Political Penguin

It was announced today that my wonderful Tory run local authority, Walsall MBC had spent

I’m a keen gardener. I’m proud of my humble little garden and we try to live a fairly ‘green’ lifestyle in our house. Apart from all the recycling and re-using of items we also compost as much as we can.

I have one of the Dalek style composters in the corner that I managed to pick up in the days when Walsall Council actually used to give them away for free. It suits the size of our garden and the household waste we produce which is why I’m completely envious of this.

This is Mrs Penguin’s father’s compost heap and it’s not far off the size our our entire garden. It’s got pumpkins growing on it and everything. Must buy a house with a bigger garden. With a compost heap that size and the amount of heat it throws off I could run the central heating through it.

I’ve been away for the last fortnight on holiday. Although not guaranteed, it was highly likely that we would be out of net connectivity at least for part or the whole time. This in the end turned out to be the whole fortnight so although I haven’t had oodles of time to pen thoughtful pieces for publication, I did have the odd half hour here or there to sit down with the knackered old laptop and write a few articles.

These articles have now been published in roughly the chronological order that they were written in and as noted in each article, I have changed the timestamp to reflect when it was written. As the pieces are not of a particularly time related importance I’m sure no one will have a problem with that and I’m being completely honest about the fact and not in anyway trying to alter timestamps to pretend that I’ve got a scoop ten minutes before Sky or the Beeb as I’m sure no political blogger would ever stoop so low as to do that.

Some of the articles relate to things I’d meant to write about before I left but didn’t get round to and given that I’ve had no net access and will probably be too lazy when I get back, there won’t be any hyperlinks to various references like usual. This has been very interesting given that I would normally be quite fastidious about references but for these articles from the last two weeks.

I’m sure all parents wish that their offspring become cleverer than themselves that they do more and learn more than we do. However and although I wish this for Little Penguin I didn’t expect that it would come after only 18 months of him being around.

Here was the plan. I don’t speak German but would like to learn so as we are bringing up Little Penguin bilingually the theory was that I would learn with him.

That was the theory but the little sod’s capacity for picking up words is unbelievable and far outstrips my own. Not only is he learning the English for things but also the German and he now knows what a whole raft of things are in German that I don’t. I’m rather miffed and feeling distinctly humbled.

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What do we British have about roundabouts? I’m not saying they’re good or bad but we seem to have a lot of them in Britain. There’s hardly any around here, I don’t know if that’s typical of Germany as a whole but they seem to very much favour the junction which you probably notice mostly when you’re on the Autobahn.

I’m trying to remember a single junction off a motorway in Britain that isn’t a roundabout and I’m sure there must be some but I’ve never come across them. Haven’t seen a single roundabout here off the autobahn but presumably there must be some here too.

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It’s now the seventh day of not being hooked up to the Internet. Half way through the holiday and it’s a strange cultural change from living both ones primarily professional life and to some extent social life through electronic communication. When we’d arrived we’d hoped to have a connection set up but it appears that it’s either tradition or the law in Germany that when you sign contracts you are given a fortnights cooling off period to change your mind meaning that any connection would be setup the day after we have returned home which isn’t much use.

It’s strange but the first couple of days were the worst, a bit like going cold turkey I craved my net connection. Now sitting outside with the laptop penning a few posts with distinctly no connection to the Internet, it all feels that little bit more relaxed. I’m not a vexed about not being online and apart from not being able to keep up with news back home that’s about it. It is after all August so I’m sure nothing of any importance will have happened in British politics in the fortnight I’m away and it’s good to get a break from it anyway.

It is interesting to come to realise how not dependent on technology we are. I know people who live their lives through the net and I do a little too but I’m of an age that remembers life before it. It’s going to be very interesting to see how my son grows up in an increasingly online society deals with it. That reminds me, was going to pen a post on equality and modern communication methods ages ago and never got round to it. Might just remember to do it in the next week I’m here or then again I might not.

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I like doing these comparisons between different countries, after all comparative systems (primarily social welfare) are my academic background although I’m quite rusty these days.
The one thing you notice in Germany, or at least I do which probably says something about my love for buildings and architecture is the roofs. When I think about the roofs on buildings back home they seem drab, boring and unimaginative in comparison. Even on our older buildings that in other ways are beautiful to behold, it seems that the roofs are an afterthought, something plonked on top to keep the rain out but not utilised to their full effect.

When we get into housing estates that most of us reside in the picture gets worse. From the late 60′s onwards to the present we seem to have become addicted to lifeless and drab concrete roofing tiles as if there were no alternative. Mark this against slate which for obvious reasons dominates Welsh roofs and emanates a sheer natural beauty of its own.
However in Germany, the traditional baked terracotta, a design and style that stretches back to Roman times is the one that is favoured.

It’s not used uni-formally though in a single style. There’s multiple styles and shapes of roofing tile, of different colours and textures. Personally I quite like the glazed tiles which shimmer in the sun and you can see here.

I wish I had more time to get around and take more photos, I don’t think we’ll be going back into the city centre before we leave but some of the roofs there have been imaginatively used to almost artistic extent. Even in the suburbs there’s a great sense of individuality about roofing which probably stems from it being more traditional in Germany to buy a plot of land and build your own house as opposed to our get a developer to put up a lot of homogeneous lifeless boxes mentality that we have in the UK.

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OK, lets qualify that title first. Germany isn’t cheaper for everything, definitely not healthcare, of which there’s a lengthy post/essay on that to come whenever I can get round to finishing it. We’re talking about general stuff to buy in the shops. I’m not much of a consumer, shopping is one of my least favourite activities but when I do partake of the consumer activity I’m fairly ruthless when it comes to getting a good deal.

