Of Plastic Bags And Milk Bottles

There is a post doing the rounds on Facebook (which I think originated in Australia) that is critical of Greta Thunberg and her generation for their concerns that are predicated on what we, the whole human race, are doing to the planet. If you’ve not seen it, here it is (and if it's difficult to read here, I've added the text at the end of this blog).

You may agree with what Greta Thunberg and others are saying about climate change or you may not, that is not really the concern of this blog. What the Facebook post provoked for me was a sort of nostalgia for the period the author of it was writing about, as a lot of it chimes with my childhood.

It’s true that back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was barely a plastic bottle to be seen as Coca Cola only began selling their product in plastic PET bottles in 1978. Prior to that, we bought soft drinks in glass bottles and generally took them back to the shops for a refund of the ‘deposit’ we had paid when we bought them. 

When plastic bottles were introduced, the idea of recycling them never crossed our minds, it wasn't possible anyway – they went straight into the normal waste – and it wasn’t until 2003 that the Household Waste Recycling Act was passed, which required local authorities in England to provide every household with a separate collection of at least two types of recyclable materials by 2010.[1] Today I have a recycling bin that is about twice the size of my normal one.

Coca Cola's first PET bottle.

According to RECOUP, one of the UK’s leading authorities on plastics packaging recycling, in 2014 60% of PET plastic bottles in household waste were being collected for recycling - in 2001 this figure was just 3%. Plastic bottles are not the problem, people are. Plastic bottles are little more of a problem than glass ones, except that glass bottles are reused rather than recycled and recycling plastic bottles requires a process that needs much more energy than washing and reusing glass. But, as recyclable does not mean recycled, the problem is us, human beings, who still dispose of 40% of plastic bottles into the general waste, where they end up in landfill.

I remember my Mum going shopping with a large hessian bag, into which the greengrocer tipped loose carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and the like. All of these now come pre-packed in plastic bags in supermarkets these days, and there are plastic bags available to take home the loose ones. There was an almighty furore when a charge for single-use plastic bags was introduced in 2015, and if the intention was to wean us off plastic bags, it didn’t work. In 2018 1.5billion so-called ‘bags for life’ were sold in the UK; the average household bought 54 that year. 

The countries shown in green have banned plastic bags.

Bags for life have become as disposable as the old single-use ones and campaigners such as Greenpeace have suggested that such bags either be banned or that the price be increased to around 70p (when Ireland introduced a 70-cent charge, sales fell by 90%).  The idea that a country could totally ban plastic bags might seem unworkable to many people, however, there are 74 countries worldwide that have banned plastic bag usage. If plastic bags were either banned or priced prohibitively (let’s say £5), we would all find alternatives, but at present there is no incentive for us to do so.

My parents never owned a car; I walked to school every day of the thirteen years I was in full-time education and I would take issue with the blame that the person who originated this Facebook post attaches to five to sixteen-year-olds for being taken to school in Mummy’s 4x4, because it is Mummy and her generation who own and drive these vehicles and decided to take their children to school in them.

It is equally disingenuous to implicate McDonalds and Burger King’s plastic toys, because although there’s really no reason (marketing purposes aside) why a Happy Meal has to include a plastic frippery, then if plastic toys are the problem, then there are more appropriate targets than the fast food companies. These days however, there are toy manufacturers who are moving towards the production of sustainable and ethical products. Neither McDonalds nor Burger King contribute to the problem of the waste from polystyrene food boxes, however, since (drinks apart), all of their food comes in paper or cardboard containers, which are either recyclable or biodegradable. In fact, most fast food from chain restaurants now comes in cardboard or paper, it only seems to be small and independent outlets that continue to use polystyrene. It seems to me that few teenagers frequent the food retailers that use polystyrene, preferring the big chains that have almost exclusively eschewed that material.

My abiding memory of newspaper being used to wrap food was cold food rather than hot, as shopkeepers would wrap up blocks of ice cream (which then came in carboard containers) in it to keep it from melting while you took it home. Today a litre of ice cream will come in a plastic tub; recyclable if not always recycled.

