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In the Oxford Times today Reg Little write of demands from district councils in the county to Build Compost Plant

"Oxfordshire could build itself a giant modern 'in vessel' composter similar to this one in Somerset
A food recycling centre is being proposed to help Oxfordshire deal with its mounting waste crisis.

"District councils say weekly household collections of food and kitchen waste could help usher in a new era of recycling in the county.

"They are pressing Oxfordshire County Council to invest £1m to build a modern 'in vessel' recycling plant which could turn waste food into compost. Such plants are already in use in Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Devon and Dorset."

Actually, Oxfordshire already has a decent sized similar thing and has had for fourteen or more years. A farm I lived on near Cassington built one to recycle food processing waste - taking orange skins from the old orange juice plant at Kidlington and eggs and things from other commercial suppliers around the county.

I know, I worked on it briefly in a (nearly) former life in order to pay the rent at the farm cottage. And I suggested this idea before I left the council in 2002 as a way to get rid of the city's organic waste collections. At the time I did a little research and I think found out that there were legal issues with it - that there was some prohibition on collecting peoples' kitchen waste and turning it into compost because you never could be sure quite what was in it. Presumably such problems have been overcome now somehow and the idea is "de rigeur".

Or perhaps they should just have elected such a visionary as myself executive mayor while they had the chance...:)

...let alone enforceable?

A row that has so far been played out in the pages of the august British Medical Journal has suddenly burst out onto the public stage as MPs have found constituents being told they will have to pay for their NHS treatment because they've paid for additional drugs or treatments, for example that the NHS doctor tells them may help but cannot be prescribed by them.

But is the notion that you can be barred from receiving the treatment your tax already pays for even legal? Apply the same argument to education, for example, and parents who pay for a few weeks extra tuition for their child would be forced to pay for the whole of their state school provided main stream education.

And even if it is legal, how is it enforceable? Should someone who buys some nutritional supplement that a friend recommends in addition to prescription drugs for their illness be forced to pay the full costs of their NHS treatment? Or is there some (arbitrarily?) set level - is it okay to buy an extra packet of over the counter drug but not a cancer drug that NICE won't allow you to have on the NHS even if your NHS doctor says it will possibly help over and above what they can do for you? And how do they know? Is it basically down to whether or not a private consultant requests your medical records from the NHS and the person receiving that request has to snitch on you?

Of course I can see there may be cases where it might be legitimate for the NHS to wash their hands of a patient who has paid for some additional or alternative treatment that actually compromises the care the NHS is trying to give that patient. But if it's complimentary to the treatment the NHS are giving, and only unavailable through them because of NICE, or budgets, or rules, that doesn't apply. Indeed, it would probably be saving the NHS money in the longer run - the quicker you are cured, or the more independent you are, because you have supplemented your treatment, the more resources they have to spend on people who cannot pay the extra, surely?

Again, the comparison with private education is interesting - if someone's additional private tutoring has made them better able to cope with their mainstream school classes in some way, the classroom teacher, surely, has more time to spend on others.

And if it's indeed just if it goes against the advice of the NHS,
should anyone who does not apply government sanctioned wisdom on
healthy living be made to pay for all NHS treatment because their
lifestyle is prejudicial to their health in some way? 

Or, perhaps, could it all be a case of corporate welfare - the NHS has "exclusive" deals maybe with drug companies that, say, give them discounts or some other kind of soft benefit even if only their treatment is used for a particular condition and if people opt to go for a competitor's supposedly better treatment the deals all fall apart. The NHS is riddled with protectionism, particularly in its procurement policies. And yes this itself locks out competition and keeps prices high.

The only real answer is that clinicians themselves should be allowed to select and prescribe their own choice of treatment that they think will help that patient get off their hands as soon as possible and let them get on with curing someone else. Surely that's the whole point of the NHS?

"I feel frustrated. I feel the whole mode of modern British Government, Whitehall and Westminster, is in a profound way counterproductive."

So says Andrew Phillips, as he would want to be known, and we should listen. Personally, I would add anti-democratic, dysfunctional, depressing and, more than anything else, increasingly unnecessary. He goes on to say:

"We have politicians and civil servants who have done nothing outside parliament. All they are fit for is passing new sky blue laws."

In a century we have swapped one ruling class for another, plutocracy for psephocracy if you will, where careerist spinmeisters will do anything to attract a vote at the expense of ideological debate. But more ominously this puts personality ahead of principle. The winners in this battle delude themselves that they have a mandate for almost anything that pops into their little heads as if they and only they are capable of governing.

Modern British government (perhaps western government as a whole) is like a mediaeval papacy (complete with a corrupt curia and all that papal bull crap!) and we need to rekindle the political equivalent of the reformation's "priesthood of all believers" or the enlightenment's rejection of a higher power altogether for whose favours we need some intercessor to mediate. We need to foster a belief in all citizens' right to self-governance before anything else, the sovereignty of the individual over the state.

The beast that is the state is increasingly only able to sustain itself against its own people by ever more coercion. Globalization threatens to empower the individual to the detriment of the state. Individuals and voluntary associations are more than ever before able to form communities not restricted by geography, to operate in markets once only accessible through intermediaries, to choose where to live, work, play, shop and pay taxes or not, none of which need be in the same jurisdiction.

We need to deconstruct the state, slay that beast. To reconstitute government as something to which we voluntarily cede only those functions that we cannot arrange for ourselves or in our communities, geographical or otherwise. To communicate, learn from and learn respect for those other basically decent individuals and associations of individuals oppressed by a world of states that seek to aggregate power to a ruling few. An age of co-operative individualism. Individuals seem, largely, to be able to make more friends than enemies, states more enemies than friends. We no longer need those states to network on our behalf when we can do it for ourselves.

My one regret about Andrew Phillips is that, having recognized some of the problems, he finds himself too tired to stay and try to change them. But we all run out of puff some time. Those who agree with him need to carry on that fight with ever more urgency.