If they can’t even organise the bins being collected then….
We’re told that a new and exciting bin collection scheme is to be imposed:
Millions of people face a three-week wait for bin collections as councils across England move to longer gaps between taking away rubbish. Why? It is all part of a masterplan to increase recycling. It is hard to think of anything more politically stupid and divisive, guaranteed to achieve little more than infuriate households.
Even so, a growing number of councils are pressing ahead with the plans, which means waiting an extra week for non-recyclable waste to be collected. The geniuses behind it all refer to it as the “one, two, three” system, in which food waste is collected once a week, recyclables once a fortnight and “residual” waste every three weeks.
We agree that what follows could be seen as extreme. And yet there’s still that nub of truth to it.
There are two possible views of governance. One is that we’re cattle, kine, to be managed as our governors see fit. As above, we are to be managed into more recycling apparently - when the most obvious increase here is going to be in flytipping.
The other is that government is simply us the people hiring someone to make sure the bins get collected. These days those governors take 45% of everything - no, really, 45% of all economic activity by everyone passes through government hands these days - and yet they don’t even manage to get that prime task, the bins collected, done.
At which point, well, you know, the hell with them.
As AJP Taylor pointed out:
…Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman…He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter a foreigner could spend his life in the country without permit and without informing the police…All this was changed by the impact of the Great War…The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time.
We had local councils who did actually organise the bins. We also had a Royal Navy to keep the French at bay. It’s possible to suggest that life was not perfect back then but also possible to suggest that it was freer, more liberal, more efficient and, perhaps, better in those ways.
One of us lives in very rural Portugal, so rural we’ve our own language around here - the urban sophisticates laugh at it. You know, like north Dorset? Yet the binmen and their lorry come around three times a week and take all without complaint. How that pre-1914 Englishman - or Taylor - would have laughed at the idea that Latin speaking Europe might be better governed than England.
D'ye think that Hillary might still have that great big “Reset” button that we might borrow?
Really? The tithe is now 45% and yet the bins are not collected?
Tim Worstall