The milkman however, is apparently making a comeback. More than 70,000 new households signed up for milk deliveries from Milk & More last year. Back in my youth, everyone had their milk delivered to their doorstep; supermarkets only began selling milk in the 1990s when the milk industry was deregulated. Glass bottle usage for milk, which had accounted for 94% of the market in 1975, fell to just 4% by 2012. Unfortunately, my memories of the milkman were that all too often he didn’t deliver until after we had left for work or school, which meant that even when we had enough milk  for our morning tea and cornflakes (and boy, did we seem to drink a lot more of the stuff back then than we do today, we had a pint delivered every day, I don’t buy much more than a pint a week now!) the bottle would be on the doorstep, heating away quite nicely in the sun, leaving a rather unappetising pint for when you got home. That is if it hadn’t been stolen (we had to ask our milkman to hid ours behind a bush at one stage), or if birds hadn’t pecked through the lid to get to the cream on top. In the interests of the environment, I would happily go back to having a milk deliveries, although at 95p for a pint of organic milk, Milk & More are significantly more expensive than your average supermarket, and with a one pint per week order, I’m not sure it’s worth my while (or theirs).

It may seem ironic – and lacking in self-awareness – that the original Facebook post is ostensibly from a member of the generation that introduced plastic bottles, stopped using milkmen, began buying food in polystyrene containers, brought in single-use plastic bags, and was in the forefront of driving gas-guzzling 4x4s, but then waxes nostalgic for all the things that it criticises the younger generation for preaching about and apparently wishing we could return to. But I rather think that that was the point.

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[1] https://www.proskips.co.uk/when-did-recycling-start-in-the-uk

Footnote: Facebook post in full:

It’s hilarious, all these school kids preaching to us oldies that we ruined the planet! Back in the 60’s and 70’s and 80's not a plastic bottle to be seen it was all glass that were reused, pop bottles taken back to the shop. No plastic bags, loose food was brown paper bags, all sweets were bought in 1/4lb put in a paper bag. Mothers used shopping trolleys to carry heavy stuff or used a linen bag. You walked to school from 5yrs to 16yrs not jumping into mummy’s or daddy’s 4+4. No McDonald’s or Burger King plastic toys, no polystyrene food boxes for you to litter the streets with, we used newspapers to wrap our hot food in. Our milk was delivered at 5 am 6 days a week in glass bottles by a milkman who drove an electric vehicle! Holidays were in a caravan in Britain not an aeroplane to far off destinations. So I think these youngsters need to take a look in a recycled mirror and think was it my wasteful generation who are ruining the planet.

Biased or Balanced? Where Does The BBC Stand?

The Tory government seems to have it in for the BBC at present - and for Channel 4 News, The Mirror, The i, HuffPost, PoliticsHome, The Independent among others – with journalists excluded from Downing Street briefings, ministers refusing to appear on the Today programme on Radio 4, and suggestions that by 2027, when the BBC’s charter is up for renewal, the licence fee will have been scrapped and the corporation thinned down to a mere shadow of its current form.

Too right, many of you may say. You may also say that the BBC is a liberal, left-wing, anti-Tory, anti-Brexit organisation – except those of you who think that the BBC is pro-Tory, pro-Brexit, and very much anti-Labour (and particularly anti-Corbyn). But the role of the BBC – and other broadcasters and journalists for that matter – is to question and challenge politicians (and anyone else) and not simply accept what they say and parrot it blindly. I suspect that many people who are critical of the BBC questioning Boris Johnson and his government would be similarly critical of the BBC if it didn’t pursue Jeremy Corbyn or any Labour politician in the same way.

Dominic Cummings – the Prime Minister’s special adviser – is attributed with remarks that No 10 would ‘whack’ the BBC. Mr Cummings is an interesting specimen, for whereas unelected Brussels bureaucrats were considered beyond the pale, he, the unelected bureaucrat that he is, is considered okay – “He may be an unelected bureaucrat, but he’s our unelected bureaucrat.”

