Although this article was published a week ago, I doubt it is out of date. Andrew Osborn speaks of his and other Belgians’ encounters with the country’s small army of fonctionnaires.
Armed with a battery of Dickensian stamps, a rulebook as obtuse as it is thick and the mindset of Cruella De Vil, they do their best to make the life of the ordinary citizen a special Belgian form of hell.
Apparently, in Brussels, you can end up in court for taking your rubbish out a day early.
Put it out on the wrong day or in the wrong type of bag and you are likely to bring down the entire weight of the Belgian establishment on you. A friend recently received a letter saying she had been fined 80 euros (£57) for putting her bin bags out a day early.
But how did they know it was her rubbish? The “rubbish police” of course: enclosed with the demand for 80 euros were grubby photocopies the police had made of letters addressed to her which they had scrupulously recovered from the offending bin bag. Big Brother, it seems, is alive and living in a suburb of Brussels. In order to contest the fine she had to appear before a special “bin bag” tribunal and explain that a neighbour had erroneously put it out for her.
Failure to sort your rubbish into a choice of three different coloured bin bags is also a serious offence. In normal circumstances, that would be understandable, highly laudable, and a real fillip for Belgium’s environmental credentials. But it isn’t: all the bags are thrown in the back of the same truck and then thrown onto the same dump. The Belgians, it is explained, are merely trying to get people into good habits before they start properly recycling the rubbish themselves.
The Belgians are taxed on the most ludicrous items. Who works out which ones they should be?
The issue on which Belgian officials outdo themselves is tax. Own a car radio? You had better make sure you’re paying the special car radio tax, and don’t try to pretend that you haven’t got one. They know.
Want to open an office in Brussels? Then make sure you’re paying your computer screen tax. Just count up the screens and tell the authorities and they’ll send you a bill.
The most poignant example of the kind of mentality that is threatening to engulf Britain is the depressing lack of humanity of the rule and those who enforce them. A long-term resident gloomily describes his trip to a Belgian police station to complain about being woken up by builders illegally starting work at 6.30am:
“Do you have your identity card Monsieur?” (mandatory in Belgium).
“Well, no, it’s 7am and I’ve forgotten it. I’ve just woken up. Sorry.”
“Monsieur, that’s an infraction of the penal code. You’re breaking the law.”
We often complain that the British officials are robotic, impersonal and inefficient. And yes, they are. But they cannot compete with the spawn of the Belgian officialdom.
We shouldn’t mock the Belgiums for this sort of behaviour. The Swiss are the same, including stuff on washing and so forth.
I also understand that there are towns in the US which are just as Draconian, even down to the colour of your garage door, length of grass and so forth.
But they cannot compete with the spawn of the Belgian officialdom.
Or the Californian DMV or any Immigration Officer pretty much anywhere 😉
I also understand that there are towns in the US which are just as Draconian, even down to the colour of your garage door, length of grass and so forth.
What US is this? Upper Silesia?
Mr. O’Neill must be referring to neighborhood associations…the rules regarding the appearance of your property are a contractual obligation the property owner signed on to in order to buy the house in that particular neighborhood, so if one doesn’t like the rules, one shouldn’t complain that one didn’t know what one was getting into…
I think it was more of a form letter than a complaint.
You know the formula, “mustn’t complain about anything that happens in Europe because, after all, there are towns in the US where old ladies are forced to paint their bottoms red and walk on their hands.” What the one would have to do with the other, even if both were true, is a complete mystery.
Eh. Lefty maths.
“…there are towns in the US where old ladies are forced to paint their bottoms red and walk on their hands.”
S.Weasel- For heaven’s sake – if you are going to go giving them ideas like that – at least make it “young ladies ” !!! 😉
It makes you wonder if the average European is able to connect the dots between stories such as these and voting for parties running on a nanny-state platform…
Montreal also has trash-rooting garbage police, though they seem to be almost completely impotent, as there is always garbage everywhere. Getting Montrealers to follow the rules in general is a fool’s errand. The National Post did a series this fall in Freedom in Canada that rated the bothersomeness of the municipal governments in Canada. Winnipeg and Ottawa were the worst major cities, I believe, and Montreal was affirmedly the best, surprisingly enough. The article pointed out that the Mtl. city government has fewer bylaws and hassles than other cities for the express reason that they know no one will follow them anyway. So my sympathy for the Belgians is somewhat muted.
But, surely, if you own the property what rights does or should a neighbourhood association have over your private land?
Being called a lefty does make me chuckle though.
It’s a right called a “contract”. You sign it voluntarily. You can place yourself under all sorts of limitations and strictures not inherent in the nature of property by signing a contract. Wouldn’t go near one of those neighborhood association things myself, but there you go.
And I didn’t call you a lefty. I identified the rhetorical device you used as lefty maths. If the foo shits…
Sounds like this:
Taxing Ancedotes
…And back to the European continent: a large number of windows in the finer homes of England were boarded up when the windows were used to estimate property taxes.
Speaking of windows, a house with no windows looks unpleasant, and indeed, people who lived in these houses were more likely to get diseases and die due to the lack of light and ventilation. So why did anyone live in such houses, thousands of them, in many locations in western and central Europe? Because someone decided to impose a tax on windows! One can still find some window-tax houses standing today, silently testifying to the tax folly of some people. …
It’s not only associations, f.ex. City of New York recently decided to enforced similar set of regulations/fines due to huge budget gap. I’ll try to add link to my local neighborhood message board for anybody interested. http://www.bayridge.net/forum1/viewtopic.php3?t=2494
Among examples mentioned
– women IN AN EMPTY SUBWAY CAR was fined $50 for putting her bag onthe empty seat next to her
– $100 published fine for putting your garbage out on a wrong day
-same amount – for not tieing used and flattened carton boxes (put out for recycling) – even though they end up in same track with other categories of recycled trash, and so on…
Bureaucrats are the same everywhere…
I have heard anecdotes from friends that suggests that Belgium is especially bureacratic, in fact. In my experience many Belgian officials are petty to the point of childish nastiness.
Athough there is an anti-Belgian tradition in Holland, it is worth adding that my Dutch friends say that police violence is supposedly serious in Belgium. There are regularly newspaper stories in the Netherlands about some Dutch offender [the northern half of Belgium speaks a dialect of Dutch, called Flemish] being beaten in a Belgian police station, denied access to a lawyer, and so on.