GIVEN that one local authority in the country has decided to give golf lessons to asylum seekers, it should come as no surprise that this sort of nannying is now being extended by Blackburn with Darwen Council in the form of cookery lessons for them.

Why? Well, it seems that the single men among them are complaining that although they have kitchens in their homes, they do not know how to use them.

I would have thought that, having spent weeks or months travelling through several countries in order to reach the land of free kitchens and much else, these sorts are already sufficiently schooled in the art of survival.

What is plain, however, is that among the ones doing the moaning are men from cultures where cooking is the women's job. But if so, why should council do-gooders interfere?

What's wrong with letting them find out how to fend for themselves for a change -- especially, as I suggest, they seem to have managed well enough so far?

But, of course, if a council goes to the length and expense of setting up a department to look after asylum seekers' welfare, it will have to justify its existence, won't it? -- whether it be with laying on golf lessons or cookery classes.

Yet do they ever stop to think now vexing this hand-holding is to the host community? In the very same issue in which these cookery lessons were reported, there was a story about a seminar in Blackburn on pensioner poverty.

Just how well do free houses, kitchens, spending money and cookery classes play with people who have worked all their lives, paid their dues, find themselves poor in their old age and find so much attention paid to the moans and demands of gate-crashing newcomers who have not contributed a thing?

Finally, the £60,000 anti-rumour mill that Blackburn with Darwen Council is setting up to flatter itself seems to have kicked off with gusto -- with the new 'Fact or Fiction?' slot in its Shuttle newspaper.

It says: "Fiction -- There are thousands of asylum seekers living in Blackburn with Darwen. Fact -- There are currently 666 asylum seekers living in Blackburn with Darwen."

The fact that this categoric number is then immediately qualified by the rider "as of December last year" suggests that the real fact is that they do not know how many there are -- especially the numbers in private-sector accommodation somehow getting along without cookery lessons.