Tipping losers

The well-funded, young, neoliberal influencers currently popping up all over social media are a weird bunch, espousing equally weird causes. But few are as weird as those claiming to be defenders of our public realm against threats like fly-tipping or graffiti.

Tackling such things, of course, necessitates well-funded public regulators and public cleansing operations, two things neoliberals are usually anxious to destroy and help divert any remaining revenues to tax cuts for their wealthy backers.

Their recent rantings try to convince you that fly-tipping is a new scourge. The huge pile of fly-tipped waste near the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire, however, took me back 40 years to the time I started in journalism.

One of the first features I wrote, for a municipal services magazine, was about the huge tide of fly-tipping which engulfed London in the mid-1980s on the back of massive office development prompted by the flaky economic boom of the time.

Even supposedly responsible major contractors were delighted to avoid that era’s relatively cheap landfill charges by passing their rubble and muck to unscrupulous haulage operators. They, in turn, would simply tip the 20 tonnes on the back of the tipper lorry anywhere they could escape detection.

The result was an estimated million tonnes of fly-tipped material round the capital at any one time, despite local authorities and land owners spending a fortune clearing away the mess.

Research for my feature took me to Millwall Football Club, then trying to tackle an existential threat from its own hooligan fans fighting with visiting supporters. Part of its solution was a separate car park for visitors.

But during the summer close-season, this was occupied by travellers, charging fly-tippers about a fiver a load to tip there. Thousands of tonnes of rubble and muck swiftly breached the Club’s defence.

The Government’s solution was revision of the waste licensing introduced by the 1974 Control of Pollution Act, but Whitehall was moving at its usual glacial pace. The extraordinary sequel was Mrs Thatcher’s very right-wing government backing a private member’s bill by fairly left-wing Labour MP Joan Ruddock to introduce registration of waste carriers and new powers to attack fly-tippers’ vehicles.

Her Control of Pollution (Amendment) Act 1989 took effect a year before the Environmental Protection Act and is still in force. It gave local waste regulators and the Environment Agency the powers they needed to gradually get on top of the problem.

Fast-forward 35 years. Councils and the Agency have been emaciated by “austerity” and central government prefers tax cuts for the wealthy – ironically funding influencers whining about the state of the public realm. Inevitably we have a big fly-tipping problem again.

Just today I saw an influencer stomping self-importantly round Tunbridge Wells (why do they always walk as they talk?) demanding we build more reservoirs to tackle, er, a failure of local water treatment. Reservoirs, of course, are a house builder obsession, but do nothing for the climate change impacts on supply or the shocking state of the water industry, coincidentally also privatised – despite warnings – in 1990.

Jon Reeds