I used to be a Mr Angry of Henley-On-Thames, whenever I listened to Radio Pravda’s Today program, but now I listen strictly for laughs, particularly since the New Labour machine and the BBC started sniping at each other, in their bloody marxist schism. And today did we have a humdinger.
Their reporter, Nicola Stanbridge, went out with some Environment Agency rubbish inspectors (no, I’m afraid I’m not kidding), to find out what they’ve been getting up to, out there in the real world, on their taxpayer-funded salaries. It turns out that organised crime is now running massive fly-tipping operations, in the UK, as it gets rid of waste for cash-strapped companies more cheaply than “proper” waste disposal agencies. I can’t remember the text, word for word, but it went something like this:
Reporter: So here we are in Birmingham, standing on a pile of smelly fly-tipped rubbish. What are we looking for?
Rubbish Inspector: Any refuse with names and addresses on it, like water bills.
Reporter: What do you do with it?
Rubbish Inspector: We bag it, and tag it, and then invite those named to an interview, under caution, where we investigate why their names and addresses have been found in illegally fly-tipped rubbish. If they cannot provide a satisfactory explanation, we prosecute them.
Okay, so far, it wasn’t too bad, at least, not for a draconian state like the UK with civil “servants” who love threatening people, and a country mired in increasing petty regulation, with 1 in 4 of the working population engaged in “services” for the government. And I’ve no love for organised criminals, particularly those who dump hazardous waste onto private property. But then it got really interesting, as back in the studio, they interviewed the chief executive of the Environment Agency (I bet that’s a nice salary). The Today programme wanted to know why this had only become a problem in the last few years. This was the gist of the reply:
Chief Exec: Because for the last few years it has been the agreed policy, across Europe, to force up the cost of refuse disposal, to encourage greater recycling and greener policies. We, in the UK government, are keen to push these policies through.
Oh dear, oh my. That evil ‘market’ again. Just when you try to break it, by forcing companies and individuals to pay more than the market will naturally bear, for waste disposal, to make everyone obey your diktats, based on the stupid though highly successful Malthusian nonsense of a load of eco-green human-haters, it bites you on the bum. The legal companies, the ones trying to do a good and respectable job of waste disposal, get priced out of business, and the illegal ones, the ones acting with menaces and crowbars, dump all kinds of fridges, tyres, rusty cars, and shit, all over the place, making the environment for all of us far worse than it was before in the bad old days of laissez-faire. Marvellous. Welcome to the wacky fridge mountain world of upside-down EU regulation.
If only they would obey us, they cry, into their subsidised beer. If only they had obeyed prohibition in the US, to prevent organised crime. If only prostitutes would ditch their £1,000 pounds a week cash jobs, to work behind supermarket tills to pay their “fair” level of National Insurance, to prevent organised crime. If only people wouldn’t take drugs, to prevent organised crime. If only.
Wherever you find a successful crime organisation, you’ll most often find a raft of stupid government regulation driving it from behind, whether it’s drugs, prostitution, tobacco smuggling, or whatever. And now, for Jesus H. Christ’s sake, behind the organised crime growth of rubbish disposal!
Who’d have thought it? Next we’ll have an entire film genre of ‘rubbish disposal’ gangster film stars, like Judge Dregs, Super Man-Size-Tissue, and the Incredible Bulk.
They never seem to learn. If you want rid of organised crime, get rid of stupid regulations, and stop trying to rig the market to your perverse satisfaction. It only ever makes things worse.
Which brings us to the central charge, the one you may have been expecting, that there’s one thing any organised crime syndicate always tries to ensure, and that’s a strictly regulated monopoly on all of its ‘business’ within its particular ‘jurisdiction’. And the biggest organised crime syndicate of all, of course, the government, really hates it when its profits, or taxes, go into the pockets of other gangs (come on, you knew I was going to say this). Hence, more regulations, more rubbish inspectors, more taxes to pay for more rubbish inspectors, and more taxes to pay for more government agency chief executives to manage all of the new rubbish inspectors and new rubbish regulations and taxes; when all of them could be out doing something productive for a living. God forbid.
We’re living in a dream-world, Dorothy, one where the 3am Gestapo knock on the door will now come from a pipsqueak of a man in a grubby white plastic suit, waving bags of old bank statements at you, and threatening you with “EU Rubbish Regulation 13-D, sub-paragraph 11”. We have ways of making you sift.
