Tendring Topics.......on Line
If that is the idea, then a majority of Gazette readers think it is doomed to failure. Two thirds of those polled believe that there will be more, rather than less, refuse destined for landfill as a result of the new scheme!
Tendring District’s Recycling Scheme.
I thought that I was being fairly critical of Tendring District’s changed recyclables collection scheme in last week’s blog. It seemed clear to me that, had sufficient thought been given to the matter, they would surely never have provided unlidded red boxes for the reception of paper and cardboard. I also felt that the amount of food waste from old people like me, living alone, would hardly be worth the trouble and expense of collection.
I thought that the scheme could be improved at minimal trouble and expense simply by swapping the purposes of the two collection boxes and using the green box, with lid, for paper and cardboard and the red box which has no lid, for plastic bottles and food cans of all kinds.
Compared with ‘letters to the editor’ in the current Clacton Gazette, and comments on the Gazette’s website last week, my blog amounted to virtually unstinted praise! I hadn’t realized, for instance, that for larger families, neither the red nor the green box is sufficiently large to hold a fortnight’s recycled items. In the past we have been able to put any excess into a white plastic bag, place it on top of the green box, and it would be taken away with the box’s contents. That isn’t allowed under the new scheme. Anything in such a bag will simply go into landfill.
Also now going into landfill are the plastics that once were collected for recycling but are to be collected no longer for that purpose; plastic bags of all kinds, and pots used for containing yoghurt, cream and spreads, for example.
A number of correspondents had realized, as I had, that paper left in an open red box would blow out and litter the streets. An official Council spokesman said that to provide a lid for each red box would have cost £1 a lid, and that householders could use the lids from the green boxes (they can’t, they don’t fit!) or place the waste food container on top of the paper and cardboard. If waste paper does blow about the streets, ‘it will be cleaned up’.
Among the many letters published in the Clacton Gazette is, inevitably I suppose, one from a reader who sees the malign hand of ‘Brussels ’ behind the Council’s scheme. S.H.Wells of Holland-on-Sea writes
‘I have a suspicion that Tendring Council’s revised waste collection measures have less to do with “helping the environment” than with the EU landfill tax.
After all, a major percentage of the world is covered by water and the theory that man has anything to do with the changing cycles of the climate has never been proven.
But the tax is very real. It varies from country to country but in the UK
I am glad that I am not still Tendring Council’s Public Relations Officer. Putting a ‘positive spin’ on the current situation would be well beyond my capabilities! I reckon too, that the members of the ruling majority group on the Council are glad that, unlike in Colchester , none of their number has to seek re-election early next month!
A spokesman for the Council says that the scheme will be kept under review and the views of residents taken into account. I think that that means they’ll keep their heads down and hope the scheme will be working properly and to everyone’s satisfaction, by the time of the next Council election. I wouldn’t bet on it!
Oh for the days when decisions like major changes to a recycling collection system that was at least working, would have been thoroughly debated in an appropriate committee, before being debated again by the full Council – rather than being decided by a tiny Politburo and presented to the Council as something which all members of the ruling party are expected to support! In those days the whole plan would have been discussed in the press and by the public before a final decision was taken and a new system was imposed on the public.
‘You can’t have your cake…..and eat it!’
This seems to be yet another piece of folk wisdom of which the Government is blissfully unaware. They are very concerned about truancy from school. In my childhood, certainly in the ‘aspiring working class’ circles in which I moved, truancy was a very rare phenomenon. None of us dared to take a day off school unless we could be sure of being able to take with us the next day a note from mum or dad explaining that on the previous day we had been too ill to attend.
If, due to mumps, chicken pox or some other childhood ailment we were absent for two days or more, the school would expect a parental letter of explanation to arrive promptly by post (very, very few of us were ‘on the phone’ in those days). Parents and children alike dreaded a visit from ‘the School Board Man’ that would follow any unexplained absence. The fact that the actual extent of this official’s powers were unknown added to the fear of his visit, as did the fact that his visit would be noted and regarded as a mark of shame by all the neighbours. ‘Them at no 27 – them that’s so ‘igh and mighty; I know for a fact that they ‘ad a visit from the School Board Man yest’y afternoon. What d’ya think of that?’
