The Garbage Gestapo

Is rubbish the battleground where Winston Churchill's prophecy of a socialist Gestapo in Britain is becoming reality? On the one hand it seems such a trivial subject and yet, on the other, it is, after all, just about the only state run (you know what I mean) service that all citizens really need to use.

Churchill 1945:

Look how even to-day they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities.

2007:

The Bin Police will have powers to slap £100 on-the-spot fines on householders who put out rubbish too early or leave their bin lids open.

Churchill 1945:

A Free Parliament - look at that - a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire. Have we not heard Mr. Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterwards to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations?

2007:

David Miliband's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has already laid the groundwork for council rubbish collection to be handed to non-elected quangos which are bound to seek fortnightly collections as this would cut costs.

Yesterday it was revealed that Defra gave councils the go-ahead to set up their own wheelie-bin police in "guidance on the use of fixed-penalty notices for environmental enforcement" smuggled out last month.

As has become usual with key Whitehall moves in the growing controversy over rubbish collections, no public announcement was made.

Churchill 1945:

They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

2007:

The Bin Police will wear uniforms and operate in the same way as traffic wardens - but there are no rules to prevent councils hiring illtrained and unsuitable individuals for the job.

The Defra guidelines say that bin wardens must be trained in the law and how to deal with uncooperative or violent householders. But a training course set up by the department itself lasts no more than four days.

Mr Miliband's guidelines set out that a council can ask police community support officers to do the job "or it could authorise contracted external staff to undertake the work on its behalf".

Screw the public health horror prior to municipal waste collection. What did those Victorians know about anything anyway? Rats, miasmas, cholera, just the whole stinking mess; nevermind about any of that. There can be only one way to proceed and whoever stands in the way is an enemy of the people and must be treated as such.

What's so daft is that there can't really be anyone remotely against sensible recycling or even excessive packaging. Yet the first and only solution which occurs to the totalitarian mind is to go in with the jackboot. That'll win over the Hearts and minds of a people who don't like being told what to do.

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Whose finger on the trigger?

That's the front page of the Daily Mirror from polling day in the 1951 General Election.

The dominating issue in the run up wasn't the Korean war which was still in full flow; nor re-armament of our troops in Europe and Hugh Gaitskill's budget allowing it which saw Nye Bevan resign as Health Secretary after charges for dentistry and prescriptions were brought in to help offset the cost.

No, it was a dispute with Iran. Plus ca change and all that. (In that case mind, 56 years later, Iran would at least seem to be in the right.)

Despite Bevin's successor at the FO, Herbert Morrison, strutting around like Palmerston, Attlee's cool approach to dealing with the crisis has often been favourably compared to the somewhat different path taken by Eden when trouble flared over British interests in the Middle East again some five years later. It was this coolness versus the, it was claimed, warmongering attitude of Churchill that the headline alludes to.

As it happened, with some cunning diplomacy in Washington and some skullduggery in Tehran, "new" Prime Minister Winston Churchill actually emerged from the dispute triumphant some years later. I don't know though - were the seeds of the 1979 Islamic Revolution sown when M-16 and the CIA engineered the regime's downfall in 1953?

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