Waste Wars

A man could become the first person in Basildon to be prosecuted for failing to recycle properly.

Basildon Council is drawing up a magistrates’ court case against the Noak Bridge resident, who has yet to be named.

He failed to pay a £75 fixed penalty notice, issued last month, for failing to recycle properly after receiving two warnings.

You see, in Basildon, you don’t get a choice about recycling. You have to do it.

If they spot no recycling bags, they go rifling through your black sacks to see if you are throwing away stuff that could be recycled:

Compulsory recycling went live across the district from September last year, with the enforcement review running from November 2009 until the end of June.

Five full-time environmental enforcement officers probe people’s pink and black rubbish sacks, looking for correspondence to identify the offender.

Welcome to the People’s Republic of Basildon, comrade.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Southend, they may have trouble instituting such draconian schemes.

At least, until they’ve cleaned their own house:

Southend Council has been slammed for not recycling its own food waste despite urging residents to do so.

Lib Dem councillor Carole Roast said she was outraged to discover that food from the Civic Centre is not recycled and the council does not require its private catering firm, Yes Dining, to do so either.

Unless Pickles and Spelman get a grip on things, expect this to escalate, and flytipping to spiral out of control.

Cries Of 'Racist!' In 5...4...3...

Stephen Batten QC, prosecuting, said many of the people involved in the case had been linked to shootings and drug dealing on the Stonebridge Park Estate, in Harlesden, north west London.

He told the jury: 'Attitudes and standards are different. It is more the law of the jungle than the law of civilised England.'

Oooh, someone's going to be screaming about that, I'll bet...

It Seems The Animal Kingdom Has Declared War On 'Mail' Columnists...

First, there was Ben Douglas and his epic battle with a home-invading fox (he lost).

Now, we hear of Quentin Letts and his issues with squirrels:

Our seven-year-old daughter, Honor, learned about squirrels the sharp way last month. She spotted a grey squirrel in a nearby garden.

Honor was on her way to see her little friend, Mia, at the time and was in one of those chirrupy, hello-clouds-hello-trees sort of moods. Hello squirrel.

She bent down to stroke the thing.

Note that, despite Daddy's antipathy towards the 'vicious tree rats', he didn't think to warn her that this was a wild animal...

It bit her. With a hiss and a swipe of claw and a baring of fang, the squirrel had a go at Honor and drew blood from her right thumb.

Cue waterworks and wailing and, thank goodness, a shattering of our child's Disneyfied notions of an anthropomorphised animal kingdom where every little furry thing has a name and a benign character.

Oh, wow! You're Father of the Year, for sure!

I suppose little Honor is pretty lucky you didn't take the same 'wait and see' approach to bleach kept in lemonade bottles and unsecured electrical sockets, or she might not have reached the tender age of seven in the first place...

When The Going Gets Tough...

...the tough - it seems - quietly fold their tents and slip away:

Coalition plans to give anonymity to men accused of rape are to be abandoned in a significant policy U-turn, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

*sigh*

Their first real test, and they bottled it:

The controversial pledge to "extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants" was a surprise inclusion in the power-sharing agreement binding the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats together after the general election.

It faced an immediate storm of protest from MPs across all main parties including Harriet Harman, the acting Labour leader.

So what? That's like saying that you refused to deliver life-saving medication to a critical patient beccause, as you got near her, a teacup chihuahua popped its head out of her handbag and bared its tiny, mouse-like teeth!

How the hell are the coalition supposed to 'take the unwelcome decisions' if they cut and run from this sort of thing?

David Cameron hinted last month that the plan, based on a Lib Dem policy of shielding a defendant's name until conviction, could be watered down.

'Watered down' = 'dropped' in ConDem speak, it seems.

Now it has emerged that ministers will not change the law to ban the identification of men accused of rape at any stage in the legal process.

Crispin Blunt, the justice minister, told MPs that the government wanted to find a "non-statutory solution".

Instead of a legal ban, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) sources suggested that one way forward would be a voluntary agreement among newspaper publishers and website chiefs that those charged with rape should not have their identities revealed until they were charged – backed by a beefed-up role for the Press Complaints Commission.

Oh. Well, that'll work well, I'm sure...

Sunday Funnies

Mankind always has to improve on nature...

Rare Case No: ...I've Lost Count, Actually!

Thanks to Mark Wadsworth, yet another case to prove the wisdom of allowing anonymity in rape allegations:

A young mother who falsely claimed she was raped by a teenager was yesterday locked away for 15 months.

Jade Brooks was 17 when she claimed the 18-year-old had taken her into a copse and attacked her.

And, presumably because the alleged attacker was 18, he isn't named.

But you can't say he didn't suffer:

He was later arrested, subjected to an intimate examination, kept in a cell for 13 hours and grilled by officers under caution before being released on police bail.

It was a further two months before he was told no further action would be taken after Brooks's story began to unravel.

Why so long?

Witnesses said they had seen her kissing and cuddling the young man shortly before the alleged attack near a disused railway station in Haverhill, Suffolk, and was laughing and embracing him immediately after they left the wooded area.

And no alarm bells rang then? So what finally made them twig?

She dealt a final, fatal blow to the rape case when she refused to give a video-taped interview to police.

It took that to finally pursuade them that there was no realistic prospect of a conviction, eh?

How fortuitous...

'Mail' Headline FAIL!

Surely he was already in a life of depravity? Prison was supposed to raise him up. Worked well, didn't it, progressives?

