Pickled priorities - fixing something that ain't broke while the poorest struggle

I haven't had much time for blogging these last few days, but rest assured that I have been frothing at the mouth over the announcement by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles that he's found £250 million to enable Councils in England to restore weekly bin collections.

That's a phrase I really don't like anyway. Every house has a bin emptied every week. That means that the bad bin, the landfill bin, gets emptied once a fortnight. And people complain about it like mad. Let's get it into perspective, though. The worst that can happen from the fortnightly landfill bin collections is that a household is mildly inconvenienced. Nobody dies. Nobody, despite predictions of everything from rats to bubonic plague in the right wing press, gets ill.  That inconvenience should in most cases act as a spur for people to think carefully about what they're throwing away.

I am not aware of complaints coming from people who make the effort to sort their recycling. We could do with a bigger recycling bin and we have trouble filling the landfill bin. But do we whinge? No, we take any excess to what my husband insists on referring to as the recycling centre and what most of the rest of us call the tip.

Pickles' announcement panders to the middle classes in the Tory shires but, of course, it doesn't affect Scotland, so what right to I have to complain? Well, of course it does. It's £250 million, a quarter of a billion bleedin' quid, being wasted, giving less money to things like the welfare budget, for example. Frankly, I'd rather ensure that the sick and disabled are properly supported if there's any money to play with. Nobody in this country in this day and age should not have enough food to eat - yet last week Fair Share reported that demand is rising for food from charities because people can't afford to buy it. And a Government we are part of is taking a measure that encourages people to throw food away?  I have no words to describe my fury.

I know that the Tories have to have things to announce at their conference but it really annoys me that they go on about reducing the deficit so as not to leave the next generation with debt, yet they're quite happy to compromise the environment for those same people.

I have never felt comfortable during a Tory Party conference but they take on an added, gut wrenching, feeling now we're in Government with them. Yes, we are taking the sting out of them in so many ways, but announcements like this show that as parties we are a zillion miles apart.

Eric Pickles talks rubbish about rubbish and Winterval

I caught up with the Politics Show the other day and cursed the format that gave we viewers in Scotland Eric Pickles and missed out the interview with Chris Huhne.

I was not impressed with the way Pickles was going on about how Councils needed to collect rubbish weekly as "it's a basic human right that your tikka masala carton isn't festering in a bin for a fortnight".

We can do without Tory ministers spreading such ill-informed bile and not saying one word about how important it is for the environment to encourage re-using and recycling.

We've never had a problem with the fact that our landfill bin is emptied once a fortnight. In fact, because West Lothian has a really fantastic kerbside recycling programme, which means all our tin cans and many of our plastic bottles can go in the blue bin, even after a fortnight, the landfill bin is usually not that full. If a household as disorganised and scatterbrained as ours can do it, anyone can.

Even at the height of Summer, I've not been at all bothered by the fact that waste has to hang around. I mean, it's properly wrapped, in a closed container. We've had this system for several years now, and it works perfectly smoothly.

If people are finding that their grey bins are full after a week then they are probably not recycling enough.

I only put things in the landfill bin if they can't go anywhere else. We simply can't afford to continue putting things to ever decreasing landfill space or burning it in polluting incinerators. If we don't act, our children are going to find themselves in a real pickle (see what I did there).

Ironically, though, he did recycle one thing - this bizarre myth that nasty atheist councils are stopping people celebrating Christmas. As any of the proud parents queueing up to see their children in nativity plays will be able to tell you. You might want to have a read of this essay which is an excellent case study of the history of the Winterval Myth and shows how the tabloids can completely distort the truth for their own, pernicious agendas.

And thanks to the Information Commissioner's recent statement, those proud parents watching their little ones dressed as donkeys and the like will be able to deal confidently with anyone who tries to stop them taking photos of the event. I'm glad that this has been clarified because I came across some real stupidity on that a few years ago - Anna went to a friend's birthday party on local Council premises and the parents were forbidden from taking photographs of their own child's party because they didn't have the consent in writing of all the parents concerned. As Anna was due to have her own party in the same venue a few days later, (and even if she hadn't, I'd have done something to be honest, as I thought it was disgraceful), I complained rather vociferously and this nonsense was stopped.

We can really do without Government ministers reinforcing the ill-informed nonsense of the tabloid press.Where's Evan Harris when you need him?