Still, through the tears of despair, it’s good for a laugh.
You might be interested in the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive [pdf]. This will require all manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment to come and pick it up when you’re done with it.
It rather assumes that there will be “central collection centres” (i.e. rubbish tips) where you take the waste equipment; then a collection agency funded (somehow) by a levy on manufacturers will collect the equipment from the rubbish tip and take it to…a rubbish tip, presumably. Of course, this will require a considerable amount of administration.
What happens next, when the fly tippers collect a few bags of other business’ office waste to mix in with their client’s? That would seem to me to be the obvious response to the inspectors’ methods. Will they prosecute everyone who can’t protest their innocence convincingly? Seems like a good way to smear a rival business or personal enemy is to relieve them of their rubbish and dispose of it somewhere public. So easy! And the irony of it is, what really pollutes: rapidly biodegraded sheets of A4, or sofas, fridges, builder’ rubble and other industrial waste?
Andy Duncan wrote:
If only they [ie. the civil ‘servants’] would obey us, they cry, into their subsidised beer.
You mean they really drink the drink of the common man? I’d have thought they drink French wine and eat Brie, subsidised by the CAP. 😉
Andy,
In the agricultural world there is a small-scale precedent for government’s unfailing ability to screw up to everyone else’s cost. A decade ago the Environment Agency decided to set up a private company named Farm Films charged with collecting all silage plastics from farmers and shipping it off to recycling centres. This decision was centrally-taken at a time when farm incomes were under terrible and increasing pressure. It was wrong in principle since, under EU recycling regulation, it required the plastics to be classified as packaging materials when they were plainly food processing materials. It was also hopelessly “previous” since no production facility existed to receive the plastics and recycle them.
Even so, Farm Films exacted an industry levy on sales for a year. It forced farmers to clean their polyethylene films and make them available for collection but, of course, failed from there on.
Two years later the leading UK manucfaturer of polyethylene films finally opened a recycling plant in Scotland. It closed in short order, as had Farm Films by then.
Everything proceeds today down on the farm just as it always did, though environmental rumblings are still regularly heard. I don’t know what happened to the millions that were exacted in levies from farmers. But, hey, that’s taxation so don’t ask – and, anyway, in every other respect this affair was crime-free.
I can tell you think you are being ridiculous, but have you never seen the Sopranos? That’s about a gangster who runs a waste disposal business. The underlying causes of origanised crimes’ involvment in the New York garbage buisness seem to be quite different though.
I’m really surprised that it took so long for illegal disposal operations to hit the UK. I’m an environmental geologist myself, and I can tell you that “midnight dumping” of hazardous material, mostly by organized crime, has been going on in the US for at least 20 years.
Like the UK, this is primarily driven by the unbelivable red tape and expense of getting rid of hazardous material the US EPA way. Small businesses simply can’t afford it.
I will say that in the last few years they have tried to help somewhat by consulting with small businesses to help them get through all the paperwork crap and disposal requirements.
However, it would have been far better to try and set up the hazmat disposal requirements in such a way as to preclude the need for more bureaucrats to go out and explain what the other bureaucrats want you to do!
Della writes:
I can tell you think you are being ridiculous, but have you never seen the Sopranos? That’s about a gangster who runs a waste disposal business. The underlying causes of origanised crimes’ involvment in the New York garbage buisness seem to be quite different though.
Alas, I’m usually tucked up in bed by the time The Sopranos comes on, on Channel 4, here in the UK. So I’ve never seen it. Though I must say, I’m still getting over Fredo being killed, on that lake in Nevada, and Joe Pesci being battered into that hole in the ground, also in Nevada, so the Sopranos might be too scary for me, even if it was on earlier! 🙂
Though I think I can guess the point, having seen The Wolf take Marvin’s body to “Monster Joe’s”, in Pulp Fiction.
And there was the pig farm, in Snatch, and the pigs who almost got Hannibal Lecter. Yeuch. Why do we watch these things?
I suppose the moral is, never argue with a man who owns a car scrapyard, a pig farm, or a casino in Nevada. Or a waste disposal business! 🙂
Ted Schuerzinger writes:
You mean they really drink the drink of the common man? I’d have thought they drink French wine and eat Brie, subsidised by the CAP. 😉
🙂
Actually, Tony Soprano’s cover story is that he works in waste disposal – I don’t recall ever seeing a story line that he is actually involved in that business. Prostitution, gambling, drugs, loan sharking, extortion, construction scams, yes, those I recall. Waste disposal, not really.
