New Labour: Garbage in garbage out

Today's Daily Mail on their front page again, proclaim what can only be interpretted as New Labour's fanatical plans, kind of disguised as that of 'local councils' to bestow another degrading tax on the population, in this case for rubbish via installed snooping devices in their bins and weighing the contents so a suitable punishment can be dealt out by degenerate council workers pawing over your 'contribution to society'.

Of course, it's not just the additional taxation of rubbish, or the measuring of rubbish which is so appalling, it is the association of rubbish output with other taxation (in this case your council tax bill) which is absolutely and fundementally wrong.

It also seems to be that chips installed in bins for the weighing of rubbish would be a pre-cursor to reading the contents of rubbish where every item has an RFID chip embedded into it, opening the door further for the state to inflict a whole new menu of radical political punishments just for living.

The solution is to tamper with, or destroy the device which according to the Daily Mail is exactly what is happening in Bournemouth en masse (three cheers for Bournemouth then), and/or just tip your rubbish elsewhere.

But there are other questions here. This is effectively being blamed on local councils as some sort of 'grass roots', self-inflicted pious flagellation to appease EU rubbish targets (question: why are local councils trying to appease distinctly non-local targets ?), but this is not the whole story. Ben Bradshaw seems to broadly be taking the rap for this, which according to the Daily Mail 'will require new laws that ministers are preparing' . Twice now in the Mail, Bradshaw has been injected into these reports almost as a notional custodian of this scheme, yet he is only the junior under-secretary for the 'Local Environment, Marine and Animal Welfare'.

I don't know who actually came up with the idea (which seems to be the intention - I doubt it is the councils' alone), but Secretary of State for the Environment and Bradshaw's boss is David Miliband, the former head of Blair's Downing Street policy unit, and 'the elder son of Marion Kozak and the late Marxist theoretician Ralph Miliband "¹, Ralph being a well-known figure on the left.

Perhaps Miliband, who according to the Guardian, 'in private, if pressed, will call himself a socialist', is going to throw his hat into the ring to make a leadership bid and while is personally titillated with the plans, doesn't want to be publicly associated with it, so maybe the idea is to sell this gigantic transformation and degrading exploitation entirely as a kind of 'local council issue', which mysteriously many councils are doing simultaneously we are asked to believe, and with Ben Bradshaw kind of glued on top.

In August, it was reported that Miliband (merely) said he is "interested in variable waste charging where the polluter is made to pay", yet by then the devices had already been installed secretly in thousands, possibly millions of bins around the country against the consent and wishes of people already paying for their rubbish disposal.

Also that month, when the story first broke in the Daily Mail under the utterly misleading and worthless caption of "Germans plant bugs in our wheelie bins", it was reported that the "the majority of bins have been altered without the knowledge of their owners. In many cases, councils which ordered the installation of the devices did not even debate the proposals publicly".

While the official reasons for the bugs were to "improve efficiency and settle disputes between neighbours over wheelie-bin ownership" and "Kennet Council chairman Gerry Knunkler said neither he nor council tax payers had been told about the true purpose of the bugs. 'I was assured these things were simply to ensure bins could be returned to the right addresses if they got mixed up or drunks rolled them off,' he said."

So who exactly is telling all these councils to put the bugs in secretly and lie about their purpose if they are discovered?

This has all the hallmarks of another particularly unpleasant New Labour plot in the making, the like of which characterised the lead up to the Iraq war; where the policy is known to be wrong yet has already been decided on and has to be arranged in secret with zero public debate about what it actually means.

When it comes to accepting authorship of tyranny and misery, this tiresome flavour of New Labour deceit has very much been Gordon Brown's approach over the years as well; distance yourself from ruinous policies you yourself are responisible for and let Blair take the heat, but it's also been David's style when difficulties arise; "when crises have occurred, as they regularly do in the education department, he has avoided damage: during much of the controversy over A-level results, for example, he was unavailable for comment, reportedly on a "fact-finding" mission in Scotland"

I couldn't find any mention of the plan to spy on, and tyrannize, the garbage of the country and lock people into their own trash output by comparing it to their council tax bill even on Miliband's own website, indeed his current job isn't even mentioned in his biography.

Nor could I find any reference to the scheme on his (allegedly ²) £40,000 government blog, where a search for 'bin', 'wheelie bin' or 'rubbish' returns no results. A search for 'tax' brings up 5 results which do not mention the scheme at all, which seems strange when you consider that such a sweeping and dramatic intention as this which has already been gradually implemented secretly over quite a period of time and will require new laws, would be something that the Secretary of State for the Environment would be very much talking about, as well as taking ultimate responsibility for.

Even more curious is that the plan is fully in step with Miliband's other ideas that he has vocally promoted himself, such as a kind of ID card for energy consumption, where the helpless state-worshipping proles can be penalized and punished but permitted to trade CO2 tokens with each other, so it remains a troubling mystery why Miliband refuses to be associated with this scheme which will similarly remove just another little piece of your humanity.

Why not email Miliband and ensure that he takes adequate credit by being as tied into this as his department intends for you to be tied into your rubbish by all means and tell him what you think of this latest plot.

David Miliband New Labour wheelie bin rubbish slavery