Tonight:
-3°c
My mother is not ready to confess at this early stage. In the manner of an American politician up before a federal grand jury, her settled position is that she has “no recollection” of committing the offence for which she is now under surveillance.
For my part, I had no idea of her alleged criminal tendencies until last week, when, in a state of baffled anxiety, she forwarded me a menacing little communication she had received from the City of Westminster.
The charge against my 77-year-old mother is that she was responsible for a “white bag found dumped on the public highway” outside her flat in Wimpole Street. This makes her liable for a £5,000 fine if she is found to repeat the alleged offence.
Neither the size of the potential fine, nor the petty, disproportionate officiousness of the letter, alarms her particularly.
What concerns her — and me — is the means by which she was busted. And this, in turn, illustrates quite how blithely we have surrendered our liberties over the past 15 years or so to various agencies of the state.
This is not simply a replay of the now familiar parable about how New Labour has snuffed out our historic English liberties. Westminster council is run by the Conservatives, and they have adopted all the scary mechanisms of control freakery just as eagerly as David Blunkett and the other authoritarian home secretaries of the past 13 years.
Westminster is the same London authority which this week invited the media in to show off its new state-of-the-art, zero-tolerance parking enforcement cameras that are currently doing so much to shut down small businesses all around St John's Wood.
Conservatives at the municipal level, it turns out, are just as controlling and predatory as municipal New Labour in their desire to milk motorists who might want to pop into local shops. Much better that they head off to the free parking of the supermarkets.
The domestic rubbish collection system in Marylebone is unusual and, in some ways, impressively efficient. No large bins are set aside on pavements for domestic waste, so residents are required to leave their bin bags at the kerb, where they are picked up twice a day, at 8am and 8pm.
The snag is you can only leave the bags less than half an hour before collection. This is tough on the elderly, who might not want to venture out after dark in midwinter, especially when the pavements are coated in ungritted ice, as was the case when my mother was busted as the secret litter lout of Wimpole Street.
Westminster employs no fewer than 50 full-time rubbish inspectors, and had one of them laid a friendly hand on my mother's shoulder as she (allegedly) put her bag on the kerb out of hours, I'm sure she would have reacted with good humour.
But no: the bin bag she might or might not have left at the wrong time was lifted off the kerb, taken to a depot somewhere within the bowels of Westminster's enforcement agency, and torn open, in an operation out of MI5's playbook at the height of the Cold War.
The bag snatched from outside my mother's flat apparently contained an envelope addressed to her. Inside that envelope might have been confidential legal or medical communications, though Westminster will not say if that is the case.
The documentation was seized, scrutinised, and is now — according to Westminster's press office, when I pressed them — being held on file. If my mother wishes to know full details of what other information they are holding, and what was inside that envelope, well, she can file a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
There is a trivial point here, and a serious one. On the first point, should my mother or her neighbours wish to be sure not to fall foul of Westminster's stringent waste disposal regime, then they would be advised to remove all incriminating papers from among the satsuma peel and soup cans before putting them in a bin bag and leaving them on the street.
The serious point is how have we reached this pass, where it is deemed sensible or proportionate for public employees paid by my mother's council tax to rummage through her rubbish. There is an even more serious point here, too. Who is authorised to do this surveillance work? After 24 hours pressing Westminster council's press office to tell me how many individuals are empowered to go through my mother's rubbish, they will not offer even a guess.
Those who volunteer to drive schoolchildren to football games or help out with reading must submit themselves to Criminal Records Bureau checks. But the scores of council employees paid to go through my mother's rubbish need not trouble to do this — though if I were aspiring to join the booming business of identity theft, a position with Westminster council's waste scrutiny department would be my first port of call. Just think of those discarded credit card bills and letters from the Revenue.
Those of us who have been worrying since the late Nineties about the incremental erosion of our liberties and the aggregation of state powers over the individual are told not to fret, because we are protected by the Human Rights Act 1998, which Jack Straw once called New Labour's greatest achievement.
Fear not, we were told, because any centralising impulses are offset by the sacred wording of the Act. Indeed, there it is in Clause Eight, which supposedly guarantees the “right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”.
Try telling that to council workers in this city as they eagerly rummage through the discarded paperwork of the residents who pay their wages.
Reader views (5)
The exact same thing has happened to me. I live on Mortimer street and in September 2009 I have received a letter saying that on XX/09/2009 I have disposed of my trash at 12:30. This was my first warning, and if this would happen again I would receive a 2nd warning and then a fine. I assumed that my trash was dug through, as there was no other way for anyone to know who it belonged to, and someone must have been watching me throw out the trash bag if they knew the exact time.
Now I wake up 10 minutes earlier to throw out my trash (I have never heard or been told of a 8 pm collection) and make sure to shred all of my letters and envelopes.
p.s. sometimes when I go to work around 9 I see people sneakily taking small trash bags out of their homes. Makes me wonder who is this trash collection service for in the first place.
- V.K., London, UK, 01/04/2010 11:25
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We collect rubbish from Mr Robinson's mother's street 14 times a week. Yes, that's 14 times every week, twice a day, at 8am and 8pm.
Both he and his mother may well appreciate the fact Westminster keeps its streets clean. But if we can't remind people not to leave their bin bags in our busy streets, how on earth does he expect us to achieve this?
Yes, the maximum fine for dumping waste is £2,500, but we would only use such a drastic measure as an absolute last resort. We first seek to explain the rules to the individual responsible to make sure that they understood our requirements, which is why we have written directly to the resident concerned.
His comments about identity theft are also puzzling. By removing his mother's waste from the street, where it would have lain for several hours otherwise, our staff have ensured no unscrupulous people could steal confidential information.
Surely, this argument reinforces the very reason why we wrote to Mr Robinson's mother in the first place, and in her own interests, as well as the interest of her neighbours, and our 1.1million daily visitors, that rubbish should not be left in the street outside the allocated collection times.
When you have 14 opportunities a week to make your rubbish collection, and your road has nine signposts with the collection time information on, I really don’t think we are asking too much to put it out when we're collecting it, rather than leaving your rubbish in the street all day.
- Cllr Danny Chalkley, Cabinet Member For City Management, Westminster City Council, UK, 17/03/2010 12:58
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We should all of us start leaving bin bags out at dead of night filled with dirty nappies and what we pick up after taking the dog for a work...but of course no incriminating evidence....perhaps they'll pick up the DNA and start swabbing the mouths of babes and puppies!
- David Short, Tunis, Tunisia, 12/03/2010 16:45
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Jesus! Sorry but this is utter appalling and deeply, deeply worrying.
In my opinion, Westminster Council's actions are horrifically disproportionate to the "offence" if you can even call it that, of innocently placing the rubbish bag out slightly earlier than usual.
What kind of insane, perverse country are we living in here in the UK where convicted terrorists who have ruthlessly committed mass murder can use the Human Rights Act to protect them from the law, yet an honest, decent, law-abiding pensioner who innocently places a bag out in the street is crushed by the full force of the brutal local authority and threatened with a massive and outrageous £5,000 fine?!
This is SICK and we desperately need to bring back some common sense and PROPORTION where Local Authorities are concerned.
- Anon Pc, Londongrad,EUSSR, (Formerly Great) Britain, 12/03/2010 15:56
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Lock her up, she's clearly a wrong 'un.
- Ruth, Hampton, 12/03/2010 15:31
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