1 September 2003
Retaliation and how not to get away with it
In the 1960s, when referees started sending off footballers who retaliated instead of those who committed the initial foul, they could have had no idea that it would lead to the Clean Environment Act of 2005.
But it was all part of the emerging culture of placing the blame on the victim, instead of the offender.
Footballers can still plunge in with bruising borderline challenges, knowing that any instinctive response by the victim is more likely to get him sent off than them. At the same time burglars have been encouraged to sue householders, and car drivers may have to pay for damage caused by cyclists.
And now, if the Government gets its way, landowners will have to pay to get rid of rubbish dumped on their land by people they dont know and have never seen.
This is outrageous by itself, but it is made even more memorably outrageous by the fact that it is the Government that is to blame for the increased amount of dumping. Could ministers really not have worked out that a massive increase in landfill tax would lead to illegal dumping? Are they stupid, or simply cynical?
During a walk through Ringland Hills, just outside Norwich, a few days ago, I came upon a selection of household appliances, rubble and other assorted litter. This is bound to get worse if or should I say when the Government increases landfill tax still further.
There is no way landowners can stop people dumping without fencing their property, which is just another kind of pollution. Barbed wire is even more unsightly than electricity pylons.
Of course no-one should dump rubbish, but of course people will, just as they continue to drop litter. How about a massive increase in the punishment for that?
Anyone who cares about our environment will want rubbish and litter to disappear. We have to be prepared to pay for that as a community, and it should be a priority.
If only the Government would copy Breckland Council, which has decided to remove and crush cars abandoned in its area. Maybe the main objective is untaxed vehicles, and maybe it will play into the hands of people who want to avoid paying to have their cars scrapped, but at least the rubbish will disappear.
Taking the high ground
Investigating a claim by experts that the Scottish Highlands used to be part of Norfolk, I spent a fortnight in the Highlands looking for links.
It is quite obvious that Norfolk is unnaturally flat, I was told. Equally, the Highlands are unnaturally hilly.
It seems fairly obvious that in the remote past, a great deal of Norfolk land was transported to the Highlands.
It was an extremely relaxing two weeks, marred only by the journey home. Travelling from Aberdeenshire down to Carlisle was quite pleasant, but then we hit the border. Immediately the road deteriorated and within a mile or two we were in 40mph road works restrictions. It was almost like entering another country. Oh yes, it was another country. It was our country.
The M6 in the Manchester area is always a nightmare. This year some genius in the Highways Agency thought it was a good idea to follow up long bridge-strengthening delays almost immediately with long resurfacing delays. This is the Highways Agencys version of the Chinese water torture, and by the time we reached Stoke it became clear that it was having a similar effect.
The biggest danger on long-distance roads is not speed but frustration. As an experienced driver well aware of the dangers, I was still twitchy in a dignified sort of way.
So I am tempted again to ask why we are obsessed by the dangers of speed and why the reaction of a councillor in Suffolk to two crashes which are not speed-related is to demand a reduced speed limit. But of course I am obsessed by the subject; so I will not do that.
However I would like to congratulate Norfolk police in carrying out an investigation into the real reason for accidents at dangerous junctions instead of just slapping up speed cameras.
And I would like to ask why, if speed is a primary cause of accidents, deaths on British roads were 7343 in 1934, when only 2.4 vehicles were registered, and 3423 in 1999 well under half, with over ten times as many much speedier vehicles on the road.
And further, why this excellent and continuous decline suddenly ended in 2001, at the point when speed became the national obsession and the speed camera companies starting making lots of money. Some mistake, surely?
Just tick here
I was disturbed to read of an increase in the number of ticks about, especially in the Thetford area. I have noticed that this corresponds with a massive increase in the number of documents that include tick boxes. These vary from educational assessments to amazingly pointless surveys and funding initiatives.
Clearly tick boxes must contain ticks, and as most of these can be dangerous to health, irrelevant, wrong or misleading, I suggest that we abolish all these documents immediately. There is no time to lose.
Newt expansion goes underground
Happily a large number of schools have taken the first step in this direction by refusing to have anything to do with PFI funding. Some have attributed the rejection to politics or doubts about the companies involved, but my information is that the documents involved are so complicated that a head teacher would require roughly 36 hours a day to cope with them. This is only possible in the Hingham area during time distortion events.
Norfolk veteran Henry (Fred) Shrimp Houseago has come out of hiding to warn East Anglians about a new coup by great crested newts, whose expansionist plans he exposed some years ago.
The newts, who already enjoy greater freedom to cross the A11 than people thanks to specially constructed tunnels have now persuaded English Heritage, a particularly gullible organisation, to publish a leaflet calling on locals to safeguard them.
The aggressive amphibians, which have infiltrated various levels of local government in the region, have been condemned by Mr Houseago. They will stop at nothing, he warned. The only consolation for Norfolk people is that they are particularly suited to Suffolk.
Let's be moving on
Interesting comment from Norwich police on the huge two-hour snarl-up at the exit from the Castle Mall car park in the city one day last week
Apparently they did not notice anything was wrong. They had spotted a traffic jam in the Rose Lane area, but that was not unusual; so they didnt have to do anything about it.
Presumably they apply the same principle to burglaries.