Splashing Out for Business

Those who fear that Her Majesty's Government cares less about keeping the world habitable than about putting people in jail will no doubt derive boundless reassurance from the evidence that the Government is overseeing the country's recycling industry with almost as much interest as it showed when throwing taxpayers' money at those nice people from Serco and G4S in return for tracking the movements of dead criminals. As usual where nice people as opposed to experts are involved, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove has been content to sit back and allow the companies responsible for exporting plastic waste to mark their own homework. In spite of this regulatory rigour, discrepancies have somehow arisen between the amounts supposedly exported and the amounts recorded by HM Customs; in January British plastic waste became officially too toxic for the Heathen Chinee and the exports were moved to Malaysia, Vietnam and Poland. In a fiendish paroxysm of foreign envy at our buccaneering entrepreneurialism, the first two have already imposed temporary bans, and the Poles are now thinking about doing something similar. In the end, or near it, and particularly under the eminently tough and pragmatic régime which the jabbering homunculus will ruthlessly implement once we are free of the Brussels yoke, the plastic waste will continue to end up at its natural home in the oceans. That will keep those beastly Euro-wogs away from stout British fish; and it is, after all, only the taxpayers' planet.