C.S.I. Gloucestershire County

In today's thrilling episode, our intrepid police officers detect a serious crime and respond with eight officers and a helicopter.  Yes, friends.  Gloucestershire County Police are doing their bit to keep this world free of those lefty pinko tree-hugging planet-loving garbage-recycling weirdos.


A scrap of consumerism history

A little known principle of common law was established in 18291, re-confirmed in 18922 and fully endorsed and adopted in 19023.  The principle is a rethink of the notion that things should be built to last.  It states that making things that last is detrimental to economic activities and people who do that sort of thing should be hung, drawn and quartered - or fined a few bucks, whichever is the more convenient.  A corollary states that repairing things is a detriment to the economic activities of legitimate business people, since it hinders their ability to sell crappy replacements for the crappy broken stuff - or even crappy replacements for the really good stuff that used to last a heck of a long time.

Recycling in Britain is given lip service - at great expense to the taxpayer in costs of layers of bureaucracy, spammy junk mail and re-branding land infill sites as "civic amenity sites".  Behind the facade of lip service, the reality is horrendous.  Thanks to the over-regulation of private-enterprise recycling firms, many things which were previously recycled or re-used as a matter of course are now to be found littering the countryside.  Lead-acid batteries and empty gas cylinders spring readily to mind.

Seemingly, it is now a criminal offence to try to keep a re-usable item from ending up as landfill.  Owen Gray, 50, and Angela Cubitt, 34, were arrested after picking up an old video games console and an electric drill that had been dumped at their local recycling centre in Gloucester.

This is how Chief Superintendent Gary Thompson is tackling crime and the causes of crime.

Cotswolds and Stroud Division is a predominantly rural division in the Cotswolds covering an area of 160,000 hectares. The population is over 180,000 comprising nearly 80,000 households.
 
Including key towns and villages such as Cirencester, Moreton-in-Marsh, Stow-on-the-Wold, Stroud and Dursley, officers working in the Cotswolds and Stroud Division deal with 23% of all of the incidents and reported crimes in the county.

Chief Superintendent Gary Thompson is the Divisional Commander in charge of making the Cotswolds and Stroud police look like total morons on the world's stage.

Pollution in all its forms is a major global problem.  Any idiot in a uniform who stands in the way of someone who is doing even the smallest thing to control pollution should be stripped of that uniform pronto.

I make no apology, least of all to Chief Superintendent Gary Thompson, for responding somewhat whimsically to an incident like this and would urge him to think more about the impact his actions had.


Footnotes:
[1] - you can make money out of mustard, even if people leave more on the plate than they eat.

[2] - you can make money out of bottle tops - if they can't be re-used because you have to damage them to get at the bottle's contents.

[3] - you can make money out of razors - if people can be persuaded that keeping the handle and throwing away the blade after using it just the one time isn't just about the craziest idea anybody ever heard of in all their born days.