My point is that you cannot blame people for too much rubbish when the stupid retailers talk a good game about being ‘ eco-friendly ‘ while over packaging to an obscene extent . If we want less stuff going to landfil why can’t the shops stop this childish nanny state over protective agenda and just axe the over packaging ? Then we would have less to recycle and that must make sense in a nation running out of landfil space , surely ? What is the sense of having two corn of the cob wrapped in plastic for either a person who only needs one or three and objects to us wasting food while much of the world starves ? Surely the freemarket ought to mean less packaging of fruit & veg as we customers decide how many oranges etc that we want rather than stores deciding the amounts for us ? Thank goodness for local markets where we can decide for ourselves more or less ! We could waste less food if we could buy the amount that suited us which is turn would mean less packaging as well as it would be sold loose in a sensible world….

Now that M&S & The National Trust are charging for plastic bags let us hope that it works and that good causes get more money and the number of bags starts falling . Seeing those outside peoples front doors full of rubbish is an unpleasant form of litter and people ought to recall The Daily Mail’s highly successful campaign on the damage to the environment ( i.e. marine life dying & the countryside being spoiled ) and knock this silly habbit on the head . The shopping got from A to B in my grandparents day without 13 billion bags a year being issued in a country that you can fit into Texas three times over . You have to credit Alistar Darling with the sense to see that enough was enough and that this needed stopping . Killing off the free plastic bag will not save the planet by itself but if it means less rubbish going to landfill then long term these bin taxes will be less necessary so that recycling rates can rise . I would not mind a bin tax & a congestion charge and a plastic bag charge to be set & collected locally if it ensured a corresponding cut in the Council Tax . Polluters paying is all well & good just as long as taxes do not rise as a result . Taxes are far too high and the Tories will not win the business vote and save our economy by pledging 3p off of corporate tax taking the UK rate down to double the rate in Eire. A Labour rate of 28p on corporate profits & a Tory rate of 25p - no wonder the Lib Dems say both the main parties are the same ! 3p will not lead to Eire style dynamism . Business is right - you would get more money for HM Treasury from a 20% single rate of corporate tax as productivity would rise & avoidence would fall owing to lower & fewer rates .

The real price of the system would soon become apparent and lead to innovation in the sort of products the citizens want. From the “put-it-all-in-one-bin-and-sort-it-for-me”, five star service, down to “I-will-sort-everything-for-a-rock-bottom-price”.

A natural price for the landfill charge would appear quite quickly, I think, probably on a similar basis to Carbon trading.

Its taken me less than a week to confirm what i suspected.

Would the conservatives really be any better. Where are the brains, like you, that are needed to reign in the executive.

CCTV, the modern answer to all criminal activity!