Small-minded persons in big, self-important hats will continue to strut through our back streets, and indeed,  bang on our front doors, if the present government is re-elected. That’s a certainty. Nor is there any guarantee that a new Tory administration would send these panjandrums packing.

The craze for policing the law-abiding householder has become politically contagious and is hard to put  a stop to. But I must be impartially specific. It is the New Labour administration, under both Blair and Brown,  which has implemented the doctrine of setting puffed-up prigs on law-abiding citizens who forget, or decline, to dump their rubbish in the wrong-coloured bin, or even in the right one at the wrong time. One hears constantly of householders hauled to court for what amounts to their simply not doing what they are told by the bumptious flunkeys whose wages they pay through extortionate council taxes. Only a year ago or so, a young single mother in the Leigh area was actually thrown in jail for leaving her bin out overnight.  Shops and restaurants do that all the time, with absolute impunity. Interesting how the bin cops pick on the poorest in the land when wielding the most drastic goads of their  authority. Their prowling chums in the anti-litter patrol are equally craven in their selection of quarry. Averted eyes for the ten-strong gang kicking cans about and vomiting on the pavement. An irrevocable on the spot £75 fine for the absent-minded shopping-laden woman who has inadvertently stubbed out her cigarette a fag in the gutter—even though, with genuine apologies, she has agreed to pick it up. The bullies who do this work are called, in some towns, “education enforcers”. Orwell himself could not have made it up.

I am going on about this tyranny of infantile pettiness because of new proposals just announced by Hilary Benn, the environment secretary. He wants to impose fines on people who fail to re-cycle everything they throw away. He would install a compulsory food- slop bucket in every kitchen. In what other receptacle this perishable filth should then be emptied he fails to specify, but he doesn’t want it ending up in a bin bag. Bin bags may be ok for garden waste, empty cans and plastic. On the other hand they may not. With every taxpayer  conscripted into separating one sort of trash from another, before the guys paid to do it get their salaried chance with the contents of  the official refuse lorry, the rules may vary and alter from one week to the next. Domestic transgressers on Benn’s nation-wide re-cycling chain-gang will be encouraged, and no doubt periodically re-educated, by the threat of jail in lieu of unpaid four-figure fines.

Benn’s stated motive is to reduce the amount of waste chucked in land-fill tips. He says the system costs too much money from the European extortion of landfill levy. He thinks the emissions from these buried piles damage the atmosphere.  And he has heard of golden-dustbin tycoons who would willingly buy much of the filth that at present is left to rot. Here and there, he does, I admit, appear to make a reasonable point, especially about the levy.

But why should the entire population be enlisted as unpaid sorters for companies which have found an ingenious way of making money out of leftovers? The question must have occurred even to Hilary Benn, for he has submitted his plan to a cautious, presumably democratic consultative study that will last 12 weeks. By that time his government may be out, and himself, if extremely lucky, an opposition back-bencher with a scraped-in majority.

If that happens—and it isn’t certain—Duke Dave’s troops should on no account be hailed as a cavalry come to rescue us from ever expanding serfdom. True, Nick Herbert, Benn’s Tory shadow,  has gone through the motions of deploring compulsory slop-bucket plans, saying they typify Labour’s propensity for preferring the stick to the carrot. But why this mention of the carrot? Rabbits eat carrots. Tame rabbits live in hutches. Are we, under a possible Tory ordinance, to be fed on bunny fodder unless we volunteer as unpaid collectors of lucrative pig-swill? Note this too: Shadow Nick has not exactly promised to abolish the big stick.

 

ACADEMICS at Kent University say middle age starts at 35 and old age at 58. They are arithmetically right only if you swallow the absurd literality of the Bible, which somewhere lays down that the days of Man number exactly three score years and ten. But the Bible was mistaken even when it was put together two or three thousand years ago.

Even then, grandfathers of 85 were begetting extra kin on servant girls and going on to live another 10 or so goatish years while 25 year old sheep-shearing psalmists were dropping dead of boredom. Youth and age have always, surely, been dictated by as much as what goes on in the head as in the tissue and bones. Every one has met a girl who’s a crone at 28 and a woman of 40 who looks as gorgeous as Cleopatra. Both, of course, are equally likely to live a good ten to 15 years longer than their male paramours. The paramours, though, can still, if they avoid temperance and excessive greengrocery, expect to reach about 80.

The Kent study takes no account of the nine extra years that medical advances have added to the average lifespans, of both sexes, over the past century. Have its researchers, maybe, drunk too much of the notoriously pale, thin ale brewed from late-picked Kentish hops?

I SHALL be steering clear of Bolton tomorrow, though I have kin and friends there. The local friendly taxi crews say they will not be available to ferry me between pubs, and assure me I shall be missing nothing anyway as most of the pubs will be closed for the weekend. Many of the main shops in the centre started putting steel shutters quite early this evening. They won’t re-open again till Monday.

This commercial  exodus has been forced on the traders by the English Defence

League, a fascist group, which is coming into town to demonstrate, ostensibly,  against Islamic extremism. It will be met—and

Vigorously opposed—by heavy forces of the liberal and extreme left.

Free speech is free speech. But sometimes it comes at a a parching cost.