By Richard Littlejohn
Last updated at 11:07 PM on 3rd January 2011
As we stumble uncertainly into the New Year, half the country is up to its armpits in rubbish. In some areas the bins haven't been emptied for four weeks.
Bone-idle, incompetent councils have been trotting out a catalogue of lame excuses for this disgraceful dereliction of duty over the holidays.
Some blame the freezing weather, even though there has been no significant snowfall in England for more than a week.
Dereliction of duty: Councils have wheeled out a series of lame excuses for not collecting rubbish says Richard Littlejohn, while dustmen who should have collected these bags in Birmingham are on strike
Others fall back on the usual catch-all 'elf'n'safety' rules for their failure to collect the rubbish. Here's what Weston-super-Mare had to say: 'The lorries might have hit parked cars and there are safety concerns about heavy lifting in icy conditions.'
Pathetic.
In Birmingham, the dustmen have decided to reprise the Winter of Discontent by staging a strike over pay. They should have all been sacked on the spot. With three million people on unemployment benefit, it shouldn't be too difficult to replace them.
Someone has worked out that in addition to the usual household detritus in Brum, there are 420,000 discarded turkey carcasses stinking the place out.
In Exeter, the bins haven't been emptied for a month. One resident told the Daily Mail that conditions were so disgusting and dangerous she had stopped sending her children out to play.
'Rats and seagulls have attacked the bags and there is rubbish strewn around the street,' said 45-year-old Caroline Lee. 'It is an absolute disgrace, like living in a Third World country.'
Powerless: Eric Pickles' pledge to reinstate weekly collections has been ignored by many councils
The story is the same elsewhere, from Cheshire to Essex. Yet all the local government minister Bob Neill can say is: 'It is disappointing that some councils haven't shown more initiative.'
No, it's way beyond disappointing, old son. It's an outrage, a shameful breach of contract with the paying public.
This column has made a decent living over the past few years documenting the dire state of refuse collection in Britain. Complaints from readers about sadistic recycling regimes and 'alternate weekly collections' clutter up my inbox.
In the name of saving the polar bears, most councils have halved collections and introduced a vindictive range of punishments for residents who leave their dustbin lid open half an inch or put the 'wrong' kind of rubbish in their bin.
When the Tories came into office, communities minister Eric Pickles promised to force councils to reinstate weekly rounds and stop them persecuting householders for minor breaches of the increasingly perverse and complicated recycling rules. But the Town Halls simply ignored him.
Within days of his announcement, still more local authorities decided that in future they would only empty the bins every two weeks.
Pickles has proved powerless to do anything to make them comply. So when he declares, as he did this week, that the war on motorists is over, why should we believe him?
He says parking charges and fines should be slashed dramatically to help revive town centres. There's not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. Under Labour, parking charges increased tenfold. As for fines, the only way is up.
Anyway, the transport secretary Philip Hammond has already declared the war on motorists more than at least three times since May — to no apparent effect.
Announcing policy is all fine and dandy. But getting the Guardianistas who infest Britain's Town Halls to fall into line is well nigh impossible.
Local government is an organised conspiracy against the paying public. So-called 'services' are run entirely for the convenience of those who are employed to provide them.
Most of the money we hand over in taxes goes to paying wages and keeping worthless bureaucrats in the style to which they have become accustomed.
Scandalous: Despite their being no collections in Exeter, Epping and Birmingham for a month it seems unlikely that the councils will offer any refunds on council tax
Three-quarters of the cash raised by parking charges goes to meeting the cost of enforcement — just as billions collected in speeding fines were used for the creation of job-heavy 'safety camera partnerships'.
Councils simply pocket the money and will find any and every excuse for not doing the job for which they are paid handsomely.
Just as with the hapless clowns responsible for keeping the trains, roads and airports running, the Town Hall jobsworths must have known that there was a fair bet cold weather was on the way. It's called winter.
They should have been prepared, not thrown their hands up in horror and knocked off for an extended Christmas break at the sight of the first snowflake.
They have no absolutely no justification for refusing to empty the dustbins. You can bet they won't be offering a refund on your council tax.
It is nothing short of scandalous that in 2011, some towns and cities in Britain haven't had their refuse collected for a whole month.
