I might be missing something here and please don’t let it get in the way of any Tories popping up with the usual ’shows the rank incompetence of the government’ line but there seems to be a glaring point that’s being missed and indeed with other cases of illegal immigrants working for various Governmental departments.

That of them cropping up as having worked for a contractor (cleaning agencies being popular). This isn’t as much as the Tories would like to portray it a failure of Government or even individual departments but is symptomatic of the failure of the private sector and the curiously fetishistic obsession we have in the UK of outsourcing our public services to private contractors who are obviously bloody useless at doing the proper checks.

One hopes that somewhere along the line someone thought to insert a bit in the contractual agreement that if said contractor screws up big time or employs someone who isn’t even supposed to be in the country then it’s tough chum, end of contract see you later, or not as the case may be. I think I’m probably hoping a bit too much there.

Your humble Penguin is taking a little break to do family things at the moment but those in need of a thoroughly good read should drop by Unity’s place at MoT for a rather good expose of the Centre for Dopey Conservative Future Students, AKA the Centre for Open Politics.

A bit of linky love for tonight but given all the insinuations about the Smith Institute bandied about on the right of the political blogosphere isn’t it ever so ironic that another Tory front operation should crop up, duly exposed by Unity over at MoT.

I’m sure the forces of light with be whipping themselves into action over this one. Or maybe not.

Hey, promised we’d get back to a bit of politics didn’t I?

Our subject for today is Georgie ‘I is a greenie and I’m going to bung you some wonga in the process’ Osbourne.

OK, first lesson in recycling for George. In almost all cases there is no financial incentive in recycling. Sorry but there isn’t. One would hope that the bloke who wants to take over the country’s finances would be able to get his head around this.

Whether you like it or not, our economic structure is based on capitalism (yes, you don’t hear that word very often these days). Its driving principle is the creation of profit and that’s, well about it. There is no profit in recycling because when everything is reduced down to the hideously crude and simplistic concept of price, then barring a few odds and sods like some metals it’s simply easier (cheaper) to get new materials than it is to recycle old.

All ‘incentives’ to recycle are in fact sticks somewhere along the line. It doesn’t matter if you dress it up as we’re going to bung you some dosh to recycle because the premise on which that scheme is based is to creation of a false economy through regulation and or taxation.

In this case we’re dealing with landfill taxes on local authorities which is a pan-European scheme set up by the EU to encourage/force (choose whichever you fancy) member states to up their recycling rates because it’s been decided at a political level that reducing the amount of waste we as human beings produce is probably a good idea.

There’s nothing wrong with the introduction of targeted taxation to attempt to change societal behaviour as long as you can justify it with sound reasoning and preferably a lot of evidece to support your position too.

In the case of landfill, it’s fair to say you’d be hard pressed to find many people who think that reducing the amount of rubbish we chuck on tips is a bad idea although when you mention they might actually have to do something about it themselves or cough up a few bob then for some reason perspectives suddenly start to change a bit.

So we’re here, Osbourne’s little carrot is actually nothing more than the product of a very large EU stick that has created certain market conditions in the first place.

That of course leads us nicely on to the whole civil liberties malarky that seems to be doing the rounds of late.

The US company in question that Osbourne has so fallen in love with is RecycleBank and there’s two very interesting elements to their operation. The first being their use of ‘chipped’ bins. Yes folks we’re back to putting little bits a silicon chips in the bins to monitor how much waste we throw out.

Now for those with short memories, last year the Government was falling in love with the whole hi-tech approach of chipping everyone’s bins and forgive me for being a cynical old sod but wasn’t it all the Tories coming out of the woodwork saying it would be a crap idea (actually I agree with them on this one) and that flytipping would go though the roof.

There were a few pilots done, the first that springs to mind was South Norfolk District Council where it was such a disaster in both the technology breaking down and surprise surprise flytipping going through the roof that when the *ahem Tories took over the council they scrapped it.

Georgie boy might also want to have a word with Eric Pickles their very own local government spokesman because he said ‘they are also an invasion of people’s privacy’ on the issue of chipping people’s bins. Go on, what are the odds on another principled resignation of seat to stand in by-election moment? Nah, didn’t think so either.

To be fair to RecycleBank they seem really good folk and there’s nothing to suggest that they would use any information gleamed from such a system in a bad way. That said, they operate in the States where they have like proper bits of legislation and stuff written down on paper ensuring their citizens rights, not the data-mining free for all we have in the UK, seriously folks, the possibilities are endless.

