Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Mail Day, part 1: Bin there, done that

Monkey has already fainted, I'm afraid. I don't know if it was the Mail itself or the fact there was a non-white person in Dead White Woman Corner.

Then again, it could be fainting out of boredom from the sheer predictability of the front page. Ooh, bin taxes! Ooh, we're going to be fined if we put cat shit in the recycling! Ooh, we can't possibly be expected to sort our rubbish out! Ooh, we want to stick every single fucking thing in landfill, then concrete it over, then blow it up, then put the rubble into another landfill, then concrete that over, then bash a cow's brains out on the concrete, then blow that up, then put the rubble into another landfill! What's wrong with that?

I wrote about this in "Oh fucking grow up" only a few days ago. That was about Big Brother Watch, a wanktank invented by some Taxpayers Alliance bod or other, saying that spy chips in our sinister wheelie bins were there to make us pay more taxes. Except that wasn't it. The idea was to incentivise people who recycled more. Except you wouldn't have thought that from reading the earlier part of the story. Clearly buoyed by the response to that article, the Mail have decided to follow up with another bin scare. WE'LL ALL HAVE TO GET SLOP BUCKETS, ACCORDING TO HILARY BENN! Aaargh!

One thing you don't always get with the online Mail is the wonder of its cartoons. So here's a treat I'd like to share with you:

Heh. Do you see? They got put into Hell for leaving the wrong rubbish out! Isn't it, though? Tremendous fare. Everything becomes a caricature in these stories. Recycling becomes TAX. Food waste bins become SLOP BUCKETS. Everything is a bit like a cartoon to begin with, so I doubt you really even need them.

Slop buckets are, really, what you poo into if you're in prison. Not really the kind of thing which you use to put potato peelings and teabags in, if you don't happen to have a compost heap. I have one in my house. This isn't new. Maybe it hasn't come to the Mail heartland yet, but I'm here to tell you those stories of evil maggots and stinking bins and all that are a crock of shit. If you leave it open, yes, beasties will crawl into it. If you don't, they have a pretty tough time chewing through the plastic.

It's really not a big deal. I suppose though, as with all these things, it's a question of fear. Fear! Fear about being taxed for not having maggots in your kitchen! Fear! Fear about being forced to separate your rubbish, or the Bin Gestapo will come around! Fear that they'll tax you! Fear! Fear! Fear!

Of course, our friends the Taxpayers Alliance are quoted, as ever as if they're a legitimate group that represents taxpayers as opposed to a cluster of right-wing rentagobs who'll happily fill in any anti-Labour story. And the Tories too, who say it should be 'stick more than carrot', but who don't object to the idea of separating rubbish, which is an important point to make, nor with so-called 'slop buckets' either, it's not irrelevant to point out. They just say it shouldn't be fines, it should be 'rewards for recycling'. Though essentially that boils down to the same thing, and it was only ever going to be persistent offenders, according to the story, who would be penalised anyway, people who'd deliberately ignored repeated advice. Defra gets a look-in a couple of paragraphs from the end to mutter something or other, but it's really a token gesture.

So far, so predictable, I'm afraid. I don't know what I was hoping for, or if I was really expecting any different, but I haven't found that yet. The search goes on.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related posts:

1. Mail Day, part 9: Here’s the bit I liked most
2. Mail Day, part 10: And…?
3. Mail Day, part 13: The end
4. Mail Day, part 3: Columnists
5. Mail Day, part 8: Can’t be fucked to Google it