Yet again Cornwall will be facing council tax increases well above the rate of inflation this year.

While we all have to live within our means, and accept salary or pension increases in line with - or, more often than not, below - official inflation figures, the public sector goes on spending our money like water.

Not on important things, of course. Services don't get any better. In fact, they get worse. That's because the extra money robbed from us by local and central taxation is being used to finance a growing army of bureaucrats and a never-ending flow of rules and regulations aimed at turning us all into politically correct robots.

You don't believe me? Well, let me tell you what many highly-paid Cornish bureaucrats, policemen, firemen and health workers got up to yesterday. They all - at our expense - piled into the Atlantic Hotel in Newquay. Not to discuss how to solve Cornwall's housing crisis; not to work out plans for improving our health care; not to discuss ways of maintaining 24-hour fire cover in Falmouth and Camborne; not to find ways of cutting crime.

No, they had a far more important issue to keep them busy: the Gender Equality Duty. Or, to give it the full title as it appeared on Cornwall county council's press release: "A speed dating' event to discover how to meet the differing needs of men, women and transgender people."

I'm a fairly simple sort of chap and I have to confess that - despite reading the press release three times - I still haven't got a clue what on earth this extragavant gathering was all about. Three pages of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo droned on about men, women and transgender people but I couldn't quite see what all this had to do with "speed dating."

Was this some sort of publicly funded orgy? No, surely not. After all, the Atlantic Hotel isn't the sort of place to rent rooms by the hour.

To be honest, I'm not even sure what "transgender people" are. I think it might have something to do with men who have had their bits cut off and don't know whether they're Arthur or Martha. Whatever they are, do we really need a publicly funded "speed dating" event to discuss how to accommodate their differing needs?

I tried to enlighten myself further by looking up "Gender Equality Duty" on the internet. Astonishingly, there are 1,160,000 pages on the subject - as far as I can see, all from government departments, quangos and local authorities - all, no doubt, spending millions on this nonsense.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!

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We really are living in a crazy world. Cornwall has thousands of farms but our supermarket shelves are stacked full of New Zealand lamb and Bernard Matthews' turkeys.

The economics and politics of the agricultural industry are so bizarre that New Zealand farmers can ship their animals half way around the world and still undercut the price of meat reared on our own doorstep.

The price of importing food products might, however, have to be measured differently if a new government web site is to be believed. What price, for example, do we put on the damage done to the environment by transporting produce around the world?

The discovery of the bird flu virus at the Bernard Matthews' factory in Suffolk also raises questions. It transpires that some of the turkey meat processsed by Bernard Matthews came from a part of Hungary which had a recent outbreak of the virus. Why do they have to use meat from Hungary to make their revolting turkey twizzlers?

Environment minister Ben Bradshaw says we may have to ration meat to save the planet. What poppycock! What we need are fairer rules to allow local farmers to compete with the rest of the world on a level playing field.

Just imagine the effect on carbon emissions if all our produce was locally produced.