How’s this for a wicked idea to catch out naughty people burning stuff in the back garden or flytipping. We could hand the service over to Tesco. They could monitor what we buy and if it doesn’t end up in our bin then we could get automatic fines as well, how’s that? Seriously folks, I’m here all week.

What Ozzy boy doesn’t exactly go out of his way to mention is the nature of payments, if indeed we’re taking RecycleBank as our model.

We’re not talking cold hard cash, you know, that stuff that’s readily accepted everywhere, even in the local boozer. No we’re talking tokens, and not the 30p off a box of Daz type (do they still sell Daz? Haven’t seen it for ages).

We’re talking (at least as far as can be ascertained from the information on their website) spend £50 in selected partner store and get £10 off tokens. OK, don’t quote those figures but we all know where we stand, to get the sweetener we’ve got to shell out a larger amount which is all well and good if you’ve got a reasonable income in the first place but if you’re getting by down to the last penny then are you going to have or even want to spend the extra to redeem the token?

What this approach also fails to address is the exact criticism the Tories were laying at the concept of pay as you bin last year. When you introduce a system whereby there is either a financial cost or benefit to putting less in your bin, doesn’t matter which. You will encourage fly-tipping and backyard burning because the financial incentive is there.

Of course what is continually being missed is not the actual desire or lack of from households to recycle, many aspects of the problems we face in the UK arise from the inability to recycle due to either poor facilities or, at least in my opinion poor packaging.

I’ve lived abroad, over a decade ago, seen how they did it back then. I’ve travelled about a bit, observed different recycling practices because it’s an area of personal interest but all came down to one very important factor. The recyclability of the packaging in the first place.

It doesn’t matter whether you try to penalise or incentivise recycling, if consumers can’t recycled the 2 litre bottle of coke they bought from Sainsbury’s then they can’t recycle it. They could if they lived in Finland or Germany but they can’t here. It’s the same product (admittedly produced locally under license) but in the UK it goes in the bin because it’s made of cheaper thinner plastic compared to thicker reusable (after being washed out) plastic abroad. There’s no scheme available to recycle them here, in other countries you just take them back to the supermarket, plonk them in a machine, it prints out a ticket that can be used at the checkout and hey presto, there’s your incentive system, it’s really not that hard and the whole lot doesn’t even have to be done by the public sector, you simply mandate the supermarkets to do it instead. They do after all have extensive distribution networks and it makes sense that after making deliveries they can do a pick up as well rather than driving back empty.

A bit of joined up thinking wouldn’t go amiss here.

I’ll finish on a positive point. It used to be (the last time I looked) impossible to recycle Tetrapak in the UK which is barmy. I was going to write a bit about it in this post but after some research it does appear to be picking up and your humble Penguin is planning a trip to Sandwell in the near future now he knows that he can recycle the milk cartons. Wednesbury to be precise as they apparently have a facility at the Leisure Centre. It’s just a bit sad that the most accessible facility for me is in an entirely different borough, but hey, that’s what you get from living in an area covered by Walsall Council I guess.

My final good deed for this post is a littl link to Tetrapaks recycling locator. I think I should move to Sandwell.

The last six months or so have been marked by the constant drip of criticism from the Tories that following Governmental departments having lost various pieces of people’s personal information that this leads directly to the ‘Labour can’t be trusted with your data’ mantra.

How apt then that it should be that on the eve of polling for what’s probably one of the most hotly contested by-elections in years that the Tories should manage to e-mail off the personal data including names, addresses, telephone numbers, voting intentions and socio-economic groups of 8,575 key voters in Crewe and Nantwich to some foreign journalists.

Apart from the obvious breach of data protection legislation of taking such sensitive data outside of the internal political party structure it does beg the question why they would see fit to simply e-mail such information around in th first place? Were they using encrypted e-mails or was it some whipper snapper sitting in front of their Hotmail account?

There will of course be some very serious questions that need answering to the Information Commissioners office tomorrow morning of which I’d just like to add this extra one.

Although not all of the recipients have been named, one that has is the Isle of Man based Manx Radio. Now for those not disposed of the knowledge of the geo-political status of that little island between us and Ireland it has an almost unique status being a rather nice cushy little tax haven for certain individuals.

To achieve this status it has to lie outside of both the EU and the EEA.

Now for those who know their onions regarding data protection registration there are some important clauses (actually they’re called ‘prinicples’) in the registration that is filed with the Information Commissioners office.

We of course need the answer to a question first. Under who’s jurisdiction in terms of the data controller for the Tories is said data?

