Political pledges fit only for (1 of 9) bins

THE FRIDAY THING: THERE’S bad news and then even worse news on the bin front this week.

We are not going to have weekly collections of rubbish as promised by the fat rascal (as sponsored by Betty’s tea-rooms perhaps) Eric Pickles. And we may have as many as nine bins each so, we can all become recycling maniacs.

This last bit is good news for the makers of wheelie bins and their shareholders (maybe a few Tory MPs among them) but not such good news if you live in an Oldham terrace house or flat.

Where will you put all those bins? And how will we remember what goes in which bin and on which day each bin is collected? Will there be neighbourhood bin wars as we do battle to get our bins in a place where they will be emptied and not ignored by the bin men? And will they put all the bins back where they got them from?

Perhaps we will all get our own bin adviser, seconded from the neighbourhood watch team (curtain-twitching noseys to you).

At least bin spies won’t plague us: the council will be forbidden from putting spy cameras and electronic chips (not edible) in our bins. Then again, with nine bins to buy for each household they won’t be able to afford to spy on us anyway.

Apparently most of what we throw away these days is food, which doesn’t say much for the standard of menus or cooking in the average home. On the bright side, the thought that the bin police may be able to work out what you are cooking and eating from the contents of your food bin (they do random bin audits) could improve culinary standards.

Caroline Spelman, the minister responsible for rubbish (and take that as you will) says she wants families to throw away less uneaten food.

Are we to gorge until we are as fat as the Americans, feed it to the urban foxes, burn it or put it in someone else’s food bin?

Or maybe just send it to the minister?


IT was only a matter of time before the highlight of a TV programme was the broadcast death of someone.
It had become the last taboo (is there really anything else that we haven’t seen or heard on broadcast media?) and thus had the programme-makers and producers chomping at the bit to break it.

Not surprisingly it was the BBC that crossed this final line.

“Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die” showed a desperately-ill man committing suicide with a lethal dose of drugs at the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland, in a blatant and one-sided argument in favour of euthanasia.

Whether you think euthanasia is a mercifully good thing or an act of, at best, manslaughter, it is an issue worthy of a wide-ranging debate, especially as we live at a time in which more and more people are living much longer than previous generations and are, therefore, more likely to suffer from dire and incurable illnesses.

The hospice movement, of which I have deeply affecting personal memories, and charities which support desperately-ill people, would no doubt have liked an opportunity to contribute to the debate on assisted death but, as is too often the case these days, the BBC was happy to show only one controversial side.

For me it was an opportunity missed: for the BBC a point scored and the last taboo broken. I hope the programme-makers are proud of themselves.


FINAL WORD: Reasons to leave the European Union 4,362.
The European Court of Human Rights (or indeed, Wrongs) has decided rapists and paedophiles can be removed (not from the land of the living) from the sex-offenders’ register, thus hiding their identity and whereabouts.

So what happened to the Bill of Rights David Cameron promised us?