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Open Up Madam, We've A Warrant To Search Your Fridge
Richard Littlejohn
Recession, what recession? The economy may be going to hell in a handcart, but the Government still has money to burn.
On the day it was announced that what used to be called British Steel was shedding 2,500 jobs, as unemployment rockets towards three million, another raft of exciting job opportunities opened up in the public sector.
As if we’re not already overrun with thousands of five-a-day co-ordinators, nagging us to eat our greens, and legions of recycling enforcers, sifting through our dustbins for evidence of carelessly discarded potato peelings, plans were unveiled for a new standing army of food police, charged with cutting down waste.
Six councils will be taking part in a pilot scheme which will see inspectors paid £8.50 an hour, with double time on Saturdays, to visit our homes and offer ‘advice’ on what we eat and what we throw away.
If the trial is ‘successful’, it will be introduced across the country. Which means it will be introduced across the country. When did you ever hear of any council running a pilot scheme and declaring it to be a complete waste of time and money?
Precisely.
By the end of this year, there will be 8,000 of these food fascists hammering on every one of Britain’s 25million front doors and demanding to inspect the contents of our fridges and pedal bins, at a cost of tens of millions of pounds the country simply can’t afford.
This crazy scheme has been dreamed up by the same quango which wants to force each and every household to install a slop bucket under the sink. The justification is to bring about a reduction in the amount of food we waste.
After just one day’s training, this new breed of busybody will be given the power to turn up on our doorsteps unannounced and demand answers to an intrusive series of questions about our food consumption.
They'll also be handing out guidance on optimum portion sizes and what to do with leftovers, as well as explaining the difference between ‘best before’, ‘use by’ and ‘sell by’ dates.
The impertinence is breathtaking. Who is to say what constitutes an acceptable portion? It’s a matter of individual choice, one of the hallmarks of a so-called ‘free’ society. Frankly, it’s none of the Government’s damn business what we eat. Or what we do with our leftovers.
In World War II, there was an official recipe for something called Woolton Pie, made out of scraps and named after the then food minister. What’s the modern austerity equivalent — Gordon Brown Windsor Soup?
How stupid do they think we are? We can read. Just a guess, but I would imagine that ‘best before’ means best eaten before the date specified. Similarly, ‘use by’ is the date said item is likely to go off and start to whiff a bit. If something in a supermarket has passed its ‘sell by’ date, don’t buy it.
This is all part of the infantilisation of Britain, the belief that we are incapable of running our own lives without government guidance, interference and regulation.
A spokesman for the health department said: ‘By hitting people at home, rather than in supermarkets, we can get inside their lives. It’s only by knocking on doors you can find out what they are having for their tea and offer some healthy suggestions.’
Listen, chum, we don’t want you getting inside our lives. Where do you get the idea that it is the job of government to ‘get inside’ our lives? What most people want is to get on with their lives, without constant official hectoring, nannying and bullying.
If I want to eat four rashers of bacon and three eggs for breakfast, that’s my heart attack. And I can assure you that if any of these inspectors comes knocking on the door of Littlejohn Towers at teatime, he’ll be sent away with his head in a slop bucket.
![People want to eat bacon and eggs without nannying advice from the government](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/01/27/article-1128642-009CA64D00000259-602_233x327.jpg)
People want to eat bacon and eggs without nannying advice from the government
You can bet your life that this scheme won’t stop at just offering handy hints on how to make an appetising supper out of last night’s leftovers. Soon it will be backed up with fines and punishments. Under this government, ‘voluntary’ schemes have an inevitable habit of becoming compulsory.
How long before the polite knock on the door becomes a battering ram and the leaflet offering ‘advice’ turns into a warrant?
Think I’m exaggerating? Look at how ‘encouragement’ to recycle led to a vast enforcement industry, with householders being punished for leaving their dustbin lids ajar — with inspectors climbing over garden walls and using anti-terror laws to spy on those suspected of slipping plastic containers into the box marked ‘glass only’ or inadvertently dropping a used envelope into their garden waste.