There is an argument that runs along the lines that because the BBC is supposed to be balanced and impartial, then every programme, every debate, every news broadcast, has to be. That every report into one claim or another has to include something or someone that refutes that position. On that basis, when they reported the craze for eating Tide Pods back in 2018, they really ought to have balanced the argument that doing so could be fatal with a viewpoint from someone who had survived eating one and promoted the view that it was a harmless piece of fun. Or perhaps not.

If we are talking about a lack of balance, then Question Time is probably the prime example. Nigel Farage – the high priest of Brexit – has appeared on the programme more than thirty times, during which time not a single pro-EU MEP has appeared, yet Farage believes that BBC is biased against him, and against Brexit. By the bye, Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time than anyone else in the 21^st century. Equally, however, I’m sure that there is ‘proof’ that Question Time is a rabidly left-wing, anti-Brexit, Farage hating, Boris baiting, tree-hugging programme full of snowflakes.

My point here is that it is very easy to pick up on something – no matter how rare or isolated – and offer it as proof of one’s own beliefs and prejudices and the media feeds that, because whether we accept it or not, the mainstream media – and social media – have a powerful role in affecting behaviours and attitudes.

The bulk of the newspapers published in England tend to be right of centre, which is scarcely surprising given that they tend to be owned by organisations or individuals that are right of centre. Understandably they will support politicians whose policies and interests are most closely aligned to, and protect their interests, but I’m sure you already knew that. Naturally, consumers of these publications may, having been drip-fed the views and outlooks that those papers support, find their own prejudices and points of view moulded by what they read. And, of course, people will naturally gravitate towards newspapers that support their own point of view or preferences.

For many years I read the Daily Mail, although I haven’t done so on a regular basis since 2012. When I did read it, I often found myself nodding along in agreement with it, particularly with some of the opinion pieces. Now I don’t know if it is me that has changed, or whether the paper has become more rabidly right-wing in recent years (a bit of both I suspect), but I picked up a copy of it in a dentist’s waiting room recently and despite knowing what to expect vis a vis its political views, I was unprepared for the bile, spite and hatred that it spewed: I’m sure it was never as bad when I was a regular reader. Then there is the Daily Express. I’m not sure whether I know any regular readers of that newspaper, but I suspect not, since – if the paper is anything to go by – they would be easily recognisable as being in a constant state of outrage given the frequency with which words like ‘anger,’ ‘fury,’  and ‘rage’ appear in the randomly capitalised headlines on their website (when they are not writing about Princess Diana, statins, or the impending cataclysmic weather we can expect next winter).

The influence of newspapers in forming opinion should not be underestimated. Liverpool, Sefton and the Wirral bucked the trend during the 2016 EU referendum, as these districts were rare islands where Remain was in the majority among a sea of Leave voting areas around them. 

The apparent 'Sun' effect on Liverpool voting Remain may just be that larger, more metropolitan
areas were generally more likely to be in favour of staying in the EU

A major reason that has been cited for this was that these areas had largely boycotted The Sun newspaper following its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which it placed blame on the Liverpool supporters. Researchers at the London School of Economics and the University of Zurich found Merseyside was around 10 per cent less Eurosceptic than the rest of the UK as a result of the boycott. It seems that having shunned the Brexit supporting Sun, many of these readers migrated to the more pro-EU Daily Mirror. This argument carries less weight however when one considers that Manchester (where there was no known Sun boycott) also heavily voted Remain.

Liverpool has never forgiven Th Sun for stories like this.

It is easier to destroy than create, easier to criticise than to praise, and the media are hyena-like in picking on the weak and vulnerable. It is nothing new that the tabloid press and the celebrity magazines build people up just to knock them down, and are able to hold two contradictory views about people simultaneously – so long as both are negative views. Thus, Piers Morgan is able to criticise Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for taking money from the crown rather than going out and earning it, and then criticise them for getting involved with bankers Goldman Sachs. Not earning your own money is bad, but equally so is earning it, or so the logic runs.

Celebrity gossip magazines like these are now often banned in various waiting rooms
due to their negativity and celebrity shaming.

Despite the ambiguous evidence as to how influential The Sun boycott on Merseyside was in the 2016 referendum, it seems fairly unequivocal that the mainstream media and social media play a very significant role in shaping public opinion, or in reinforcing it. Even if allegations of bias against the BBC have any basis in fact, at least they rarely – if ever – spew the bile and hatred so commonplace elsewhere, especially in the print media.