Nowadays we are all aware that the Education Welfare Officer (the successor to the School Board Man) has very limited powers and that when he called he would very likely find no-one at home. What’s more no-one would care. Parents and children are no longer terrified of an official visitor – nor are nosy neighbours interested. Truancy flourishes.
Someone at Whitehall had a brilliant idea. Stop the child allowance of persistent truants at source! That’ll bring the parents to heel. That’ll make those neglectful and non-caring mums and dads make sure that their kids go to school every day.
However, the same Whitehall geniuses expect us all, singles, mums and dads and childless couples, to be in productive work. They overlook the fact that for many there is no productive, or even unproductive, work for them to do. They also overlook the fact that where both a husband and a wife, or a single parent, are expected to be at work at 8.30 or even 9.00 it is impossible for or them to be certain that their child or children actually go to school. They may make sure that they’re up, dressed, breakfasted and ready, but there is no way they can be sure that those children go through the school gates.
Similarly there’s no way that working parents, returning home at about 6.00 pm can control what their kids are up to between leaving school a couple of hours earlier and their arrival on the scene. No wonder we have truancy. No wonder we have street gangs and juvenile crime. No wonder we have teenage pregnancies – ‘Let’s go upstairs to my bedroom. Mum and dad won’t be home for at least another hour!’
It seems to me that modern society has stark choices about its future direction.
Carry on in the way that has become popular since the avaricious eighties – husband and wife both hard at work (when they can get it!) to maintain mortgage payments or HP debt, children coming home from school to an empty house, growing youth crime, teenage pregnancies, juvenile drug and alcohol abuse, and a violent gang culture. The alternative is revert to pre-1980 (pre-Mrs Thatcher) values, recognising that growing children need a parent to be present when they set off for school and when they come home in the afternoon; and appreciating that bringing up a child or children in a loving caring and comfortable home is a satisfying, fulfilling and socially-valuable career. Building Societies and banks should revert to the practice of relating the size of their loan to the income of just one of the couple seeking to buy a property, instead of the sum of the incomes of the both.
We would need to recognise that home ownership need not be everybody’s goal and that there is no shame in living in a rented home, even if it is Council or Housing Association owned. Social housing should be for those who need it – not just for those who can’t possibly afford anything else.
That way, I’m afraid, we would have fewer aspiring home owners and fewer thrusting young entrepreneurs. We would probably lose a few potentially brilliant female scientists, lawyers, doctors and (dare I say it?) priests – though it could be the house-husband as easily as the housewife, who elects to stay at home and bring up the children. On the plus side we would have fewer unsustainable debts, fewer mortgage defaulters, fewer broken homes, less youth crime, fewer teenage pregnancies, less antisocial behaviour and fewer schoolboy and schoolgirl truants destined to become illiterate, innumerate and antisocial adults!
Punishing the Charities
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has, so he says, been shocked to discover what most of us have known or, at least suspected, for years; that many of the seriously wealthy contrive to pay less in taxation than we less affluent mortals! Having made this ground-breaking discovery; how extraordinary that he should take measures that are more likely to impoverish a number of worthy charities than to cause serious inconvenience to the wealthy.
It couldn’t, I suppose, be a deliberate ploy to persuade us that if we attempt to make the rich pay their fair share into the nation’s exchequer it is the poor who will suffer?
I could see how the state would lose revenue as a result of large donations to charity but I have to confess that I couldn’t see what the generous donor would gain from his or her action – except perhaps a few ‘brownie points’ to present at the Pearly Gates when the time comes.
Paul Vallely, writing in last week’s Church Times enlightened me. ‘If a basic-rate taxpayer gives £1 to charity, the state gives 25p in Gift Aid to that charity. But if a higher-rate tax payer gives £1, the state gives 25p to the charity, but another 15p or 25p to the wealthy donor in extra tax relief. So top philanthropists don’t just get a knighthood, or dinner with the Prime Minister, or an art gallery named after them. They also get money back’. He also points out that some charities to which we taxpayers are thus compelled to give that Gift Aid are not ones that most of us would think of as being desperate for a few extra quid – Eton College
Paul Vallely suggests that before targeting charitable giving, the Chancellor might try cracking down on some of the other scams – off-shore accounts, turning income to capital gains, setting up companies to rent their own homes from themselves – by means of which the wealthy avoid paying tax like the rest of us!
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