According to the Information Commissioner’s Office there is no registration for anything like a local Crewe and Nantwich Conservative Association and this being a by-election where national parties step into the breach we can only assume that the national Tory party is in charge and here’s their registration:

Registration Number: Z5909711

CCHQ
25 VICTORIA STREET
LONDON
SW1H 0DL

While we’re at it, here’s the statement of purposes for the use of data under their control, long I know but the important bit is at the end of each statement of purpose:

Purpose 1

None outside the European Economic Area

Yes, that’s right. ‘None outside the EEA’ which is rather a bugger when you send your data to someone in the Isle of Man isn’t it?

I think a nice little e-mail to the Information Commissioner’s Office is in order. Just being helpful like…

Sometimes you can get a bit jaded by politics. The party political knock-about takes its toll on occasions but from time to time something happens which restores your faith that we, despite what some people may think, and what some elements of our media might want people to think; live in a country where reason can prevail.

I’ve not been involved but have been following the ongoing saga that is what a complete nut-job Nadine Dorries and at least to some degree having a wake-up call as to just how close we always are to the prospect of legislation being forced upon us by those who seek to make judgments, not from the position of informed reasoning but because it fits nicely with their own religious position.

I’ve been reading a bit lately about the historical relationship between religion and law in British history. If anything, what struck me most was that I’d always considered we have moved steadily away from belief based legislation towards a more enlightened position.

Even I had somehow accepted that this was a steady one-way street away from superstition towards logic and rationality but it isn’t. The threat from those who would stoop so low as try and stir emotional responses to further their own position is ever present despite what the science actually is.

Are these intellectually lax tactics inherently the of the ‘right’? If years in politics is anything to go by then the answer is probably yes. Have I been in the position where someone on the right has gone down the route of ‘well everyone knows that’ and utilising the wonderful (I’ve lost the argument phrase) ‘well there’s lies damned lies and statistics’ while blatantly quoting a party line based on use of statistics? Yes I have and it’s disconcerting not only that this approach to political discourse is not only considered to be acceptable by some but that people might give it credence in the first place.

The worst kind of legislation is that passed purely on the basis of belief. Where there is no intellectual grounding or verifiable evidence to support the position. We’ve seen that in the past few weeks and in cases such as this, with absence of an actual substantive support for their position they choose instead to rely on pseudo-science and play to people’s emotions.

If nothing else it has made me realise that we are not on a one-way street towards greater rationality, that along the way we risk taking that step backwards if the views of people like Nadine Dorries are not challenged and shown for the shallow disingenuous nonsense that they are.

Those of us that value the rational over the superstitious, that value how far we as a country have come and surprisingly how far behind even some of our close neighbours are should never take this for granted while there are those who wish to drag us backwards.

I have to admit though that I do agree to some extent that in a perfect world there should be no abortions other than those for specific clinical or medical reasons. In a perfect world contraception would never fail, in a perfect world we wouldn’t have unintended pregnancies because people are ill-informed or lack the knowledge of how to avoid them. In a perfect world every child would be wanted and loved but we don’t live in a perfect world.

What troubles me the most is that these same people taking a religious position against abortion are the same religious people who seek to rob our children of the information to prevent them in the first place.

When I was at school the sum total of all sex education consisted of a single two hour session at age 14. I remember it quite distinctly because of the alarming lack of knowledge shown by my fellow pupils and my school was not a religiously aligned one but the lessons that we’re supposed to carry on suddenly stopped for no known reason apart from some rumour that a vicar had complained (whether that is true or not I do not know but for some reason the classes did indeed suddenly stop) and at least two girls to my knowledge in my year at school were pregnant before they left at 16.

It strikes me that if these people really do care about wanting to reduce the number of abortions in our society then instead of seeking to restrict young people’s knowledge or spouting claptrap about some mythical ‘abortion industry’ and shove the ‘just say no’ matra down their necks then they should actively to promoting better sex education in our schools. accepting that yes, shock horror teenagers do have sex with each other and no amount of moralising is going to change that.

That said, far better commentary on this whole debate can of course be found by Unity over at MoT and as the saga closes the best laugh can be found here.

As I sit here, dutifully waiting for the four horsemen of the apocalypse to come charging over the Tividale hills ushering in the end of humanity and the subsequent reports in our staunchly independent mainstream media that it’s all Gordon brown’s fault. I thought I’d shy away from my usual in-depth approach and jot down a personal perspective on life as it stands at this current point in time.