Whatever you may think of the BBC, they are actually an oasis of calm and measured consideration of news stories when compared with many of their competitors, and we lose that at our peril. The criticism of the BBC – that it is not as impartial, or unbiased as its charter requires – could not be applied to any news organisation that took its place. Look at Fox News in the USA, or RT International; are these balanced, impartial and unbiased broadcasters? No, they have no need to even pretend to be.

If the day comes and the BBC isn’t there anymore – or is as pared back as some might wish - then our television and radio may be dominated by broadcasters who have no reason to even pretend to be balanced or unbiased and that could not be a good thing.

Who Said Crime Doesn’t Pay?

This is a heavily truncated description of a sequence of events that began a year ago. The full story would fill many blogs, and it is long enough as it is. I have not mentioned the name of the company involved (which has ceased trading anyway), nor its directors in case this may affect any ongoing investigations by the police, although I am not sure that there are any ongoing investigations.

In February 2019 my mother-in-law was scammed out of over £6,000 and the efforts that my wife went through trying to recover that money, and the inefficiency and total inaction on the part of the people that you would think would want to pursue the people who did this, leads me to the inescapable conclusion that in this case, crime - specifically fraud - does pay.

We only discovered that £6,000 had gone missing from my mother-in-law’s bank account when we decided that we really had to deal with the tsunami of paperwork that was all over her living room floor. Our principal concern was that hidden among the mountains of paper was some crucial bill that had not been paid. As it turned out, I did find a cheque that was three years old and hadn’t been paid into her bank account; fortunately getting a replacement turned out to be relatively straightforward.

Having gone through the piles of utility bills and sundry other correspondence, I sorted about four years’ worth of bank statements into date order and started plodding through them in case there was anything dubious. I didn’t expect to find anything but then I came across a debit for £6,100 for a cheque that had been issued.

As luck would have it, I almost immediately came across a Customer Purchase Order, which was for the supposed installation of some loft insulation. This document showed that this was what my mother-in-law had issued the cheque for.

We managed to piece together a few facts, as although Val’s mum could not remember the men to whom she gave the cheque calling, her neighbour did remember them coming and being quite aggressive; she told them to leave, but it seems that they returned and that was when they got the cheque. Of course, we checked the loft; no work had been done – there had never been any intention on the fraudster’s part to do any – and it looked as though no one had been in the loft for decades.

What happened next is a long, depressing story of the frustration that comes dealing with the agencies that you would hope and believe should be there to help people who have been the victims of this sort of thing. It is fortunate that Val and I have the time, the patience – and after a couple of lifetimes working in environments where one has to deal with bureaucracy – the wherewithal of going through the steps to try and recover the money. I am sure that a lot of victims of this sort of crime simply give up and write the money off.

Our first port of call was the local police station, except they don’t accept visitors except by appointment, so we phoned 101, the police non-emergency number. Some seventy-minutes later, when we finally spoke to someone, we were told to contact Action Fraud. We had tried phoning the company, but both of their phone numbers went straight to voicemail. We reported the matter to Action Fraud; to this day, we have not heard anything from them and contacting them for updates is completely pointless. Similarly, Trading Standards are of no help whatever, as we reported the matter to them through the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and have never heard a peep since, and according to the CAB, Trading Standards do not – as a matter of policy – update them, nor complainants, on any progress that they may make. We eventually did get confirmation – through the county council, and thanks only to the assistance of my mother-in-law’s Member of Parliament - that the matter had been filed unactioned by Trading Standards.

Naturally, we tried writing to the company asking them to refund the £6,100 and we also contacted my mother-in-law’s bankers and requested a copy of the paid cheque. Both the Royal Mail and Barclays Bank performed – or should I say, failed to perform – these tasks with breath-taking levels of incompetence.