The Dark Side Of Hero Worship

David Cronin is the Brussels correspondent of Inter Press Service news agency, and he’s not happy. One of his childhood heroes has betrayed him:

Johnny Rotten has cheated on me.

Not literally.

OK, I don't expect that statement to elicit much sympathy.

Aaaaand…you’d be right!

But I can't have been the only one to feel queasy reading the interviews John Lydon gave ahead of this week's British tour by his band, Public Image Ltd (PiL). The erstwhile Rotten believes that now his ads have boosted sales of Country Life butter, he should be courted incessantly by marketing executives. "It amazes me that people don't get the opportunity of me," he told the Guardian. "I sell."

‘Former punk grows up to be quite canny with money’

Hold the front page! News at 10:00!

As I was only five at the time Anarchy in the UK was released in 1976, I wasn't conscious of hearing it until nine or 10 years later. Fashion might have moved on in that time – not that I had any knowledge of fashion – yet it is no exaggeration to say that the Sex Pistols' debut single was liberating and educational, not least because it prompted me to look up "anarchy" in the dictionary. Here was an exotic creature from London telling a young Irish boy that it was cool to defy authority.

Well, yes. When you are young and foolish, you advocate and follow many strange concepts.

But when you grow up, you realise that you need to earn a living, squatting in abandoned buildings plays havoc with your piles, and Abercrombie & Fitch suits you better than a ripped t-shirt covered in beer and puke.

This is hardly news.

So, what is it about Lydon that has really got Davey’s y-fronts in a bunch?

A few months ago Lydon claimed he's "well-known for being a pacifist" and named Mahatma Gandhi as his all-time hero. Surely, then, he would be open to supporting one of the most impressive examples of Gandhi's principles being put into action in today's world: the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bi'lin, where unarmed activists are regularly fired at by Israeli forces. Surely, too, he would be sympathetic to the call made by numerous Palestinian trade unions and other campaign groups for a cultural and economic boycott of Israel.

Aha! Now, the penny drops…

Not a chance, I'm afraid. Lydon has vowed to go ahead with a PiL concert in Tel Aviv, scheduled for late August. "If Elvis-fucking-Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he's suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him," Lydon told the Independent. "But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won't understand how anyone can have a problem with how they're treated."

/cheer

Naturally, little Davey is shocked, shocked, to hear that his idol may not share the same political views. Clearly, this can’t be explained by anything other than the corrupting influence of capitalism.

No, really:

How can Lydon so callously disregard the suffering of a people under colonial occupation? The answer is easy. PiL will be performing in Tel Aviv as headliners at a festival sponsored by Heineken. Along with giving him all the free beer he can swallow, Lydon can be sure the brewers will help to swell his bank account.

Yes, it’s clearly all about money, Davey.

"You always hurt, the one you love..."

Brian Butcher (described as a 'frustrated newt expert') was most upset by Natural England's work on neighbouring land to tear down hedgerows and fill in holes. You see, newts may be there. Great Crested newts. A protected species.

Brian knew they might be there because the pond on his land was full of them. So he wrote letters. But they were ignored. For four and a half years, he battled to get the organisation to halt it's work.

So it was time to step up to direct action and hold a press conference chain himself to Natural England's railings fish some newts out of his pond, hit them over the head with a hammer, and post the bodies to the organisation.

...

Wait, what?

The bench was told the package was a "payback" for the public body's perceived lack of action against the work being carried out on Butcher's neighbouring land.

I can see now why he's a frustrated newt expert...


H/T to 'APiLN', the place to go for all your barmy local news requirements.

Savings - A Tricky Concept

Zoe Williams is having trouble with the concept of ‘saving’:

I only realised the child trust fund was worth saving about three days before the election: even then, I didn't process what a foolish loss it would be until it was lost, immediately after the poll.

Oh well, the coalition was faced with some tough choices. And a scheme to take taxpayer’s money and place it in a ‘savings’ account was clearly one that had to go.

But under the umbrella Save Child Savings, organisations from ResPublica (Phillip Blond's "red Tory" thinktank) to the Family and Parenting Institute (Katharine Rake's organisation, more red than Tory) crave one last favour. Halt the funds, if you absolutely must, but keep the infrastructure – the cost to do so is £2m a year, or thereabouts. In terms of a public savings initiative, that is tiny.

And why would we want to do that?

It would leave the apparatus in place to power the whole thing up again when the country recovers from recession.

Hmmm. Maybe.

Or maybe for when the public have forgotten what a mess they left, and elect another Labour government, you mean?

If this is so valuable that even keeping its door open is worth fighting for, why did the fund ever look dispensable in the first place? From a distance, it seemed like a lot of money to spend, given that it was a universal handout and so would go to many people who weren't poor enough to warrant it.

Precisely. It was a waste of money. And furthermore, it sent out the wrong message.

Since it was a savings initiative, it seemed also as if it might benefit the middle classes more than anybody else (with their fabled ability to defer gratification and make long-term decisions).

Isn’t ‘delayed gratification’ and ‘long-term decision making’ something to be encouraged and strived for, then?I always thought so...

Yet at the same time there was an aspect to it that was socially conservative, that distilled the beliefs of the decent Tory: the value of asset-building; in everybody having something to trade in the free market beyond their labour; in people taking responsibility for their own savings, their own financial futures.

For the last time, Zoe, ‘saving’ is what people do with their own money.

Not when the government takes money from everyone else and gives it to you.