Found this excellent rant by Leo Mckinstry in the D**ly M**l the other day. We weren't reading the D**ly M**l, you understand. It just sort of fell open as we walked past the stand in the supermarket, and we couldn't help noticing it ...
Emptying the bins used to be a straightforward municipal task, perhaps the most basic but universally valuable job carried out by local councils. But thanks to the malign culture of political correctness which has swept through the public sector over the past two decades, refuse collection has been transformed into a weapon of ideological bullying.
In the hands of the commissars who have come to predominate in British official life, the bin service is now used as an instrument not just for enforcing the fashionable green agenda, but also for encouraging an authoritarian mix of state intrusion and race-fixated social engineering. Putting out our rubbish is becoming like something out of George Orwell’s epic novel 1984, where all the private activities of British citizens were ruthlessly monitored to ensure compliance with the state’s dogma.
Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable that the Government would place microchips in people’s bins to check how much they are disposing of, but that has now happened in more than 2.5 million households. Hidden cameras have also been deployed by some councils to spy on what people are throwing away.
Similarly, we would once have found it absurd that ordinary, otherwise law-abiding, residents could be heavily fined for putting out their rubbish on the wrong day, or putting the wrong waste in the wrong bin, but such practices are now commonplace. Indeed, the householder who fails to show complete obedience to the creed of recycling is likely to be treated with far greater harshness by the courts than a shop-lifter, drug abuser or vandal.
As the communist regimes of Eastern Europe showed during the dark days before the Berlin Wall came down, authoritarianism is addictive for bureaucrats. The heady mix of self-righteousness and control feeds a desire for ever greater power. That is what we see today in Britain, with the revelation this week that local councils have been rummaging through our bins with the intention of gauging householders’ ethnicity and earnings.
According to findings published yesterday under a Freedom of Information request, no fewer than 90 local authorities have awarded themselves the right to rifle through the waste of at least 10,000 families, finding out details about their wealth, race, and personal habits. The town hall snoopers have even taken to looking at the contents of discarded mail, which is surely a direct contravention of the Data Protection Act.
Inevitably this grotesque invasion of personal privacy is dressed up as a public good: council chiefs claim they need to ascertain the income status and ethnic backgrounds of different types of households so that recycling campaigns can be targeted more effectively. It is hard to imagine a more spurious or less convincing excuse. For a start, there has been no genuine demand from the public for our town halls to run these self-indulgent recycling information exercises. This is all about over-paid environmental awareness officers inventing work for themselves in order to justify their own existences.
At a time of massive public sector cuts, there is absolutely no need for this intrusive nonsense. Moreover, the idea of town hall spies examining our personal papers is deeply disturbing. Are they going to send any financial information they find to HM Revenue and Customs? Will they examine private letters for any potentially homophobic or racist content?
When Sir William Macpherson, the chairman of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, notoriously urged in 1999 that racially prejudiced remarks, even within the privacy of the family home, should be prosecuted, the proposal was condemned as paving the way for the introduction of Orwellian ‘thought crimes’ into our society. Now the bin snoopers could have made this a reality. Such a fear is not nearly as outlandish as it might seem.
By far the most striking feature of this new revelation about the bin spies is officialdom’s neurosis about race. To most rational citizens, the ethnicity of householders is a complete irrelevance when it comes to garbage. But such sanity does not apply to the modern breed of bureaucrat, whose mind is filled with Marxist notions of white oppression and cultural difference.
Apart from apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and the mid-19th century U.S., no society in history has been more obsessed with skin colour than modern Britain. Everything in our public sector is seen through the prism of race, from television output to crime statistics, from childhood adoption to the teaching of history. Absurdly, now refuse collection has been added to the list. I saw this for myself when I was a Labour councillor in Islington in the Nineties, where I chaired both the personnel committee and the equal opportunities committee. A relentless focus on race was the driving force of so much of the work. Instead of promoting integration, services had to be ‘culturally sensitive’ to the needs of different ethnic groups. The ethnic composition of the public workforce was meant to mirror exactly the make-up of the local population, so there was constant pressure to ‘address the under-representation’ of certain races. A vast army of race equality officers and diversity managers presided over all the council’s activities, swooping down on any alleged instance of prejudice.
On one occasion, a senior manager wanted to advertise for a new secretary, stipulating that ‘good English’ was required because the post involved dealing with complex legal documents. He was told that this condition was racist, since it could deter applicants who did not speak ‘good English’. In the same vein, senior personnel were often terrified of taking appropriate disciplinary action against ethnic minority staff for fear of accusations of racism.
This disastrous approach which helped to make Islington one of the worst-run councils in Britain, was based on the flawed philosophy that a person’s race is what really matters in society. Character, ability, learning and diligence all counted for nothing. So if any ethnic group seemed under-represented in a certain department, or over-represented in school failures or crime figures, then white racism must be to blame, rather than other factors like family breakdown or peer group pressure.
Cultural diversity has become the defining theme of governance in the modern British state. We can see it in the endless race regulations passed in recent years, in the appeasement of militant Islam, and in the creation of the £70 million Equalities Commission, which has been given vast powers to intervene in businesses. Ethnic monitoring has encouraged a huge industry of segregation and grievance in modern Britain. It has not only created its own expensive bureaucracy, but it has also helped to create a climate where everyone is defined by their race.
It is absurd that this destructive approach should be extended to bin collections. If the commissars are going to act on the information they clandestinely acquire, then the only result can be more racial divisions, more pointless labelling of people by race, more irrelevant campaigns and more suspicions among neighbours. We should all unite, black and white, to throw out this ludicrous, Big Brother intervention in our lives, and demand that councils do what we pay them to do: empty our bins weekly.
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