We make no apology for lifting this article by Richard Littlejohn from the Daily Mail. No other columnist expresses quite so well the contempt we all feel for the arrogant behaviour of the mean-minded little jobsworths who infest our streets ...
This morning's edition of Mind How You Go comes live from Ayr, in Scotland, where a man has been fined for dropping a £10 note.
I knew the pound has been falling in value, but I didn't realise it was so completely worthless it counted as litter.
Arthritis sufferer Stewart Smith had just left a charity shop when he was called back by two policemen, who pointed to the note and a till receipt lying on the pavement. Stewart thought he'd put the money, part of his change from buying a T-shirt, in his back pocket, but it must have fallen out.
Thanking the officers, he retrieved the note and prepared to go about his lawful business. Not so fast, chummy. The cops informed Stewart he had committed an offence and gave him a £50 fixed-penalty notice for littering.
We're not exactly talking Taggart here, are we?
'Hulloo, is that the polis? Come quickly, there's been a murrdah!'
'Nae can do, pal, all our officers are out nicking litter bugs.'
Stewart, a former warehouse worker who has to live on disability payments because of his arthritis, was stunned. A £50 fine would eat up more than half his weekly benefit. He tried telling them it was an honest mistake. No one in his position can afford to wander the streets throwing £10 notes away. But the ever-vigilant McPlod were having none of it.
Police in Ayr operate a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to littering. Stewart has been told that unless he pays up, he could face further action.
His solicitor is calling for the fine to be rescinded and an apology issued, describing the incident as 'a scandalous use of police resources'. But Strathclyde constabulary is refusing to back down. No doubt the Case of the Felonious Tenner counts as another crime 'solved', another box ticked, another target achieved.
If Stewart had been apprehended throwing a fast-food carton or a fizzy drink can into the street, I'd have cheered them on. Litter is a disgusting curse on the Great British High Street. Anyone who chucks fast-food detritus in the gutter should be strung up from the nearest lamp-post, with half-eaten KFC chicken legs stuffed in their nostrils.
But nicking someone for accidentally dropping a £10 note is just the latest manifestation of our pettifogging punishment culture. The only surprise is that Stewart Smith was collared by a couple of proper, warrant card-carrying policemen. You don't often stumble across a pair of them on foot patrol. They're generally too busy whizzing by in panda cars, hiding behind bushes trying to catch motorists doing 54mph in a 50mph zone, gawping at CCTV screens, or lolling round the canteen filling in claims for racial or sexual discrimination.
Littering is more usually the province of David Blunkett's pretend policemen, Jackboot Jacqui's sinister 'Accredited Persons' or the legions of jumped-up Warden Hodges wannabes hired by the Town Hall. The country is over-run with quasiconstables handing out hefty fines for the most piffling 'offences' - from stubbing out a cigarette on the pavement to discarding an envelope in the 'wrong' kind of rubbish bin.
And speaking of bins, as I predicted I've heard from readers all over Britain in the wake of the story about the dead body found in a wheelie bin, where it had been lying for three weeks because the dustmen wouldn't empty it on elf'n'safety grounds.
Everywhere it's the same story of bloody-minded bureaucracy and ridiculous refuse collection regimes designed to inconvenience, infuriate and punish the public, reinforced by fines out of all proportion to the alleged 'crime'.
Meanwhile, in Coventry, school teacher Emma Harper's punishment for complaining about her dustmen was to have them retaliate by blockading her driveway with 15 wheelie bins dragged from all over the manor.
Just as the police have ceased to be citizens in uniform and have morphed into the provisional wing of New Labour, so public 'servants' have got it into their heads that the public's job is to serve them - not vice versa. In their warped view, we are not paying customers, we're all potential criminals.
The officious 'rules is rules' culture is enforced with Stalinist inflexibility and a complete absence of human compassion and common sense, whether it's a pensioner getting ticketed for parking on a single yellow for a couple of minutes while collecting a prescription from the chemist, or a harassed mum omitting to pick up an apple core which her fractious toddler has chucked from its buggy.
No matter if the excuse is elf'n'safety, saving the polar bears or keeping the streets clean, the intention is always to pick our pockets. So you end up with a disabled man being fined £50 for accidentally dropping a tenner. Even if it had been real litter, the sensible course would have been a mild ticking off and an instruction to dispose of it in the nearest bin.
But then again, as this column has always maintained, whenever you give anyone even a modicum of power, especially if it comes with a uniform, they will always, always, always abuse it.
Mind how you go.
And we'll just add to Littlejohn's article this sad little story about the vicious incompetence of another set of uncaring, self-righteous jobsworths. yes, you've guessed it, Social Services ...
A veteran of D- Day starved himself to death after being held against his will in a care home.
Alfred Tonkin, 93, went on hunger strike when he was prevented from being reunited with his wife of 68 years, Joyce. The great-grandfather, who lost a leg to a Nazi machine gunner, was initially admitted to hospital with a blood disorder.
But social services claimed he was suffering from dementia and insisted that a round-the-clock care package would need to be arranged before he could go home. He was transferred to a care home and was still there four months later when he was taken to hospital with dehydration and malnourishment.
Mr Tonkin died six days later on June 3 - three days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
His son Ian said yesterday: 'It was a dreadful experience. My dad thought we had betrayed him but we were in social services' hands because they knew the rules and we didn't.'
'Dad told me he was going on hunger strike and even refused to eat for me. Then he stopped drinking too. My dad starved himself to death.'
So he was suffering from dementia, was he? He wasn't so demented that he couldn't starve himself to death. That took some time and a certain amount of concentration, presumably?
The fact is that his dementia took the form of not wanting to do what Social Services ordered, and in the eyes of the modern jobsworth there is no greater crime.
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