The Royal Mail delivered our Recorded Delivery letter back to us instead of to the addressee, and when they resent it and had it refused at the address, promptly lost it for a number of weeks. It has to be said that our writing this and subsequent letters were just us going through the motions, we actually delivered letters in person, but as the company’s address was at a self-storage unit, it is improbable that anyone from the company ever saw them.

It took innumerable phone calls and letters to get a copy of the paid cheque from the bank – in the end, we had to raise a formal complaint – and when we finally got it, showed that although my mother-in-law had signed the cheque, had been completed by one of the men who scammed her.

We did make contact with the police again and eventually made it to the police station where we spent three hours giving a statement. That was in September 2019; we’ve heard nothing since.

We instructed solicitors to try and recover the funds, albeit that we were reluctant to throw good money after bad, and they had no more success in contacting the company or its directors than we did.

There is a happy ending to this story, for us at least, although other similar victims may not have been as lucky. In an act of desperation, we wrote to the bank at the suggestion of a social worker and suggested that my mother-in-law may have been a victim of an authorised push payment fraud (APP), although these are more normally associated with bank transfers than cheques.

The bank then phoned us and took some more details and decided that, without any admission of liability on their part, that they would credit Val’s mum’s account with the full amount of the cheque, plus £150 for the less than efficient way they had dealt with our request for the copy of the paid cheque. This they said, was in recognition of the lengths to which we had gone in trying to recover the money ourselves.

While this ended happily for us inasmuch that we did get the bulk of the money back (there were some solicitors fees that we obviously did not recover), a lot of people in similar circumstances would not have been so fortunate.

Investigations at Companies House (their website is a mine of information), showed that the directors of the company that scammed my mother-in-law have set up and dissolved a good number of companies in recent years, companies that I imagine they set up with the express purpose of committing similar frauds.

Action Fraud were worse than useless in this matter, although having seen the expose that The Times ran on them, this is scarcely surprising, as it seems that by and large, they do little more than record incidents of fraud that the public report to them, and collate the information. Cases that are passed on to the police seem to have a limited chance of being investigated, let alone being resolved. The Times reports that a review conducted by former Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Sir Craig Mackay showed that only one in 200 officers were dedicated to investigating fraud even though there were nearly four million incidents per year in England and Wales, which is more than one in three of all crimes.

The report said that fraudsters were able to ‘operate with impunity’ and that millions of victims were being failed as cases were being handed to ‘unskilled investigators’ and that the police could ‘no longer work effectively to identify criminals and help bring them to justice.’ That definitely tallies with our experience.

We did contact my mother-in-law’s MP, although there is little that he could do, even as a member of the party that tags itself ‘the party of law and order.’ He said he would write to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel about the matter, or at least the general principle. If he did, she doesn’t appear to have responded. Her boast at last October’s Tory party conference that the government was "coming after the thugs, gangs, and criminals who make law-abiding people's lives a misery" rings pretty hollow, I’m afraid.

Priti Patel 

Bizarrely, we received a letter from Brandon Lewis in his capacity as Minister of State for Security and Deputy for Eu Exit and No Deal Preparation: your guess is as good as mine as to how Brexit connects with the fraud against my mother-in-law. The letter says that Mr Lewis was sorry to hear about the fraud, but then rambles on for several paragraphs generalising about the government’s response to fraud, but stating that although Action Fraud did pass the information on to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, they decided not to pass it on to the police and that Trading Standards were the people through whom a claim against the fraudsters should be pursued. As we know, Trading Standards filed the matter unactioned.

The conclusion that I have reached is that if you are a fraudster, or plan to be one, your chances of getting caught are slim; if you are a victim, you are pretty much on your own. In this case, and no doubt in many more besides, the agencies that one expects to help – Action Fraud, the police, Trading Standards – take the information and simply file it unactioned.  Since there is no point in relying on them, then it is clearly essential to be careful and avoid being scammed, but if you are old and vulnerable, that may be easier said than done.

It's Good To Talk

In 1990, BT launched an advertising campaign featuring Bob Hoskins, star of The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to name but three of his big-screen successes, with the tag line “It’s good to talk.”

