I THINK it must be something to do with Halloween, but the usual suspects seem to be out in force. There's Jean Yates charging an imaginary windmill two weeks in a row, there are various other Labour creatures trying to pretend that everything is everybody else's fault and then there's Ian Barker.

Where would we be without Ian Barker to remind us how awful his group really are? As a purportedly intelligent man, he could, I suppose, be known as the thinking person's trick or treat.

His latest offering in your columns urges us to learn from the Salt Ayre report. Good advice, except that the conclusions and lessons he would like us to draw from the affair relate only to the fantasy world he seems to frequent. How about some real lessons?

Lesson One. The Salt Ayre report is yet another where the officers have acted as judge, jury, prosecuting and defence counsel and all the witnesses. Just like the now infamous series of reports which were going to provide the ultimate, final, conclusive and definitive statements on Blobbygate. The only thing that would be surprising would be if one of these white-washing exercises ever came up with a verdict other than a triumphant "Not guilty on all counts, M'Lud".

Lesson Two. Salt Ayre was a typical example of a Labour folly, for which the community may well have to pay for years. The Millennium bridge is another. They are attempts by small minded men to feed large egos at the expense of the tax payer.

Lesson Three. Salt Ayre was badly conceived and badly planned. The construction process was badly managed. Huge amounts of tax payers' money have been wasted.

Lesson Four. No matter how many times the Labour Group tell us that millions may have been wasted but nobody did anything wrong, it's still rubbish, piffle and nonsense. It is impossible for any authority to be as bad as Lancaster was under Labour without someone doing something wrong.

The disturbing point is what Barker's letter tells us about his thought processes. He says, "No one has seriously challenged the findings that the major cause of the overspend was the unexpectedly poor ground conditions". For twisted logic this really takes the biscuit. It's like saying, "I went out in the rain without a hat or umbrella and, unexpectedly and to my astonishment, my head got wet.

The area is not too far from the river. They were going to excavate much deeper than the other phases of the project. It was a racing certainty that the sub-soil would be waterlogged. Who bothered to check. When they dug the big hole, surprise, surprise, everything was full of water. Sounds a bit like Ian Barker's brain, really.

Mike Ford Silverdale