We've Thrown It, But We Own It

Police have arrested three men for taking food out of dustbins behind an Iceland store in north London. The items included tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and corporate stodge; the boys in blue dutifully returned all this to the shop where, having been thrown out comparatively recently, it was doubtless greeted with much rejoicing. Instructively enough given the prevalence in the present government of overweight Regency bullies, the food-snatchers were charged under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which was passed during the reign of George IV, an obese aristocratic vulgarian whom the public were in the habit of pelting with dung at any convenient opportunity. The Crown Prosecution Service feels that the arrest, trial and punishment of people for taking things nobody wants carries "significant public interest", possibly because magistrates will be required to scrutinise corporate waste and public hardship, but more likely because allowing people to avoid starvation without paying for it would be an unacceptable workfare disincentive and could lead directly to the punitive privatisation of the CPS. Lawyers for the accused had called for the case to be dropped; the fact that people who eat out of dustbins can have lawyers being, of course, one of the primary motivations behind Chris Graybeing's war on legal aid.