Empty the bins, damn you!

The world has officially gone mad - or at least this country has.

A father-of-three has been fined £225 because his wheelie bin was overflowing - not rubbish strewn on the floor but overflowing.

Council officials took pictures and two turned up on his doorstep wearing stab vests, read Gareth Corkhill his rights and then issued him with an on-the-spot fine of £110.

Taken to court, he was ordered in absentia to pay the fine plus hit with costs of £100 and a £15 surcharge.

Mr Corkhill said: "I could not believe I had been fined for putting rubbish in a bin. I tell my kids not to throw rubbish away and always use a bin."

Whitehaven magistrates convicted Mr Corkhill in his absence of overfilling a receptacle used for waste.

In a statement the council said: "Copeland Borough Council will continue to crack down on the problem of overflowing bins, which cause problems for local residents and in the battle to reduce waste."

Here's a radical solution: why don't they crack down on overflowing bins by emptying them weekly instead of fortnightly?

And why does everyone have to pay a £15 surcharge? Well, I say everyone - if you are sent to prison you don't have to pay it. The surcharge is supposed to go into a fund to help victims of crime - muggings and the like. But if you are convicted of, for example, "overfilling a receptacle used for waste" why should you have to pay towards a mugger's victim when the mugger himself doesn't have to pay if he is, rightly, sent to prison.

In the name of God, go!

Sir Ian Blair's position as head of the Metropolitan Police Force is now completely untenable.

As I have said before, he cannot remain as Britain's most senior policeman. Yesterday his force was found guilty of 19 "catastrophic" failures over the shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes. The force was fined £175,000.

PM Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith have both given Blair their backing - for now. The mayor Ken Livingstone has also said, "The idea that people farther up the food chain somehow bear... responsibility is nonsense."

It is not nonsense at all. The ultimate responsibility for any organisation always always rests with the head. If a building falls down, the architect is responsible not the brickie who worked on the site.

Why is it that this government and its acolytes can never take responsibility? Why is it always time to draw a line and move on?

The sooner Ian Blair is removed from his post and replaced with a policeman who sees his job as nicking villains and not being obsessed with diversity the better.

The surveillance society...

An interesting new book has landed on my desk. The Road to Southend Pier details Ross Clark's struggle against the surveillance society.

Britain’s Information Commissioner said that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society so Ross Clark decided to find out if that was true.

These are some of the facts uncovered by Mr Clark:

• There are 4·2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, one for every 14 people
• In 2004 Melbourne dismantled its 23 cameras because they did not justify the A$500,000 they cost annually
• Britons are the third most spied on people on earth; only China and Malaysia spy more on their citizenry
• In 1998 Newham introduced a facial recognition software. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on sunny days and had a tendency to confuse young people and women and had a tendency to recognise black people
• Despite the claim that DNA is foolproof – it isn’t. If everyone in Britain (60 million people) was on the database the chances of a mistake being made by misidentifying someone’s DNA at a crime scene is actually one in 16
• In 2007 John Reid admitted that the Prevention of Terrorism Act had been drafted in such a way that people on control orders i.e. terrorists could not have their fingerprints and DNA taken
• In 2007 the Home Office admitted that despite the plethora of CCTV, DNA databases, tagging and police surveillance it had “lost” 322 registered sex offenders
• In 2005 2,000 people randomly volunteered to be surveyed for the biometric ID card. It took an average of seven minutes and 56 seconds to record the information. To cover the entire country would take 905 man years
• Between April and June 2007 the six largest European airlines lost 1·12 million pieces of luggage – this at a time when passengers and their baggage are supposed to be monitored every step of their journey
  
  
  
  

More rubbish ideas

The government has decided in its infinite dumbness to halve rubbish collections in much of the country.

Unsurprisingly, people have started arranging their own rubbish removals. Until today, I was unaware of the existence of environmental crime officers. But apparently, they exist.

The Environment Agency is setting up a special intelligence unit to tackle the illegal rubbish disposal gangs.

Graham Holdsworth, an environmental crime officer with the agency, said: "This is becoming a key issue. We are experiencing increasing problems and we need more people on the scene. There is a huge difference between local sporadic fly-tipping, which is directly related to the rubbish collection, and organised environmental crime which is similar to drugs trafficking."

Similar to drugs trafficking? No, it isn't. You simply cannot compare someone dumping rubbish illegally to a person who brings illegal drugs into the country.

Once again, a massive overreaction by some buffoon who works for the state.

You can wipe out these illegal dumpers with one easy move (unlike drug trafficking): reinstate weekly rubbish collections.

Packs that are not Hip

From 1 June 2007 it will be illegal to sell a house/flat without a Home Information Pack.

The pack will include a certificate which rates a property’s energy efficiency. Packs will also contain details of the lease, local searches and a list of items included in the sale.

Packs will cost more than £400 but if you don't have one, you can be fined £200. Failure to produce a pack, however, will not be a criminal offence.

The packs are widely opposed by members of the property industry, including the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the National Association of Estate Agents. Last week, it emerged that only 1,000 people have trained as inspectors, out of the Government’s target of 7,400.

Nick Salmon, the commercial director of Harrison Murray estate agents and founder of campaign group Splinta – Seller’s Pack Law Is Not The Answer – said that many homeowners will "do the maths" and risk the fine. "There is a great deal of anger among homeowners who do not see the point of these packs and consider them yet another stealth tax," he said. "Sellers have nothing but contempt for the new law and many will go ahead without HIPs, especially as a potential fine is less than the cost of the pack."

Once again, this Government has proved itself to be incompetent and inept.

(With Roya Nikkhah)

It's just not fine

Once again the Government goes after the motorist. From Monday 2 April anyone who is fined in court will have to pay a £15 surcharge on top of their fine to help victims of domestic violence.

Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland said: "We are hitting criminals in the pocket to make sure that crime doesn't pay."

Fine you think until you learn that real criminals - rapists, murderers and the like - won't have to pay and that money collected won't actually go the victims of domestic violence. Oh no, it will go towards expanding the number of independent domestic violence advisers on the public payroll.

So that's good - yet more people dependent on the state for a living.

Vote Labour.