There are a few things I’m interested in at present. Mainly techie stuff, computer components and DIY stuff, building materials and the like so with this in mind I’ve been comparing prices.
Before I left I was looking up the price of RAM for PC’s. I might one day have the finances to build a new computer and I’d like to have at least a Gigabyte of RAM. There were some strips of 1Gb RAM in Maplins circa

The other month the Tories were playing to their more traditional audience by beefing up their position on marriage. More specifically on finally finding a policy of reintroducing the married couples tax allowance.

You see it’s all gone pear-shaped since Labour came to power. Their hellbent policies of trying to focus money towards people who actually need it, like young working couples with things like childcare costs and ever spiralling costs of getting on the property ladder has led to a breakdown in of morality in our society meaning that all these kids being raised by unmarried couples are going to turn out as hooligans, drug addicts and thugs.

The Tories are right, this could all be fixed by getting people to walk up the aisle together, don a couple of rings and erstwhile bad parents would miraculously be transformed into model members of society raising well-adjusted good children.

What the Tories are doing is making a value judgement on the circumstances in which people should raise their children. Personally I happen to disagree. I don’t think children are best raised by married couples, nor unmarried couples nor single parents for that matter. Children are best raised by good parents.

Myself and Mrs Penguin despite my referring to her in those terms aren’t married. We’d like to think we’re good parents. We take lots of time out to play with Little Penguin, do educational activities with him and give him a good healthy diet. We’re people of modest means, we don’t have sufficient resources to afford lots of field trips or toys but we do what we can within our means.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t like to at some point get married. We have no problems with our long-term commitment to each other, it’s just nasty horrible things like paying a mortgage, affording toys for the little one, travelling back and forth a couple of times a year to Mrs Penguin’s homeland to keep up with family get in the way.

Whatever criticisms might be placed at it, the tax credit system helps people like us out a lot. The Tories policy of abolishing tax credits and introducing a married couples tax allowance would not only not help us but would knock us back on a rough reckoning over a

In my current location there’s two wheelie bins outside, a 240 litre and a 120 litre bin. I’ll just do a little disclaimer. I know next to nothing about how waste disposal is organised in Germany but I’m enquiring. Whether my current location is typical of the whole country or whether there is great difference between the different states of the Federal Republic I don’t know so what we’re doing here is just taking a snapshot of this particular bit of Brandenburg that I happen to be in.

The 240 litre bin, akin to the one that sits outside my front door back in Willenhall is solely for paper, nothing else. Its smaller counterpart is for generally non-recyclable materials. Also out of site in the outhouse are a further two other 240 litre bins that are yellow and are for plastics.

This sparked off a thought I’d had for a post before I left that I simply didn’t get round to. There was an article in the Express & Star about fortnightly collections in Walsall. A couple of weeks previously, our wonderful Cabinet Member for Environment in Walsall, Cllr. Rachel Walker had announced that Walsall would not implement fortnightly collections when the Express & Star did a survey of the local authorities in the Black Country. However just before I left she announced that Walsall Council would be looking at fortnightly collections and there’s going to be some public consultation on the issue.

By the way, when we say public consultation, we actually mean according to the article in the Express & Star that Walsall Council will ask residents whether they want a 240 litre bin that will be collected once a fortnight or a 120 litre bin which will be collected once a week.
This poses some interesting questions some of which are specifically related to Walsall given its other policies.

Now for myself personally, we never get anywhere near filling our 240 litre bin primarily down to us already being quite conscious about recycling and avoiding as much packaging on the things that we buy as we can or to the annoyance of Mrs Penguin, my own obsession with finding ingenious ways to re-use the packaging for other purposes.

However when it comes down to it, there is no choice that Walsall Council is giving residents. Whether you want a big bin or a little one, you’re going to be limited to producing 120 litres worth of waste a week as opposed to the current 240 litres and that is what it amounts to, nothing more, nothing less, Walsall Council wants to cut down on the waste it collects. I myself would prefer one of the small bins and I am rather keen on weekly collections. Some local authorities have switched to fortnightly collections and it’s obviously an issue that certain sections of the media are building up as an issue to bash local/national Government with.

When the likes of the scream sheets are building up a bit of a bandwagon against fortnightly collections and in defence of weekly collections it almost sparks off a questioning of my own views but we’ll deal with thatanother day, back to Walsall Council’s policies for a bit.
What does intrigue me about this plan by Walsall MBC is that Cllr. Rachel Walker appears to be indicating that people will have a choice between two systems that are in essence the same in terms of what you’re going to be able to chuck in the bin in terms of quantity, halving it to be precise. I have for a long time taken a great interest in public policy implementation. Those that know me well, know I’m a stickler for efficiency, I don’t like waste so please indulge me while I get my head around this policy.

As a resident of Walsall MBC, I can choose and I probably would, to ditch my 240 litre bin for a 120 litre bin that Walsall Council will empty every week. Lets say hypothetically that my neighbour and for arguments sake, everyone else in my street retain their 240 litre bin that Walsall Council will empty every fortnight.

If I’m due for a weekly collection that means the binmen have to come to my street every week just to collect my bin but nobody else’s. That at least from my perspective smacks of a very inefficient use of public resources. So will there be a quota? A set percentage of properties needed in a street to justify a weekly collection, if so then that’s not real choice or as this humble old cynic suspects, is this a case of attempting to introduce fortnightly collections by the back door without the Tories in Walsall having the bottle to go to the public openly with the policy at an election or stand up and justify it?

Then we move on to the issue that is very much an individual case for Walsall as it doesn’t affect any of the neighbouring authorities.

In Walsall, residents who require a new/replacement for broken/stolen wheelie bin have to pay Walsall MBC