I’ve learned from passing the news stands in the supermarket and corner shops around these parts over the past six months or so that our country is so over-crowded with immigrants that no one can get a doctor, dentist, delivery suite for giving birth or a place for said offspring when they reach school age.

On top of that the economy is tits up, our houses are going to be worth less than the price of a Pot Noodle by the end of the year which of course due to soaring inflation in the cost of food will stand at somewhere around £5,000 come the time the big red suited one descends for his annual distribution of Chinese manufactured toys - should said toys get here because oil will cost $10,000 a pint and the freight companies will have all gone bust.

OK, a little exaggeration there but you get my drift. Everything is getting worse and in case you didn’t know, it’s all Gordon Brown’s fault because he’s Scottish.

So for a little perspective here’s my rundown of various personal experiences of late which either means that 1, all this stuff in the media is rubbish, or 2, the little bit of the world I inhabit (Willenhall, little town in the Black Country) has broken with the old space time continuum and shuffled off to a different dimensional plane.

Getting an NHS dentist isn’t hard, I’m about to change mine, no hunting around, calling up numbers from the Yellow Pages like J.R Hartley only to be told sorry. There’s plenty of availability.

My GP surgery at least the last time I went there a few weeks ago had a sign up inviting new patients to sign up with them.

Last year I had a minor op, removal on ingrowing toenail. Waited 5 weeks to have it done. Bit of mild discomfort while I waited but nothing too bad that required anything like regularly taking pain-killers. Back in the early 1990’s my second-cousin-in-law waited nearly two years in agony for kidney stones to be removed which led to over dependence on pain killers and substantial time off work. Yep, health service has obviously got worse under Labour.

Apparently expectant mothers are being turned away from maternity wards because they’re full or understaffed. Well, I can highly recommend Wolverhampton New Cross hospital as a place to give birth. The wards were half empty, service was great and Mrs Penguin was well impressed by the food. Far better than anything you’d get in the pseudo-private-insurance funded system in Germany - which incidentally cost a damn site more to run than our own good old NHS. On a side note to that, the neo-natal facilities have all been done up since we had Little Penguin and are a darn sight better now than even two and a half years ago but shush, don’t tell anyone, things getting better in the health service, we can’t have that now can we?

When the little Penguin’s are due to start their academic career there’s plenty of school places knocking around. The most likely destination for them, the newly built (with lots of investment dosheroonies from the Labour Government) but admittedly built in the most stupid of places thanks to the local Tories and LibDems’ has, the last time I checked only about 70% of it’s capacity filled. Much like most of the schools across the borough to the extent that you can bet the newly wishy washy Cameroonian Tories will find a way of closing a few to save money. Not that they’re penny pinching bureaucratic minded micro-managerial types of course.

I’ve never quite understood the British obsession with house prices. I’m assuming it’s a British trait and perhaps would make a good question for one of those nationality/citizenship tests. “Will you worry constantly about the capital value of your house?” Answer yes, you’re in, answer no, well you’re not really British enough, please sod off.

For the last few years we’ve had a media banging on about how house prices are so high young people can’t get on the ladder. Not to mention it’s all Gordon Brown’s fault for letting in all those Polish people in the first place. Now prices aren’t rising at rates vastly above the rate of wage inflation and Ministers get spotted with papers indicating they might fall by between 5-10% by the end of the year which you never know, might actually make them a bit more affordable to first time buyers, and the world’s gone to pot.

My house is my home. I actually don’t care if my little two bedroom Victorian terrace is worth £50,000 or £100,000. It’s irrelevant if said other persons comparable property is worth the same and if the differential between property prices narrows it actually makes it easier and more affordable to upgrade, not that I’m planning to.

Apparently there’s a credit crunch going on, its impossible to get loans for mortgages or anything else and our whole economic system built on the procurement of debt is going to grind to a halt.

This is weird to me. I’ve been inundated with offers for loans and credit cards the last few months, far more than normal. Every time I go to the bank, building society or post office I get the question have you got a mortgage, would you like to switch to us or take out a loan?

As it happens, I am planning on switching my mortgage, have to sort out a few things but all told I should be shaving about 13% off my monthly payments which is nice. What was that about credit crisis again?

I’m torn but as far as I can tell, ably abetted by large swathes of the media we seem to be talking ourselves into a recession. Employment is higher than ever, unemployment continues to fall, the currency is pretty steady, interest rates are low. I may have missed something, and this is probably all Gordon Brown’s fault that he simply can’t do a recession properly but what happened to the good old days when the Tories were in.