At a time when mobile phones were in their infancy, and BT had a monopoly on the landline market, this campaign was less about generating new business and more about getting existing consumers to use their phones more frequently. And the existing customers it targeted were men, hence the choice of Hoskins to front the campaign, because of the sexes, men – despite the fact that it was they who by and large paid the bills – made fewer phone calls.

It’s possibly as true today as it ever was that men are generally less inclined to pick up the phone – whether it’s a landline or a mobile – and call someone up for a chat. Perhaps I am perpetuating stereotypes, especially since my wife is not especially inclined to call anyone simply for a chat either, but generally it is my experience (based on an admittedly very small sample), that women are more inclined to use the phone for casual conversations than are men.

Whereas my mother would phone friends and family members regularly, and my first wife would do the same (I never understood why she saw the need to phone someone and chat with them for ages when she had already arranged to meet them that same day, but she did), my father seldom made calls to anyone other than – infrequently – to his brothers or sister. Even after I married and moved away from my parents, I can only recall him phoning me once, and that was for the very practical reason that my mother had recently become afflicted by tinnitus, and was driving him mad with her complaints about the noises in her ears that she thought were cars, lorries, or machinery outside the house.

I don’t recall my father ever calling any friends, although that was largely due to the fact that I don’t remember him ever actually having friends and I definitely don’t recall an occasion on which he went out with friends. That isn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy talking – getting him to stop was more often the problem - and whereas most people are ever keen to shoo away Jehovah's Witnesses when they call at the door, when they spoke to my dad it was more likely that they would make excuses and leave!

While BT were telling us, and men in particular, that it was good to talk because that would be good for their profits, the idea that it is good to talk is otherwise rightly based on the fact that it’s good for our mental health. I realise that I am stereotyping wildly (again), but generally, a group of women gathered together will have conversations much different from a similar group of men. Men don’t generally talk with each other about their feelings, their emotions, their fears or their needs. It is possibly a contributor to the alarming statistic that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK, and is responsible for 18 deaths every day.[1]

I admit that I am as reticent as the next man when it comes to expressing my feelings, but I really appreciate the benefits of doing so. My sole experience of professional counselling, which came back in 1993, proved immensely valuable, and while it may not be for everyone, it is definitely something which – if the need arises – should not be written off.

There’s an old saw that suggests that while men utter somewhere in the region of 7,000 words per day, women speak an average of 20,000 although research undertaken in 2007, and published in the American journal, Science suggests that this is way off beam. A decade’s worth of data collected by the University of Arizona in Tucson produced results that had women speaking 16,215 words and men 15,669 per day. I would be interested to know how many words I speak daily; there are many days when I reckon my total would be way below 15k.

A few weeks ago my wife and younger daughter went away for a few days, and although I spoke to them daily on the phone, it quickly dawned on me that barring the odd exchange with someone serving in a coffee shop or the supermarket, I went somewhere in the region of five days without having a face-to-face conversation with anyone. Did that bother me? No, not at all. Being an only child, I have always been comfortable in my own company; I think that I would have been ideally suited to some solitary profession – lighthouse keeper, perhaps – as on balance, I am an introvert. Of course, I knew that at the end of the week, my family were coming home but there are many people for whom a week - and longer - without a face-to-face conversation is the norm, for them it is no trivial problem.

I never considered lighthouse keeping as a career, but I reckon it would have been right up my street.

I Googled “am I an introvert” and the definition is me to a tee. Apparently, there is a seemingly paradoxical personality type, the talkative introvert; at times I think that is me, too, but only when there is something worth talking about!

Conversation for the sake of it – what one might call idle jibber-jabber – is sometimes almost physically painful in my experience. That isn’t to say that I can’t yabber on with the best of them (my wife would probably say that, like my father, there are times when it’s difficult to shut me up, and especially when she is talking; she calls it interrupting, I call it joining in – we’ve agreed to differ), but I don’t have a problem with silence, even in company. Companionable silence is, in my view, preferable to inane chatter.

The crux of all this though is that it is good to talk, but like so much in life, it’s about quality, not quantity, about making words count, and while I don’t entirely subscribe to the theory that a problem shared is a problem halved, sharing a problem can at least put it into perspective.

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[1] Source: https://www.thecalmzone.net/