Bill Bryson talks rubbish

Bill Bryson:

Now here is a fact to make you sit up. In the three years to last November, the city of Sheffield recorded a rather whopping (but by no means exceptional) 441,361 instances of fly-tipping. In the same period, it managed to catch and prosecute exactly one person.

That's pretty remarkable, but it's not actually the fact I am on about. The fact I am on about is this: when the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs released its latest annual fly-tipping survey, Sheffield was held up as a model because the number of fly-tipping incidents there fell from 161,000 to 108,000 over the year.

That is an improvement, to be sure, but a rather dispiriting one nonetheless. We have reached the point where it is considered cheering news when only 300 vanloads of rubbish a day are illicitly dumped along a city's streets.

And there's screeds more in the same vein. Even so, our man Bryson actually manages to miss the main reason why people take to fly-tipping. You don't have to dump your rubbish on street corners, after all. There's a perfectly legal way to do it too - take it to the council dump (sorry, recycling centre). But of course, the government has decided to make landfill prohibitively expensive by slapping lots of lovely taxes on it (all for the benefit of the environment you understand). And if you mention that then you might also have to let on that they've done this because the EU has told the UK to close most of its landfills, allegedly to encourage recycling.

And it would be most non-U to mention Brussels in a critical way, wouldn't it?

Update:

The Times reports that car owners will be fined if CCTV operators observe litter being thrown from their vehicles. Why do I now find the timing of Bryson's article a strange coincidence? 

Comments

[GCooper]

Indeed, and the latest proposal includes the right to impose yet more spying on us with CCTV and other devices.

Sometimes it's hard not to fall in with the tinfoil hat brigade and conclude that this is all leading to some pre-planned dystopian hell organised by aliens from the planet Glob. It is certainly hard to find any sensible explanation for this statist, authoritarian madness.