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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

The latest victim of environmental zealotry is the wastepaper basket. Because of our sacred duty to separate rubbish into different sorts — paper, plastic, ‘residuals’ and so on — offices are now infested with boxes and bins with instructions all over them and little pursed mouths to prevent the wrong sort of rubbish being inserted. The undiscriminating wastepaper basket is banned. Some businesses go further. A friend who works in a very large company tells me that any sort of basket or bin anywhere near you is forbidden, the hope being that you will cease to generate any rubbish at all. If you are really desperate to throw something away, you have to make a humiliating journey to the other end of the building. He says that the attitude of colleagues to this new rule is a sure mark of their political views — Tories and libertarians all against, New Labourites ardently in favour.

More and more people — I may have done it myself — include the phrase ‘any time soon’ in their articles, as in ‘Don’t expect it to happen any time soon’. Apart from sounding tough and worldly-wise, does the phrase add anything not conveyed by the solitary word ‘soon’?

In Ferdinand Mount’s forthcoming memoirs, Cold Cream, the author’s father, falling on hard times, takes a room in Oakley Street, Chelsea, and is pleased to fulfil his own dictum that ‘Everyone lives in Oakley Street once in their lives’. Obviously the definition of the word ‘everyone’ here is eccentric, reminding one of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s famous claim, ‘I was the first person to live in Maida Vale’; but it is true that there are certain London streets which are the favourites of the more mobile (though not necessarily upwardly mobile) section of the upper middle classes. In any list, I would also include Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea, Linden Gardens in Notting Hill, and Fentiman Road in Lambeth. What is the gravitational pull?

Our part of England contains the largest population of what DEFRA calls, tautologically, ‘feral wild boar’. About 200 of them are thought to be roaming the Kent/Sussex borders. They are very hard to find (my only sighting was of eight in the gloaming at the end of a day’s hunting), but they certainly do damage crops. DEFRA does not like them much, muttering about the ‘risk to biodiversity’ and of spreading notifiable diseases. It has ‘secured the agreement of our delivery partners’ to a national three-year Action Plan, which will be monitored to see how it ‘may impact on DEFRA’s intermediate outcomes’. I don’t know what that means, but the general idea seems to be that wild boar should be killed (though not, of course, hunted with ‘dogs’). This contrasts strongly with the official approach to badgers. DEFRA points out that it is illegal to kill a badger or to ‘interfere with a badgers’ sett’. Yet badgers can undermine houses, kill chickens and spread TB in cattle. Why the difference between the two? Is it aesthetic, moral, what? Both badgers and boar are interesting animals, and both can cause harm. Both should exist, and both should be controlled, not by government, but by the people concerned. Strange how controversial this simple point is.