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“They want to fine me £300 for sandwich wrappers. The world’s gone crazy. We got a letter from the council’s environmental waste department, like everybody else, about six months ago asking us to declare the waste we produce.
“I wrote back to them saying we don’t have any. We didn’t get anything back and so I though nothing of it, until an officer walked into the office out of the blue for an inspection. There was no warning, he just bounded in and demanded to inspect our waste.
“He accused us of lying and said there are dire consequences for trying to avoid having a proper licence.”
Mr Hughes claimed the official was simply looking for reasons to charge him, rather than conceding that he was acting within the law.
He said: “I remembered that my wife had made me cheese sandwiches that day so I produced the cling film and said, ‘the only waste here comes from my sarnie wrappers’.
“But he jumped on that saying, ‘Well that’s waste!’ He also asked if we drank tea and when I said ‘yes’ he told me that tea bags were also classed as waste.
“It was laughable really, I thought he was joking. We take the wrappers and bags back home with us at night.
“But he said we should pay for a licence and save them up for a week and then call them for collection. I showed him the door and he said we’d be getting a £300 fine.”
It’s not just some jumped up little snot nose having a laugh. There’s a reason why the laws are the way they are and it doesn’t come from Westminster.
No, all environmental laws now come from Brussels. And thus this law must have come from Brussels. And indeed it has done…that industrial waste (yes, even sandwich wrappers) cannot be dealt with in the same manner as domestic waste is a direct result of the directives and regulations coming out of Europe.
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Once again, Bob Spink gets an interesting answer to well crafted question in the Commons.
It does grate that we’ve got a law that says it’s OK to put EU on your car’s number plates but it’s illegal to put GB on the same ones, don’t it?
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Something else we can note about the European Arrest Warrant.
The increase is largely down to the volume of European arrest warrants (EAWs), many of them issued by Poland.
EAWs, requiring the arrest and extradition of suspects from one EU country to another, are being used by Poland for a “large volume of trivial extradition requests”, according to Detective Sergeant Gary Flood of Scotland Yard’s extradition unit.
He estimated that 40% of all extradition cases dealt with by the Metropolitan police originated in Poland, adding that many of the offences were so minor they would lead to either a caution or no investigation at all in England and Wales.
In one case, according to Flood, a carpenter who fitted wardrobe doors and then removed them when the client refused to pay him, was subject to an extradition request by Poland so that they could try him for theft. In another case, the Polish authorities requested the extradition of a suspect for theft of a dessert. “The European arrest warrant contained a list of the ingredients,” Flood said.
The problem is that there’s no one who is (in the words of my colleague here, Clive Page) responsible for common sense. There are things which could, if we really tried, if we were prepared to be entirely nuts about prosecuting every piece of trivia, which could be court cases.
But we do (and had even more in the past) a system which did exactly that. Magistrates could look at a case in front of them and, while not actually saying as such, simply reject it as being trivial.
But what this EAW does is ties us in with legal systems that don’t have that.
Aren’t we lucky, eh?
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On the subject of Imperial and metric measurements.
Our official classes hate our ancient, polished-in-use, human measures precisely because they are ours and because they are British.
Like the Common Law, jury trial and constitutional monarchy, we fashioned them here during a thousand years of freedom and independence.
And they have all got to go because that freedom and independence are rapidly coming to an end. We live in the afterglow of our dying liberty. From now on it’s top-down, do-as-you’re-told standardised, globalised, bland, inhuman and ugly, like it or not.
Those who think this is just a quirky side issue are mistaken. Once the State has the power to force its way into private transactions between individuals, you are no longer free.
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Presented without comment.
In 1964 Tommy Cooper used the same technique, just as successfully, on the Queen, in the line-up after the Royal Variety Show. “I say, Your Majesty - may I ask you a personal question?”
“As personal as I’ll allow,” the Queen replied.
“Do you like football?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, could I have your tickets for the Cup Final?”
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Bob Spink has won the Westminster dog of the year contest with his two greyhounds, Fozzy Bear and Jessie.
