A report this week claiming that thousands of credit card applications are currently being rejected every day as the debt crisis bites will be seen as bad news by a lot of people.

However, the banks' new hard line could end up doing those people a favour by protecting them from over-stretching themselves. In fact, if it heralds a general move away from credit cards and back to cash, it could do us all a favour.

Although I possess a credit card and a debit card, I seldom use either of them. It isn't that I don't trust myself not to spend more than I can afford. Many of us were brought up to believe in doing without something until you've saved up for it, which I appreciate is now considered a terribly old-fashioned way of running your life but can save a lot of trouble in the long run. No, it's that I don't trust the security of the card system.

The debit card is used to access cash at a cashpoint after carefully checking that no discreet screening device has been put in place by crooks keen to scan the details and pinch my identity, that the keypad is fully obscured when I tap the PIN number in, and that no seedy-looking characters are hanging about nearby with mugging in mind.

And the credit card is used (with similar precautions) only on those rare occasions when I make an impulse purchase and don't have enough cash in my pocket or when it's impossible to conduct a transaction by any other means.

Try to book theatre tickets or a hotel room over the phone without a card and you're in trouble. You have to quote your full card number without knowing whether the person at the other end is trustworthy or not or whether the computer system in which it will be stored is secure.

Check into any hotel chain and you'll be expected to let them swipe a credit or debit card immediately to protect them against you doing a runner. It's presented to you not as an option but as a firm rule. What you do if you don't have a credit or debit card I don't know. Leave your watch or camera as security perhaps? And what guarantee have you that those card details will be wiped after you've settled your bill and left?

For the past few years we've been manipulated and bullied into embracing cards as a way of carrying out more and more of our financial transactions. If the banks are starting to refuse cards to those who they think might be a bad risk, while at the same time confiscating those of people like me who they don't make any money out of, the entire system is going to have to go into reverse.

If it doesn't, those who rely on their wallets and cheque books are going to find it impossible to buy anything or go anywhere and the whole economy will grind to a halt.

We're similarly being bullied into embracing the internet, which admittedly offers a mighty convenient way of accessing information but has definite drawbacks - not least the way it lures people into gambling addiction and seems to have triggered a global epidemic of paedophilia, leading to the horrible abuse of thousands of children.

If we can't control the dark side of the worldwide web, maybe we should switch if off. Now that would make for an interesting time

A Darley good show

When Darley Street was caged off towards the end of last year while the improvement work went on, I wondered if the end result would be worth all the inconvenience. After all, the street hadn't looked bad the way it was.

But now it's finished, I'm converted. I strolled down Darley Street the other lunchtime, in the sunshine, and it looked terrific. The new seats and bins are now all in place and the trees are filled with leaf buds. Come high summer when they're in full foliage, this main shopping street should be a major asset to the city. Congratulations to all concerned.

Let's just hope that the result of their hard work gets treated with the respect it deserves by all the people of Bradford.

Tessa for high jump

The cost of the 2012 Olympics was initially guessed at £2.4 billion when the bid was put together in 2003. By November, 2004, it had risen to £4 billion, soaring further to £9.3 billion by July, 2005. And now, according to the House of Commons public accounts committee, the total could be even higher than that, up to five times the initial wildly hugely unrealistic estimate that swung a lot of public opinion behind the bid (though not, it must be said, my own opinion which has stood firm against it from the very start).

How come that Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister - accused in the report of "wishful thinking" - hasn't done the honourable thing and resigned, given the sorry impact that all this sports spending will have on Britain's public services? But of course, failed ministers no longer do the honourable thing. Instead they hang on to office as long as they can.

Come the next election the voters will make sure Tessa gets her come-uppance. But by then the Olympics will be only a couple of years away and it will be too late to undo the damage caused by her incompetence.

And, of course, those who have been riding aboard the multi-billion-pound Olympics gravy train at the taxpayers' expense will be laughing their way to their various banks - which will in turn have had their own incompetence rewarded with access to further billions of pounds of taxpayers' money.

What a country, eh?