THIS week, some handy hints on securing a public inquiry into a cause dear to your heart.

As many of you know, Swindon and the communities surrounding it are currently facing all sorts of downsizing and other upsetting changes, and thousands of us are not happy.

Perhaps there’s a plan to close a children’s centre in an area where such a resource is vital. Perhaps there’s a rapacious property developer plotting to turn your kids’ playground or your local wilderness into a cramped, shoddy, under-infrastructured housing estate.

Or perhaps the street where you live is constantly being dug up by various utilities who only seem to communicate with one another when they’re plotting to keep prices high.

If so, what you need is a public inquiry, with every witness required to explain to you and the world at large just what the hell they think they’re doing.

Unfortunately, getting the relevant authorities to agree to such an inquiry is far easier said than done. A number of conditions have to be met, and the tricky thing is that these conditions change from time to time.

In order to get the go-ahead for your public inquiry, you’ll have to make sure the conditions are included in the issue you’d like investigated.

You might be thinking, for example, that a public inquiry would be a shoo-in if you somehow convinced the authorities that your problem included decades of horrific, perverted crimes committed against the vulnerable by senior politicians and others in very high places.

Well, you’d be wrong. The most you could hope for would be an inquiry whose witnesses weren’t obliged to give evidence under oath, in public or at all if they didn’t fancy the idea.

After all, some of the people doing the inquiring and some of the people being inquired about have to mix with one another at Westminster, at exclusive gentlemen’s clubs and at the founders’ days of the expensive schools their children attend, so they can’t have embarrassing things such as the truth being bandied about.

And anyway, people in high places don’t tend to regard ordinary people as fully human, so they’re not especially bothered about ordinary people being abused.

Something else you might be considering in order to secure a public inquiry is spreading a rumour that your problem includes something sinister and mysterious happening to a British person. Again, you’d be barking up the wrong tree.

Remember, it isn’t so long since some bloke with connections to the security services was found stone dead and zipped up in a large holdall in London, but there was no public inquiry into that. Nor were there public inquiries into issues ranging from a serial killer allegedly stalking an army base, a former civil servant allegedly bumped off by MI6 or a series of highly peculiar ‘suicides’ among British defence contractors.

So as a strategy for getting your own inquiry, the old ‘sinister and mysterious’ angle is dead in the water.

Nope, your best bet is to look at what’s being inquired into at the moment, which is why I suggest blaming the Russians.

It’s been nearly eight years since that unfortunate dissident was murdered in London by having something radioactive added to his tea, but successive British governments failed to order a public inquiry. That was because we didn’t want to deter Russian billionaires from investing in our banks and other companies.

After all, a spot of murder on our sovereign territory is neither here nor there if there’s cash at stake.

Thanks to events in Ukraine, however, we seem to have decided that Mr Putin is a very naughty man after all, and that the poisoning now merits a public inquiry in spite of our being told it didn’t.

Therefore, if you want, for example, to prevent that housing estate being built on your local playground, start a rumour that the builders and the planning department have been infiltrated by Moscow.

  • READING our interview with a dominatrix the other day, it strikes me that there’s room in the market for me to set up an online sadism service.

I’ll only charge a fiver a go.

If you’re a masochist, you’ll be welcome to email me and beg me to inflict whatever pain you crave most.

Then I’ll email back and say: “No.”

  • THE ongoing uncertainty over the future of our children’s centres is causing untold worry to parents.

As those parents are only too aware, there is now a ‘consultation’ over the possible closure of seven centres.

If previous ‘consultations’ involving councils of all political stripes are anything to go by, I have an awful feeling that I know how things are going to pan out. First there will be a continuation of the protests and demonstrations.

Then there will be more claims by the local authority that it has no alternative – even though it has the very real alternative of refusing to close the children’s centres and openly blaming Westminster for any ensuing shortfall, and to hell with political embarrassment.

This principle should apply irrespective of which party dominates the Commons. They’ve all been ripping Swindon off for decades.

Ultimately, I think there will be an announcement that three or four or five of the threatened children’s centres will close but the rest will be saved, and those who wielded the axe will proclaim: “See! We listened to your views!”

It’s a bit like somebody threatening to cut off some poor devil’s hands, cutting off only one after the victim begs for mercy, and then inviting that same victim to pat them on the back with the remaining limb.

  • THERE was an article doing the rounds the other day, suggesting that air pollution in Beijing is so bad that simply being there is akin to having a 20-a-day cigarette habit.

I wonder what the cigarette habit equivalent of inhaling the smoke of a million kilos of burning garbage might be, as that’s what a lot of us found ourselves doing last week.