzying heights seemed a no-brainer. Well not to the PR chiefs down the Hawthorns who thought it was all too much hassle.

Being a Baggies fan, even a fairly lazy one like me who only makes a handful of matches a year, isn't exactly fun for much of the time. You're either biting your nails hoping to make promotion or the play-offs, or biting your nails hoping to avoid the drop.

Such is the reality of yo-yo football. Of course, it's all hugely exciting, but like others I do crave the boredom of mid-table mediocrity and safety. Until that happens it would make sense to celebrate our victories as they don't come around too often (my dad was still talking about that 68 Cup Final well into the 90s).

I made my first trip this week to ExCeL, the pocket-sized, hard-to-reach rival to Birmingham's NEC.

As you might guess from that first sentence, yes - I am a little bit biased in my opinion. But I approached the experience with an open mind and an open wallet.

Worryingly, despite the grumbles I heard from both visitors and event organisers about the Docklands venue, I also heard that a parallel event is likely to be pulled from the NEC. This is even though, as I now know from practical experience, the journey between Birmingham and London (or vice-versa) is considerably more straightforward than the journey from most of London to eastern Docklands.

The reason for my visit: I was asked to share my wisdom with a queue of newly created and wannabe SMEs who had booked to hear about media relations. The event was a two-day show, but scared off by London hotel prices I decided to travel down each day. I went once by car, once by train.

It's been an interesting week for women in positions of power. Firstly, Silvio Berlusconi angered his European neighbours (and a few others besides), by claiming that the Spanish Cabinet was "too pink", suggesting that the number of women would make it difficult to lead.

On the other side of the pond, Hillary Clinton declared 'the tide is turning', after winning the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. This announcement was brought to me via a news item on a commercial radio station, which chirperly announced, "The sound of high heels could soon be heard around the Oval Office."

OK, so I wasn't expecting in-depth political analysis from this particular broadcaster, but these images of woman appear so out-dated and superficial, and beg the question: how far have we really moved on in the past 100 years?