The Aged P

From now on any customer who wants a plastic bag at the check out of every large retailer will have to pay a compulsory 5p levy. The government hopes that this will reduce the use of plastic bags and help the environment.

Of every 5p paid under the new charge, 0.83p will go to the Treasury in VAT and retailers have been told they are expected to give the rest to good causes.

You can bet your Nectar card that the six figure boss of the RSPCA and his fellow big charity chiefs are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of shedloads of shekels being forklifted into their money chests via this plastic bag levy. Some of it might go to the front line but you can guarantee that a lot of it will pay for shiny new offices and extra bonuses for those vital “administrators”….

What’s more Cameron’s government will be getting a slice of the action with that 0.83p. No doubt Samantha Cameron will be persuading Dave to pump that into foreign aid or climate change gifts so that she can feel a warm glow inside at her dinner parties.

So how about we approach this from a different angle. Keep the “good causes” ploy but instead of funnelling it the charity fat cats why not insist that the money raised from the levy goes to charities that are local to each supermarket’s catchment area. Indeed most supermarkets already identify with local good causes.

Then, instead of the supermarket bosses deciding which good cause to support while schmoozing with fellow rotarians at the golf club get the customers who pay the levy to decide for themselves by copying the Waitrose way……giving them a plastic token which they then throw into one of three boxes identifying a local good cause. Every two months three new charities would be identified so that over the year at least eighteen organisations would benefit. Then, at the end of the year, each charity would have to publish, in detail, how exactly the money was spent and make the facts available on the supermarket’s website, in the local media and via a leaflet issued at each checkout.

Oh and Dave…..why not announce that you won’t be taking your cut from the levy so the whole 5p will go to local good causes.

Simples…….

You and Yours is one of several Radio 4 programmes that still have Reithian values embedded within and earlier this week they had a useful and timely piece on “Not Going To University”

On Call You and Yours we’ll be asking do you need to go to university to be successful? More than four hundred thousand students are just starting their new courses across the country, and have committed to spend at least three years and in the region of fifty thousand pounds in getting a degree. But is university the only path to getting solid qualifications? If you didn’t apply or didn’t get in, are you left feeling flat and directionless?

Increasing graduate unemployment and dumbed down degree courses have made a mockery of the “50% at university” pimped by the Blair drones who never really left student politics. So a serious attempt to remove “not going to uni” as a badge of shame is to be welcomed.

Overall there was a great deal of common sense in the programme. But in the course of the broadcast when somebody advised going out and doing any job rather than waiting for something “suitable” one of the presenters agreed about working in a supermarket or McDonalds until something “worthwhile comes along”

Now that is rather odd when you realise that companies in the supermarket and fast food areas are doing very well and are major employers. Retail is also one of the few areas where it is still possible to rise quickly through the ranks via enthusiasm and hard graft without an initial fistful of paper “qualifications”. It is also an honest way of earning money to pay the bills.

But the BBC has always had a rather aristocratic disdain for “trade” and shopkeepers because that is the feeling of the media demi-monde that inhabits and controls the organisation. Selling is a grubby little business in their opinion whereas “making” things is godlike, hence their idealisation of manufacturing, ignoring the fact that stuff is useless unless it’s sold.

That, of course, was the mistake made by the communists who ruled Russia for over seventy years. Lenin and Stalin were so obsessed with production that they forgot that the goods and the crops also had to be distributed. Transport networks and retail systems were neglected – the USSR was always a logistical nightmare.

The result? Goods stockpiled at chokepoints and zero choice for consumers who were therefore forced into buying crap products.

Maybe I can draw a more clearer picture – Thatcher losing in 1983 and Britain under Michael Foot during the 80s = British Leyland cars and BT still dictating who could have a phone…

How about we put it another way to You and Yours?

Not going to uni but you need to earn money but nothing suitable in the pipeline? You could always fill in the time in at the BBC until you got something worthwhile at Tesco or McDonalds…

H/T for pic…SodaHead