They knew how to do a proper recession. Millions on the dole, interest rates at 15%, the pound collapsing in value overnight. Now that’s how to do a recession properly. Never mind, let’s hope the Tories get back in, after all they’ve got David Cameron who was an apprentice to Norman Lamont (the true master of buggering up economies) so I feel rest assured that when the Tories win the next general election we’ll have a proper recession and none of this wussy New Labour imitation stuff. Did I mention it’s all Gordon Brown’s fault, he can’t even get recession’s right.

So there we have it. This is not dismiss that there are real issues at the moment, many of which are hurting some of the most vulnerable in our society. Energy costs and as a direct consequence of them the cost of food. These are rising above the rate of inflation and those on fixed incomes like pensioners and people of benefits will be hit. Of course the rising cost of energy has nothing whatsoever with rip-off wholesalers like Centrico, conflict in the world, or the general inability to keep up with demand while supply gradually runs out. It is of course all Gordon Brown’s fault, I don’t understand why people don’t get that?

Can’t help a little bit of taking the mickey out of LibDems and in Walsall it isn’t hard but today I had a leaflet come through the door, local elections coming up don’t you know.

I thought I’d take this little snippet out and share it.

Now for those not of these parts, a little background. This is from Nadia Fazal, LibDem candidate for my ward, Willenhall South in the forthcoming elections. Nadia’s gets about a bit (political sense) having previously been a member of the Labour Party who wouldn’t elect her to stand, headed off to Respect where they’d let anyone stand but nobody would vote for them and finally she’s ended up as a LibDemmer.

Nadia’s obviously not too hot on her politics, either that or she’s being deliberately misleading but we’ll just take a peek at what she’s saying shall we.

Well, all the stuff about Walsall having the highest council tax, well yes, that’s all correct but what’s this:

“Council tax in Birmingham where the Liberal Democrats are in control has gone up by a below inflation 1.9%”

Now I’ve not been keeping up with things the last week or so due to personal reasons that I’ll write a bit about later but I’m sure I would have noticed mass defections from Labour and the Tories to the LibDems in Birmingham so that they could have taken control of the council.

Ah, that’s right, no, Nadia doesn’t know what she’s talking about, Birmingham would be Tory controlled with a few LibDem bag carriers to make up the numbers.

There’s also this nice little quote:

“where Liberal Democrats have a say in running things, council tax payers get a better deal.”

Nadia’s young, she might not remember but some of us do. When the Tories needed LidDem bag carriers in Walsall a few years back (who were subsequently ditched when the Tories got enough seats to run things on their own) they were so effective in getting a better deal for council tax payers that they forced through an increase of just shy of 20% in one year alone.

Yep, that was a good deal for the council tax payers wasn’t it?

This is actually a political blog so just to remind ourselves, here’s a link to Unity over a MoT with a nice little article involving a Freedom of Information request, little Billy Hague, an executive jet and breaching the regulations to declare donations to the Electoral Commission on time. Enjoy.

Over to the Express and Star for another installment of local taxation rises. This time with Walsall Council announcing a 2.94% increase which is heralded in the Express and Star with the headline ‘Tax rise lowest in area’.

There are two issues that seem to crop up in relation to this. Firstly that I questioned as to why the article on council tax rises for Wolverhampton only reported the ‘Band D’ figure and it’s good to see that the Express and Star have reported the actual figures for all the bands for Walsall but anyone would think the Express and Star were biased and I’m sure it would have nothing whatsoever to do with the political control in the respective boroughs.

However, and this really does indicate rather poor journalism in the use of the headline. Now I’m not exactly sure what the Express and Star determines to be ‘area’. Is it Wolverhampton and Walsall? In that case then yes, factually accurate but at lease from my perspective, if we are talking about comparisons then I would consider ‘area’ to mean the four Black Country boroughs (please, no arguments about the boundaries of the Black Country) of Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Sandwell.

This is strange because Sandwell Council put out this press release the other day.

Now forgive me for questioning the mathematically competency of your average Express and Star hack but isn’t 2.9% less than 2.94%?

That said and I’m sure like any other householder, the figure that’s really important to me is the bottom line actually cash amount.

I know I should do a nice table with all the bands in it but it’s late and I can’t be bothered so here’s ‘Band A’ as that’s what is of more concern to me in actually living in one.

Sandwell: £855.88
Wolverhampton: £941.52
Walsall: £948.94

Dudley don’t announce theirs till March 3rd so we’ll have to wait on them but it’s fair to say, Walsall, despite the nice headlines isn’t exactly the cheapest place to live. Let’s not get on to the quality of services either shall we.