Recycling and Environmentalist confidence tricks

Probably a few of the people I know read the Daily Mail, which is a shame. It is one of the best-constructed newspapers ever built, which has as its sole purpose an appeal to the resentments of the English middle classes. Amongst an historically 'precious' British left, the paper is hated for being so effective at that job of representing the petty bourgeois, a bit like Margaret Thatcher or Sarah Palin, the Castro and Guevara of the Dame Edna set.

Sometimes, however, it hits the nail on the head. Today, it is running a very interesting piece about compulsory recycling. This is a practice whereby some local councils, which are viewed very poorly in England, force people on pain of fines to recycle household rubbish. Subjects who pay very high local taxes are in many cases asked to separate their metal from organic waste, use several bins, and to obey a plethora of frustrating rules or risk being fined or not having their rubbish taken away.

Many local councillors are crooked or incompetent time-servers, or simply political hacks. Partly because of government policy, they have in many cases 'contracted out' their local responsibilities to large waste disposal companies on expensive contracts which defer interest payments for some years, thus allowing councillors to look efficient.

Yet councils do not know what happens to the recycled refuse of their local subjects. In many cases, it seems, waste is simply transported to the third world and dumped there. It is not re-used. Its pollution is transferred. Places like Nairobi already suffer hugely from rubbish dumping, and now such cities seem set to suffer more.

Surfing the web to find links to this story has been eye-opening, by the way. 80% of Ghana's electronic rubbish, for instance, comes from Holland--often touted as a pioneer of recycling in English town halls. It is not as though the story is new, just unreported; here is a link to a story detailing the scandal of third-world dumping in 2005 from Der Spiegel, which is a great source.

The government of this country attracted 22% of the potential vote in the last general election. Its official opposition, and the likely next government, attracted under a fifth. Ministers have outsourced and out-contracted responsibility after responsibility, many on terms they first learned as local government hacks but with the added incentive of jobs, after the coming election, in the private sector with the companies the decisions of their government have benefited.

Already, the central government response to problems with waste has been to give local governments the power to commit secret surveillance on homeowners and to allow councils to force people to keep their own rubbish for two weeks. This adds to the catalogue of abuse that local governments call the legitimate use of power.

The political class of this country are not going to fall because of war, or the deficit, or some great cause. They are going to fall because they do things like interfering with people's rubbish. Then they lie about it, and ignore complaints. Already, there have been stories of minor revolts, of the sort of which populist revolts along the lines of the Californian proposition 13 were made.

When David Davis tried to draw attention to this, he was turned upon by those who considered themselves to have political judgment, ignored, ridiculed or vilified, and made an 'unperson'. His party political opponents even refused to debate or engage or stand in the election he forced. Narked and chilled, the political-media class has been ignoring him for months.

Have a read of the Daily Mail today and tell me that something isn't stirring, or at least being stirred, amongst people who didn't ignore him. It comes to something when the Daily Mail provides one of the strongest arguments for local government control of waste disposal going and everyone in the political class ignores it.