All too late in the day, I have come to worry about the stuff I put out in my waste bins. It is not the recycling issue that bothers me, but what council officials, poring over my detritus with rubber gloves in some sanitised hell in Maidstone, might find out about me, and what they might decide to do as a consequence. Obviously, nothing good. It never is anything good. They are not going to ring me up and say sir, as a consequence of your rubbish inspection, we’ve decided to reduce your council tax per year to what it would cost to feed a family of 12 in Mali for seven decades. That never happens. We are told that rubbish inspections will en-able local councils to help us more efficiently, to provide a better service. But this is a transparent lie; everything local councils do makes things worse for the individual, and the more they know about us, the worse it will be. By ‘tailor services to your requirements’ they mean charge us more, or stop the services altogether because we’re too right-wing, or too white. And help us more ‘efficiently’? Local councils which use the word ‘efficiently’ are like Reinhard Heydrich using the word ‘humanely’. They are laughable non-sequiturs.
I don’t know how it was allowed to happen, but these local councils have started looking at our domestic waste, peering into our bin bags, pulling apart the remains of our Sunday roasts, skiffling through our discarded mail to see if it says anything interesting about us. This is a worry. Among the stuff in my latest black bin bag were the following items:
*An empty bottle of 2009 E&J Gallo White Grenache Californian Chardonnay. It was brought by a friend, OK? And we didn’t drink any of it. Our friends drunk it. I am aware that it is bad form to allow people to drink the wine they have brought to a party. But what would you do with a bottle of white Grenache? Save it on the off-chance David Miliband popped round? And we have struck those friends off our friends list.
*A letter, written in mauve felt-tip pen, addressed to ‘Ron Liddle, Zionist Bum-Boy, The Spectator, London’ and kindly forwarded by the magazine to my home address.
*Sixteen empty bottles of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey.
*One slightly foxed copy of Peter Mandelson’s autobiography The Third Man, with faint blood-stains and dark smears in the margins.
*The severed paw of a badger, which my wife found in the lane nearby and used as a sort of Kentish talisman until it started to smell quite bad.
*A scrupulously cleaned claw hammer, wrapped in a towel.
*Another letter, this time from my four-year-old daughter’s preschool teacher, advising that she was doing OK, but should work on attempting to ‘resolve conflict situations in a less screamy manner’.
*Seven unopened tins of lavabread, which I bought in bulk from a gourmet food company, thinking, happily, that the Welsh must know a thing or two about food, having nothing else to do with their sad and desolate lives. A big mistake, as it turned out.
*A reminder note from the Amazon Film Library that we are overdue on sending back to them the following rented DVD movies: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Trop Belle Pour Toi, The Battleship Potemkin, and Ukrainian Lesbian Lavatory Lust, the last of which my wife disputes we have ever received.
OK, so perhaps your bin bags are more pristine than mine, perhaps you look after your waste better than we do. But is there not something outrageous, something Stasi-ish, or Cheka-ish, about the fact that they are allowed to rifle through our rubbish as part of some policy to ‘improve’ their services, to sift through the filth and make conclusions about our lives and how they consequently adjust the useless bloody schedules of their useless bloody operatives to take account of the fact that we drink white Grenache, rather than Sancerre? Or wine rather than beer?
If they want to know how to better tailor their services to us, here’s a tip — ask us what we want. You do not have the right to sift through our rubbish and draw conclusions about the sort of people that we are, and the sort of services we might consequently appreciate, for two important reasons.
1) It is rude, presumptuous, reductive, grossly intrusive and fascistic. We are not defined by our waste and your only business with our waste is to dispose of it. You are there to do what we tell you — that’s why we pay inflated salaries and pensions for your idiotic and unaccountable staff. You do not need to guess what we want by the modern equivalent of — quite literally — reading the entrails of a chicken, or pawing through our tea leaves. If you want to know what the overwhelming majority of us want, let me help you out — it is simply this: empty the bloody bins, once a week, no argument, no fuss and don’t get arsey when we put stuff in the wrong bin from time to time. Sort it out for yourselves: that’s why we pay you. Other than that, shut up and stop publishing fatuous PR sheets telling us what your goals and aspirations are and how well you are doing. Your goal and aspiration should be to empty our bins properly and we’ll be the judge of how well you do it.
2) The people you employ — at our expense — to rifle through our waste are almost certainly more stupid than you and therefore entirely incapable of forming a judgment based upon their findings. You might as well employ Paul the octopus, or Paul Daniels for that matter. So either sack them or divert them to more useful occupations, by which I do not mean lurking in public places to see if people are smoking.
Ideologically, I sort of agree with decentralisation, with the notion that certain functions of society should be governed by local people. But that’s not how it works, is it? They are governed instead by an authoritarian creed well beyond the reach of local people — and it does not really matter who is in power, locally, Tory or Labour. My guess is that you could cut four fifths of local government spending — from the top down — and we’d all be better off as a consequence.
Offer ends in:
