h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am wondering what significant public interest there is in the CPS prosecuting this particular case.

Unless it is considered that in these type of cases it is in the public interest to re-instate that taking food from a skip that is destined to go to landfill is illegal and that it is a 'crime' worthy of prosecution.

A lot of councils recently have been getting a lot of stick about the state of their cities and towns.

Because they've been cutting back and cutting back rather than reducing waste, we've arrived in a situation where things like street cleaning is only done once a month, and there's a lot more beggars (justified and not) on the streets. Manchester especially has this problem, as well as a lot of illegal hawkers.

And people have been complaining, a lot, about how grotty and run down the places are starting to look. So, the public interest comes from the public wanting a cleaner place to live, with less litter, graffiti and homeless people.

Here in Surrey, a big truck with brushes and nozzles comes around once a week to sweep up the homeless people.

Who're then taken off and processed for the food banks.

Soylent Green Forever!

Those are wider issues

Should those be the justification for prosecution of these three individuals and their individual actions?

Because that is what it seems to me is the only motivation for this case and that strikes me as unjust from the starting point

My last post in reply to Pastey's post 15582

Surely though it is better to know, and understand the wider issues that are being taken into account?

I very much doubt that someone went into work one morning and said "Hey, I've had a cracking idea, over the weekend I found this obscure law, so let's start enforcing it for a laugh!" Although anything is possible.

It's far more likely that to address the wider issues, they would have started looking on how they could address the individual causes.

Yes, of course it is better to know the wider issues

It is just that I don't think this is a way to address them or to raise awareness of them.

How is addressing the causes not the way to address the symptoms?


The symptom, messy streets.
The causes, litter, graffiti, beggars, homeless.

The way to remove the symptoms would be to provide low cost homes and hostels, provide subsistence for those that need it, provide alternative outlets for creative talents and clean up the graffiti once the outlets have been created, and to provide more litter bins and educating people about litter to promote less of it as well as enforcing the fines to discourage its creation.
By tackling the causes, you remove the symptoms.

So how is that not the best way to deal with it?

Well I wouldn't put beggars and homeless people in a 'messy street' category

And I don't think that that these three individuals should be prosecuted for wider social issues.

Beggars and homeless people fit in the messy street category as far as the majority of the public see it, and you were asking about how it fit in with public interest.

Ah ok, I am in a minority there then

Anyway, I suspect these three will make a good case out it.

In Dublin, emptying the bins has been contracted out by the council to a private firm. Householders have to buy tags to secure onto their bins to have them emptied.

This has led to lockable bins, and much more rubbish dumped on the streets.

It's not that far off in places in the UK too.

Manchester city centre businesses have to buy special bin bags from companies. They fill these and put them out to get collected. This is on top of having to pay business rates.

But you always get people that see the rubbish left out, and leave their own litter on top of it, which the collectors won't touch.

And the street cleaners only seem able to do the main shopping streets. So you quickly get a build up of rubbish in some places.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/29/prosecutors-drop-case-men-food-iceland-bins

the case has been dropped now apparently

Yeah, Iceland had a go at the CPS wanting to know what was going on.

The Crown Prosecution Service... that sounds... very serious, I didn´t know what CPS stands for.

Public interest they say was the object for prosecuting those people.

Maybe they have watched videos from Greece, Portugal or Spain where ordinary citizens are collecting food from the containers and thought... hmmm, but, WE are not THEM! Quickly, we must put an end to this bad image of Britain, it´s of public interest that nobody think that here in the Great Britain, people are suffering just the same as those PIGS lazy people.


THe causes of those messy streets , with more homeless and rubbish are just the same everywhere: the "austerity" measures, applied to ordinary citizens while the fat cats... go fatter.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/poll/2014/jan/28/communications?commentpage=1

#NoScarJo: should Oxfam sever ties with Scarlett Johansson?

Scarlett Johansson's deal with an Isreali company working in the West Bank could hurt Oxfam's brand. Should the NGO end its relationship with the actress? Take the poll

I say YES, of course. I´ve written to Oxfam Spain and said I´ll "sever" my ties with them.
Doctors without frontiers will surely be happy with my money as well.

A bit over simplified, but reasonably close.

The problem with a lot of the councils and their cutbacks was we didn't have a change in government for too long. When one party is in power, they give more central government handouts to councils held by the own party, as you'd expect. Because we had one party in power for so long, the councils had grown used to that money always being there, and the councillors had come into their jobs with it like that, and not known any different.

Councillors are not businessmen, it's been a long time since they were. Politics is a business in its own right now.

So, cut off the money when the government changes, and all of a sudden councils are realising that all this money they've been spending doesn't actually exist any more. So they have to stop giving it out. Far too many services and niceties were paid for for many years from the "excess" which was actually central government. These are almost always in arts and entertainment, or things that are seen to culturally benefit the population. But what council is going to be responsible for stopping the funding completely to a day care centre for disabled kids? None. So they have to cut money across the board, even though before the handouts all these extra things never existed.

Over the course of the last government pretty much the entire country's reserves were spent by government and councils on making themselves look better by giving everyone all these things they wanted, and that they now seem to feel they need. And nobody can remember what they did before these things were available.

And none of this has anything to do with bankers or fat cat businessmen. This is purely bad governance by government and local councils.

best post I've read on h2g2 for a while.