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Oxford City Council is talking rubbish, again. Hard on the heels of the IPPR suggesting that the only way to radically improve recycling is to charge for rubbish collections by weight, it seems that, according to the Oxford Mail, Bin Brother is watching you - the new wheelie bins being, er, rolled out across Oxford from later this autumn will be "IPPR Ready".

Now, when I first saw it, I thought "what a terrible thing for a Lib Dem council to be doing, introducing spies on drives". I see Labour's John Tanner harping on about cost, which is apparently negligible per bin, to which the response of the Lib Dem administration seems to be that it would be better value to plan for this rubbish charging scheme now than have to replace or retrofit the bins in a couple of years time.

You don't need to fit the technology on your trucks of course, at £15k a pop according to the Oxford Mail article. You don't have to use the spyware technology until and unless it becomes compulsory to do so. And I don't think that the Institute for Pre-packaged Policy Rubbish is yet of the level of influence where one report of theirs turns quickly into law (thank goodness).

Of course the technology could be used to prove how regressive such a tax on rubbish could be. That must be it. There could be no better reason for a Lib Dem authority wanting to capture such information, could there?

But you know, maybe the IPPR isn't so far from the right direction after all. For if you charge for collections, surely you must also open them up to competition? It was something that we mulled on but did not resolve when we were trying to allocate functions to area committees here in Oxford, with waste collection ruled to be something that could not be achieved in the then market at smaller contract levels than city wide - so we could not allow area committees for example to decide to take a contract out with a different firm to do collection.

Why should waste collection and disposal be a public "service"? It was required once, just as public bath-houses and steamies were required, for public hygiene in an era when more or less untreatable epidemics were spread by (mostly organic) rubbish in the streets. Surely it is the very definition of a "nanny state" to be clearing up our mess after us? And whilst we have spent billions over the decades ensuring that we are free from the state in matters of personal hygiene and our laundry, we have done very little about technologies to deal with our own rubbish.

And it is our rubbish. There's isn't a lot of certainty in life but virtually every ounce we throw out we have at some stage voluntarily brought into our households. If we can get all that packaging back home from the shops when we buy the goods, surely it would be uncontentious to suggest that we take it back with us next time we go out?

It is easier to bill and reward a few bigger organizations - those competing businesses that will offer to collect our rubbish or pick it up from a mutually convenient place, like back at the supermarket or shopping centre. Land Value Tax might prize scarce landfill sites so that collection and disposal firms have incentives to be ever more inventive about how to reduce landfill. Similarly, Land Value Tax in the form of pollution taxes could control other disposal mechanisms like incineration versus "energy from waste".

The ability to take your empty tin cans back to a shop could be an added inducement to shop there maybe. People might be swayed by how much they have to take back into buying or demanding things with less packaging in the first place, or shopping in stores that use minimal packaging (like local traditional shops rather than out of town once a week supermarkets). Most supermarkets will already deliver your rubbish to your door, complete with its temporary contents of course, why not collect the empties at the same time?

Most people do not want to live in squalor. So if the nanny state is not handling their rubbish (at extremely dubious value for money) or other, competing, mechanisms offer a better value service, they will I am sure soon learn to use them. That leaves "the community" to police the system and enforce in the common good against those few people whose unwillingness to deal with their own rubbish impacts on others, or assist those who simply cannot deal with their own rubbish for some reason. Already we are free not to throw out anything. Already some people do, and for them we have environmental health officers who can step in to ensure their habits do not affect neighbours or the vulnerable.

And that community need not be a city, it could be a residents' association, an apartment block management company or committee, a parish council hiring the monthly village skip, or a neighbourhood action group setting policing priorities for the area. An apartment block - through its freeholder and the leaseholders, or the landlord and its tenants - can be responsible for their share, deciding either to take a contract out for someone to collect residual waste or to find ways of reducing or recycling it - making compost for the communal gardens or the local allotments. So this need not be "privatisation" so much as "mutualisation".

Red text is what's quoted in the Guardian, p2, 30/08/06

I got tagged by James Graham. But being a terrible recluse with no friends, and having seen almost everyone I know in the blogosphere tagged by someone else, I decided that I would give my response over at Lib Dem Voice.

Technorati Tags: gordon brown meme

We should be grateful to Lord Justice Sedley for one thing - re-igniting the debate about the national DNA database. His prescription, however, is completely wrong, and unjustifiable. He is right when he says that:

...the current database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible" because it was unfair and inconsistent.

but we should be very wary of his suggested fix for that, that...

...whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database.

He is of course correct that the current situation is indefensible, Black men are more than twice as likely to be on the database than white, just because of the disproportionate way in which the police target black men for stop and search operations. But his prescription that:

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody guilty or innocent should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

So, we are to be scared from committing any crimes because we know they already have our DNA and when they find that at the scene it'll be an easy next step to "pull" anyone whose DNA is found for questioning. With no other probable cause than that their DNA was at the scene - Paul Walter's Liberal Burblings puts this much better than I have, describing it as "presumed guilt", overturning what must probably be, after Habeas Corpus perhaps, the key principle of English law.

One could imagine a situation where, for example, a victim of crime in the hours before being raped or murdered or whatever was in a place with lots of other people - perhaps a bar or a club. He or she brushed up against countless innocent bystanders, some of whom left a hair on the victim's clothes or sneezed over them or somehow transferred DNA to them or to another item of evidence. The police could just pull all of those people for questioning. Or perhaps that the crime scene was quite a publicly frequented place, and countless innocent samples are collected and the owners of that DNA pulled for questioning.

And as if that weren't enough, what sort of access would the defense have to be given to make this fair? Someday one could imagine the argument succeeding that with evidence disclosure rules, the defense could subpoena anyone whose DNA sample was found to try to create reasonable doubt for their client.

And in future, when the purpose of individual genes are steadily discovered, a witness statement might describe someone that may or may not be involved at the scene and based on that physical description the police could pull all blond men with blue eyes and the obesity gene in the local area to question?

The judge talks also about how many "cold cases" have been solved using DNA evidence. Yes, that may be one of the advances that has been made possible with DNA technology. But I wonder how many of them have actually been solved simply by matching up with the database. I rather suspect very few. That most have probably been a case of arresting the person first suspected many years ago and then checking them up against the DNA. Ie that DNA is used merely to corroborate existing evidence that somehow proved insufficient at the time to convict. That's a very different proposition from having a pro-active database from which to go and pull every person that brushed past the victim twenty years ago and happened to leave DNA that was subsequently collected.

No, storing our DNA is storing a little part of each and every one of us. As I said last week, our DNA should be subject to habeas corpus. It's like putting us all on bail for further questioning, sometime, about any other matter they feel we might be able to help with. The implications even now, let alone in some future time when we may have a seriously authoritarian regime in power or where the technology is available to extrapolate from descriptions what the suspect's DNA might look like, are horrendous.

In an accompanying article, the BBC puts the other side of the case. We already hold proportionally more DNA samples than any other country. Since it was first allowed in 1995 it has been steadily extended. The evidence of "mission creep" is clear already. We cannot trust any government with this sort off information. One only has to have seen the film Gattaca to know why. We must go back to the 1995 regulations, and strengthen them indeed so that people have rights to know and control whether their DNA is held if they are not currently in the criminal justice system for a good reason.

Even if he was never going to be high up my preferences (let's be honest, he was fifth out of a field of four for me), and I agree with many sentiments expressed that Mark Oaten has been a bit foolish, I would never want anybody to be brought down by the odious rags that are the British gutter press in such a way. But there is one aspect of this whole sorry business that we must not allow to be quietly forgotten - that there was a burglary of an MP's offices last Wednesday night or whenever it was.

In the end, this has proven a far more serious breach of parliamentary security than either Fathers for Justice or the Otis Ferry brigade, albeit that they were much higher profile simply because their antics were intended to be very visible. We simply cannot have people wandering around the Palace of Westminster able to access MP's offices, or anywhere else really, without authorization.

If Mark can stomach it he needs to play his part. If there is the slightest hint that the burglary is related to the weekend's revelations or that Rupert's ruffians were involved they should face very serious consequences (as should whoever did it - but particularly if people are wandering around able to collect information for publication against MPs) as should their "controllers" whoever that turns out to be.

Sergeant-at-Arms needs to come clean about what changes have been made to Palace security since last year's very public antics. We are being told that the idea of security services being permitted to tap MP's phone lines has been floated. What need have they to do that when someone obviously can just slip in at the dead of night and get whatever information they want about an MP, constituents they may have dealt with, whatever. I know I can't just walk past the St Stephen's entrance without something not far short of a strip search being performed, so whoever did this must have had very privileged access to the place and if found out should be hung out to dry.