As I keep telling you: once you give anyone in authority any kind of power, they will always, always, always abuse it.
‘Open the door, madam. Armed food police. We have a warrant to search your refrigerator. Anything you don’t eat may be taken away and used against you in court.’
Ministers claim that we throw away £8billion of food every year, which is one of those ludicrous round figures plucked from thin air.
In the scheme of things, with Gordon Brown blowing £100 billion and more bailing out the banks to no effect, that’s still just a drop in the ocean.
The food we put in our dustbins isn’t the problem. That’s all biodegradable and can be fed to farm animals or safely left to decompose in a landfill site. One man’s ‘waste’ is another man’s pig swill.
It’s the fast food some of the more antisocial members of society throw on the pavements we want addressed. Instead of hiring still more snoopers, councils should be recruiting more road sweepers.
This is where you end up when a government has no idea what to do about the big issues, so occupies itself meddling in ever more intimate and irrelevant areas of our lives.
I believe the expression is ‘past its sell by date’.
Considerable reaction to my last column on the Trumpet Taliban. It’s worse than I thought. And it’s not just schoolchildren and teachers forced to wear earmuffs when playing musical instruments. A professional musician, who has been working in the West End and touring shows for ten years, writes to tell me of the preposterous precautions now being forced on production companies by insurers and elf ’n’ safety.
Producers are so terrified of being sued for hearing loss that musicians are forced to wear strapped-on decibel meters, earplugs and noise reduction headphones.
At his latest engagement, the drummer no longer has a traditional drum-kit, he has to play silent electronic drum pads, while the guitar and bass players have to do without amplifiers.
A reader says some professional musicians are being forced to take 'preposterous precautions'
The brass section all have to wear earmuffs.
The artificial output is then fed in to a sound desk, where it is mixed to ‘safe’ levels to satisfy the elf ’n’ safety nazis. When he questioned this madness, he was told it was
now a criminal offence to play a saxophone without noise-reducing headgear.
Needless to say, it defeats the whole object of playing together as an orchestra, since they can’t hear each other.
It doesn’t only destroy the morale of the musicians, it cheats the paying public. How long before it will only be legal to perform a piano concerto on one of those silent keyboards which older readers will remember Joseph Cooper playing during the mystery tune round on Face The Music?
At this rate, not long.
Let's send the Albanians to Gitmo
As well as playing host to 80 Albanian murderers and rapists, the Government is under pressure to welcome home from Guantanamo Bay a number of British ‘residents’.
![Detainees in orange jumpsuits in a holding area at Guantanamo Bay](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/01/27/article-1128642-03E7A1B70000044D-158_233x289.jpg)
Detainees in orange jumpsuits in a holding area at Guantanamo Bay
As I have pointed out before, they are not British citizens. They are all citizens of other countries given temporary leave to live here.
Yet when they were arrested, they were all residents of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they were working with Al Qaeda. Let their homelands take them in. They’re not
our problem.
Now we learn that France is drawing up a plan to disperse released Club Gitmo inmates across Europe, so we won’t even get a say in the matter — however much the Boy Miliband protests.
If we must take in these terrorists — and I can see no earthly reason why we should, other than to suck up to President Obama — perhaps we could swap them for the Albanians.
Hello Pete, got a new motor?
Labour has spent years trying to put the British motor industry out of business, through extortionate petrol taxes and sky-high duty on so-called ‘gas guzzlers’.
Land Rover and Jaguar have been particularly hard hit. And the used car market has collapsed because of punitive excise duties.
Now, though, the Government has realised that car factories tend to be sited in Labour constituencies and is posing as the saviour of the industry, in the form of short-term loan guarantees. If I were a motor industry executive, I’d read the small print very carefully indeed.
Be honest, would you buy a used car from Peter Mandelson?
Congratulations to all of you who spotted the non-deliberate mistake in Friday’s column. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge doesn’t carry the Great Western Railway. I should have paid more attention to Jeremy Clarkson’s compelling documentary on the great man.