Recycling rubbish is old hat

All over the world, groups of people with qualifications in ologies the great mass of humanity didn't even know existed spend their lives discussing topics of great moment. Most of these discussions occur in locations that the rest of us have to save up to visit for the holiday of a lifetime. I believe the theme of the latest conference is the effects of carbon emissions on Global Warming. It is taking place in South East Asia and has attracted 3000 delegates from all over the globe flying in Business Class and staying in four and five star hotels. Since this is a politically important conference to be seen attending, most of the delegates, of course, are spending other people's money to attend it. But, hey, what's the point of being the world's leading authority on the effect of regular baked bean consumption on the atmosphere if you can't parly it into the odd trip to the South Seas?

Anyway, many of these self-declared experts will spend much of their navel fluff collecting time trying to work out new ways to get us to recycle just about everything and anything we can. This is entireley laudable snce we should spend the planet's resources with a little more care than a drunken sailor on a wekend pass. But, what gts my goat is the patronising, lecturing, hectoring attitude they adopt when laying down the law to the rest of us.

For anyone over the age of about fifty there is nothing remotely new about reccycling - except for the name of course.

When I was a street urchin growing up in Central London virtually everything I had to wear had already been worn by many other people before reaching me. We didn't know the clothes were recycled. They were simply hand-me-downs.

In an era of large families and meagre budgets, it was the only way that most mums could keep their kids clothed. Most children I went to primary school with wore clothes that had been broken in by several older siblings before they got to wear them

Waste of any kind was not merely frowned on but almost a criminal offence. Much of our regular pocket money came from collecting empty lemonade bottles and returning them to get back the deposit they carried. Sometimes, in our enthusiasm for recycling, this involved swiping a crate of bottles from the backyard of the off licence and then returning them in dribs and drabs to the front counter to get the deposits back

Rag and bone men were a regular feature of street life. When they came around with their horse drawn cart calling out " Old rags and lumber", the housewives would trade old bits of furniture, bundles of old bed clothes and the like for money or goods in kind. It wasn't that rare for over-enthusiatic kids - encouraged by the totter - to drag out their mum's best, and probably only, coat and swap it for a gold fish or a balloon. Two streets from where I grew up there was a totter's yard run by a man called Arthur Allen. There, we did a regular trade in bundles of old newspapers, rags, lead ( don't ask where we got that!) and other recyclables including bike frames and wheels. In fact, our regular visits to Highbury to watch Arsenal play on a Saturday afternoon were funded by our newspaper and rag collecting activities.

So, there is nothing remotely new about recycling. In poor countries around the world people still have to do it not out of any sense of moral duty but simply to stay alive. Unfortunately, none of them will ever be able to afford to fly half way around the world to tell a posse of climate change experts how to go about organising it.

Forget schoolchildren - they can't even make money count

The news on the education front just gets better and better. In recent weeks we have learned that English schoolchildren have slipped from 4th to 14th in the International Science understanding stakes. Then we discovered that their use of English as a native language places them somewhere lower than Upper Volta. Today, the icing was added to the cake. Now, we discover, we are worse at maths than virtually the whole of the developed world.
Since the last set of similar statistics were compiled in 2000 and since we are regulalrly assured by Not so Flash Gordon that we splurge the best part of 50 billion per year on education, everyone - except our numerically-challenged children ofcourse - can work out that we have spent the grand total of 300 billion to date. And what do we have to show for it?
A generation of victims of child-centered education that is barely literate, and is so innumerate that it probably can't work out what the total lack of shool-based exercise has done for its obesity rates compared with preceding generations.
Yet, as usual, the response of Ed Balls and his cohorts was a precise echo of his unfortunate name. It wasn't that we were actually slipping down the international league tables. it was more a case of the statistics being wrong. If you did the calculations the same way as the British educational establishment, why we are still the nest educated country in the world. And we have the the continually improving exam results to prove it.
Strange that, isn't it. Six years ago when the OECD ranked English pupils comfortably in the top 10 in each of the core subjects, the Educational establishment was keen to puff itself up and bask in its pupils' reflected glory.
The bright side of all this for our Gordon of course, is that the people likley to be set the task of investigating the current illegal funding crisis will have, for the most part, have been educated under his watch as Chancellor and PM. So, the chances of their actually making anything add up, let alone stick, are very remote.

Misplaced identities

The loss of 25 million items of personal data should not be used as an argument against the issue of Identity Cards for all.
It merely clouds the issue.
The reason why we should not have ID cards is much simpler than that. We don'tneed them. I, you and the great massof people living in Great Britain know perfectly well who we are. Our friends, workmates and family know who we are. Judging by the frequency with which I receive communications from them so do the Tax Man, the Passport Office, the Pensions people, my bank, mortgage provider, local council, my dentist, doctor and car dealership. Ergo, ID cards are a complete and unecessary waste of time if their sole purpose is to ensure that we all know and can prove exactly who we are.
Stick to that argument and don't try to embellish it with tales of the usual government incompetence when it comes to running a databas with more than two names on it. Don't even harp on about basic freedoms from State interference. It only provides politicians and their groupies with another opportunity to bore for their constituencies.
We don't want them because we don't need them. It's as simple as that.