Unless you mean running murdered associates through the saw at the butcher shop, or dumping them off of a boat, or burying them along the shore.
Look at this
Has anyone thought capitalising on this- Surely there is some enterprising sod could have a little fun by setting up a Freelance Enviromental Waste Inspector disposal business
(I’m leaving any puntuation for that up to yourselves 😉
Della – I stand corrected. I should probably cut back on the cheap booze when I watch the Sopranos.
Joe, I’m thinking the business could be diversified beyond that, to something that helps serve the trash removal needs of “tony martins” nationwide. “Luigi Mafia’s cleanup and waste disposal” – I like it.
Della’s right that he does have a garbage disposal business, and very violent it can get, but his reference to waste disposal is also his idea of a subtle joke about his human garbage disposal side. We have seen a few of these done now, and thedrill is that after the unfortunate offender has been whacked, Christopher and whoever start cutting the hands and head off (getting rid of ID). The rest is buried in the muck under a New Jersey bridge. I suppose they completely mince the head and hands.
Who’d have thought it? Next we’ll have an entire film genre of “rubbish disposal” gangster film stars, like Judge Dregs, Super Man-Size-Tissue, and the Incredible Bulk.
Actually, I think Robert DeNiro’s cameo as the waste disposal engineer in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” might be closer to the truth.
Andy,
You’re paying far too much for the hookers. Otherwise agreed.
Hi Steve,
You might want to check this story:
‘I know 10 others on the game to pay school fees. Why not?’
Apparently, the appalling UK state education ‘service’ (as in being fertilised up the back end, by a bull :), is so bad, that English Rose ladies are moving into the oldest game in the world, to avoid it:
I bust a gut in the IT contract market, trying to raise enough cash to keep my children out of the clutches of the state-school Guardianistas, and also forcibly subsidise the state-school places of two other Henley resident children, so their parents can afford nice new BMWs.
But that’s nothing compared to what these women have to do, to achieve the same ends. They should be admired for their pluck! 🙂
Malcolm
One of the joys – as yet unnoticed of the WEEE directive is the prospect of Dildo mountains. I tried to get an MEP to query the writer of that odious report on the subject. Though the MEP snorted into his double expresso in the Parliamentary coffee shop he refused point blank to throw the question up. But the problem still stands, will all used vibrators have to be sent back to Anne Summers – I think so.
On the point ofg the rubbish inspectors. Recently I had a friend staying with me in Brussels, I went back to the UK ansd he stayed a couple of extra days. Beinga decenmt cove he bt the bin out as he left. When I returned I was greeted by a Commune fine of about 50 quid, with it were a couple of photocopied tea-stained bank statements. They had of course been rifling through the fly tipping, on my own doorstep.
Question from a yank:
What does “fly-tipped” mean?
-Thank you in advance.
Bobby writes:
What does “fly-tipped” mean?
You Americans! You go and walk out on us, a measly 227 years ago, but still expect us to translate the Queen’s English, for you! 🙂
Fly-tipped, means “tipping on the fly”, no, not placing a ten-dollar bill on the wings of a house-fly, but usually finding a quiet spot, where no rubbish inspectors are lurking, and then quickly dumping a load of illicit, often hazardous, garbage there 🙂
Popular spots are river banks, canals, countryside walks, hedgerow ditches, remote car parks, other people’s garbage skips, and disused industrial buildings. Think of a black plastic bag full of “used” pornography magazines, wrapped in a delicate tissue of old underpants and Kentucky Fried Chicken bones, sitting in the middle of your front garden, one fine morning.
You’ve been fly-tipped! 🙂
This is how mad it’s got, in this insane lunatic asylum, once known as the freest country in the world.
Rubbish inspectors are now camping out, at popular fly-tipping sites (let’s say, the banks of the River Thames), and posting 24-hr vigiils, like SAS marksmen, to catch fly-tippers “at it”.
We have all gone completely stark-raving bonkers.
“where we investigate why their names and addresses have been found in illegally fly-tipped rubbish.”
Was anybody else irresistibly reminded of Alice’s Restaurant?
Or am I the only sad git old enough to remember it?
Kid?