Six of one . . .

NO salesman ever admits his product is useless or downright dangerous. Likewise the politician.

But here’s a funny thing about politicians. According to them, the opposition, the other lot, ALWAYS want to sell us something useless or downright dangerous.

For the poor voters it so often seems to come down to who you believe. Both sides will always say, "Our plan’s the only one that makes sense. If you support the other lot’s scheme, you must be mad."

You can be sure that’s nonsense. All the threats and promises tend not to add up to a hill of beans.

Take the current row over what to do with our rubbish. Of course, we want to recycle as much of it as we can. But what then?

What on earth are we going to do with many tens of thousands of tonnes of what they call residual waste? How do we avoid paying millions of pounds in taxes for dumping the stuff in landfill sites?

These are the questions councils in the West, the old county of Avon, are trying to answer.

They’re doing it earnestly. They’re not a bunch of cowboys. They want to do the best for us all, of course.

But if you listened to the opposition, you’d think Bristol City Council and its partners, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire councils, were fools or knaves.

You’d think they were dead set on trying to kill us all with toxic fumes from a new incinerator at Avonmouth – and landing future generations with a dastardly loan repayment scheme that will cost them millions. (It’s called PFI, incidentally - private finance initiative) So what have Bristol’s Labour leaders (and, probably, their partners in Weston-super-Mare and Thornbury) got to say about the opposition – principally, Bristol’s Liberal Democrats?

It goes something like this: "The Lib Dems and fellow travellers are completely bonkers. They want us to miss out on an interest-free loan from the government.

"It’s a gross lie that we have set our hearts on an incinerator (although they are a lot cleaner these days). We won’t make a decision about technology for a couple of years.

"But as a matter of interest, the rival technology the Lib Dems are dead set on – gasification-pyrolysis – may be attractive, but it could turn out to be catastrophically unreliable. And then where will the council taxpayers be?"

Well, there’s a grain of truth in these claims and counter-claims. But there’s an awful lot of hot air, too.

My guess is that, as things stand, Labour – and its Tory-led partner councils – are doing their level best to do the right thing.

They are trying to find a practical solution that works, that we can count on and that doesn’t cost our local council taxpayers any more than it has to.

The Audit Commission, which monitors councils' spending to see whether we get value for money from them, gave this view its seal of approval a day or two back when it pressed the case for incinerators to save councils millions of pounds in fines and landfill taxes.

But long term there may be another, more imaginative way of achieving the same ends. Of course, it could mean taking risks with the public's money, though Lib Dems locally say their ideas would cost less, not more.

I just wish the opposition actually owned up to the risk element and said, "Let’s do it anyway". At least, for the voters there would then be a real and honest choice.

The Lib Dems may be in charge in Bristol following the local elections next spring.

We need to know now what they would actually do, what the risks really are and why they might be worth taking.