What do you imagine the good people of Exeter, Epping and Birmingham think of the New Year so far?
Rubbish.
Tesco is going in to the pawnshop business, offering hard cash for unwanted gold and jewellery. You'll soon be able to swap your granny's old engagement ring for a trolley full of goodies.
Daytime TV is packed with adverts from spiv firms offering to buy gold at knock-down prices, so it was probably only a matter of time before Britain's biggest supermarket chain got in on the act.
I first noticed this phenomenon when I was in the United States a few months ago. In a suburban shopping mall, people were queueing fifteen deep to have their necklaces and bracelets appraised by a trio of men with bad tattoos, who had set up a couple of trestle tables in front of the food court.
They seemed to be the only traders in the place doing any business. Armed with their fistful of dollars, these newly-enriched punters then waddled over to the food court to spend the money they had received for their family heirlooms on a family-sized bucket of fried chicken.
I know these are hard times, but I wonder how many people in Britain are so desperate that they would flog their wedding ring to Tesco for a fraction of its real worth.
It's probably just as well this scheme wasn't around when Gordon Brown was in the Treasury. You may remember this financial genius flogging off a large chunk of Britain's gold reserves for $270 an ounce, a decision which cost us billions.
Yesterday, the price of an ounce of gold was $1,600 and is predicted to go much, much higher.
If Gordon had known he could knock out gold at Tesco, he'd have been queueing at the check-out with a trolley full of ingots and spending the money on scratchcards.
He'd have had the gold fillings from our teeth if he'd thought he could have got away with it.
Every little helps.
Where is Bernie? Left a bit, up, up...
On Friday, I wondered what became of Bernie the Bolt, from the Seventies game show The Golden Shot. There have since been a number of reports of his whereabouts.
A couple of readers, John Smailes and Doreen Gow, wrote to say that Bernie was last heard of selling dodgy timeshares on the Algarve back in the Nineties.
Rod Armstong, however, said he'd been told Bernie ran a carpet shop on the South Coast.
Long serving: John Barker was one of three men who played Bernie the Bolt during the 1970s gameshow
Ann Kemp recalls living near Bernie in Lutterworth, Leicestershire. All very confusing, but I think I've got to the bottom of it. Almost.
There were three Bernie the Bolts: John Baker, Alan Bailey and Derek Young.
John Baker was the longest-serving. His friend Eric Harris — who worked with him at ATV, latterly Central TV — tells me that John died in June last year, a fact confirmed by an obituary in the Birmingham Post.
But I also heard from Sally Bell, who claims Bernie's real name is Barry Proud and he is alive and well and running a small hotel in France.
There is no record, though, of anyone called Barry Proud playing Bernie. Is Sally mistaken?
Or is there really someone out there pretending to be Bernie the Bolt?
And why?
Sad to hear of the death of that fine actor Pete Postlethwaite. Although he enjoyed success in Hollywood, I've always thought his finest role was in Brassed Off, the Thatcher-era drama about a colliery band, which was a far superior movie to the over-hyped, over-praised The Full Monty, which trod a similar path a year later.
Plan: Andrew Lansley hopes to hand out 50 vouchers to poorer families to help tackle obesity
The Government is in thrall to the trendy 'nudge' theory of politics. The idea is that if you give people a helping hand in the right direction you can influence their future behaviour.
With this in mind health secretary Andrew Lansley is endorsing a plan to hand out 50 vouchers to poorer families in an attempt to tackle obesity.
These can then be redeemed at supermarkets for 'healthy' goods, including wholegrain rice, green beans and alcohol-free lager.
Why would the Government be encouraging anyone to drink disgusting alcohol-free lager? I doubt they'll persuade many winos to swap their Special Brew for a can of dishwasher-weak Kaliber.
The good news is that this project is not costing taxpayers a penny; it is being sponsored by the likes of Asda and Nestle, who will reap the benefits in increased sales.
But once the vouchers run out, what's to stop people reverting to pie and chips and real lager?
There are also plans to rebrand fruit and vegetables as 'sports candy' to entice children to eat more healthily.
Sounds like someone has been overdoing the alcohol-free lager.
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