As The Telegraph notes today, councils have decided to justify higher council tax charges by reducing rubbish collection, which is about the only useful service they provide for the money, since everything else isn't under their control. Woking is no different. As a consequence, our house is occasionally surrounded by bags of rotting garbage because the council has decided that recycling the odd bit of cardboard (which we did anyway) is more important than preventing outbreaks of bubonic plague around Knaphill.
I'm quite unable to determine what it is that we pay our enormous council tax bill for. In the old days, the council came around and took away rubbish every week, while I put newspapers and cardboard in my car and took them round the corner to the recycling centre once every couple of weeks. Now, the council takes away the cardboard and leaves me to pile stinking garbage in the back of my car and take it round to the tip myself, effectively outsourcing half of its garbage collection council taxpayers. So many people were doing this at the tip today that there was a queue to get in! It's the new suburban Saturday morning.
Perhaps the council is assuming that middle class residents, having a basic understanding of public health and a passing knowledge of history, will continue to do their own rubbish disposal whereas in other parts of the district the Black Death will return to decimate the population, thus solving the problem of unemployment for a couple of generations as it did in the 14th century -- and that's on top of the inevitable increase in our environs following the closure of one of the major accident and emergency departments in Surrey (at the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford). I imagine a council sub-committee is working on new, politically correct, sumptuary laws even as I write. These were required because of the boom in the effective minimum wage (a natural consequence of the death of a third of the population) to stop the masses from spending too much of their money on luxuries (eg, sugar, salt, crisps, 4x4s). Surely, though, today we will simply replace the missing millions of workers with eastern Europeans, so the council's plan may not be a smart as the microchips they've put in our bins.
The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
[posted with ecto]
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2 comments:
you are in the suburbs and you don't have a compost heap? tut.
Not only do I have a compost heap, it's enormous. I have more compost than I know what to do with. I shall post a picture to prove it. Shortly. When it's warm enough to go outside again.
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