Mr Spink, who defected to UKIP from the Conservatives earlier this year, beat off competition from 11 other entries
A dog breeder, Mr Spink took on the retired greyhounds last Christmas and said he hoped his good experience would encourage more people to do the same.
“I am delighted we scored a victory for greyhounds as a breed,” he said.
The contest, run by canine welfare organisation the Kennel Club, is open to MPs, peers and political journalists.
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I’ve got a piece over at The Guardian today, picking up from a question that Bob Spink asked in the Commons.
Just how much does recycling cost us, is it in fact a sensible thing to do?
I’m wondering whether I will, in the comments, get any actual answers to the questions I ask. It would be fun if I did I think…..
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There’s a certain annoyance, it has to be said, in the way that letters to the editor get edited. Take this one:
Editor
Wanstead & Woodford Guardian
Guardian House
480 – 500 Larkshall Road
Highams Park
London E4 9BD
Dear Dominic Yeatman
An all party committee consisting of leading Labour and Conservative MPs, a former Archbishop of Canterbury and a Moslem peer has called for a cap on immigration. They suggest a policy of “balanced” immigration only allowing in the same number of people as those who emigrate.
The population of this country is now over 60 million and under this government’s open door policy is set to rise to over 78 million by 2050. Under these new proposals it would “only” increase to 65 million.
England is now the most densely populated country in Europe, apart from Malta, with most of the overcrowding in London and the South East according to government figures.
This inflow of people as a result of this government’s policy of uncontrolled mass immigration has not been accompanied by a similar increase in infrastructure and services to cope with the additional demand on schools, the NHS, public transport, water, and power supplies. As a result, services are under severe strain and the situation will only get worse as there is no more money in the kitty
This policy of balanced immigration is exactly as UKIP have advocated for a long time as we have always said it is a question of numbers of people on a crowded island. This latest conversion by policy makers is of course too little too late
Nick Jones
Redbridge & Waltham Forest
UK Independence Party
Yes, they published it, but they took that last paragraph out altogether. Which rather diminishes the point of the letter, that we’ve eben saying this all along.
Sigh.
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I think this is absolutely fascinating.
The EU rule book decrees that Mandelson, who left his job as Trade Commissioner last week before completing his five-year term, will be eligible for about £78,000 a year for each of the next three years in ‘transitional payments’. A total of £234,000 will be paid in instalments of £6,500 a month until the end of 2011. It will be subject to preferential tax rates devised for EU officials.
So he’ll be paid by the European Union for the next three years, eh? While he’s in the Cabinet? I thought there were very strict rules about what outside interests a Minister could have. For example, they don’t get paid if they write for a newspaper, they can’t publish a book and get royalties.
There’s more here and here.
The cash cushion will be taxed at only 26 per cent under special ‘community rates’ open to EU officials. A tax expert said yesterday that a similar payment in the UK would be subject to tax at the higher rate of 40 per cent.
And he pays tax at a lower rate than everyone else. Rather dangerous, that, don’t you think? That the political rulers don’t have to pay the taxes they set for everyone else?
But more than that, here’s the Ministerial Code. That’s what the extract at the top is from.
Here’s the way I read it. Ministers should not have such outside financial interests. However, sometimes these are indeed allowed (one can imagine someone with a family firm for example). When they are allowed they must be declared. And if they are declared then that Minister must abstain from dealing with matters concerning that interest, up to and including the point that certain documents should be withheld from them.
So if all that is followed, Mandelson must a) declare his interest in continuing to receive money from the EU and b) not deal with EU matters, to the point of not even seeing the documents.
Which, given that the EU provides some 80% of our legislation is really quite a lot that he won’t be able to do as the new Business Secretary.
Are we all sure that this is a good idea?
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The UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage attacked the move as “an outrage”. He said: “The sooner Britain gets back control of immigration policy, the better.”
But have a look at what this is all about.
MORE than 50 million African workers are to be invited to Europe in a far-reaching secretive migration deal, the Daily Express can reveal today.
Do go and read the rest.
