Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Customs
Picked up some useful tips from the resident expert on customs' posts at TB yesterday evening. It seems that if they are threatening to do a marigold on you, you have three lines of defence, which sometimes do the business. Item, they are not allowed to do it without showing reasonable cause. Having long hair or being the subject of a random check not good enough. On the other hand there are machines now which can detect from traces on your car's steering wheel that you have handled money which has been handled by someone who shook hands with someone who had washed his hands after using a prohibited substance. Such traces do constitute reasonable cause. Item, you have the right to ask that a magistrate be present. This one ought to hold things up a bit - unless the customs' people have a pen full of tame magistrates down in the basement against just this possibility. Item, you can sue for assault in the event of the marigold failing to reveal anything incriminating. Not sure about this one. If the marigold is reasonable, it does not seem reasonable to be able to sue just because it turned out to be wrong. Must consult legal eagle about all this.
We then moved onto the business of damage. I have read and been told on various occasions that if you get turned over by the nice people from HMCR (or is it the border protective police these days?) and your car or your suitcases get trashed in the process, you are just invited to bundle your stuff up and get out. No question of help or compensation, although on a good day a sympathetic officer of the peace might offer you a good quality dustbin bag. Now I can see that from their point of view having the time and facilities to put you back together again is something they could do without. On the other hand, if I turn out to be innocent, is it fair that I should have to bear the cost of this bit of enforcement. Would it not be fairer for it to be a charge on the public purse? Maybe they could carry a varied stock of 'Back to Basics' suitcases from Mr Sainsbury from which to dish out replacements to people? This would not cost them that much. Much more sensible, why not just get rid of the drug laws and harmonise excise duties on the legal drugs, then the need for all this control would be much diminished? All those chaps in blue could have a mid-career change and become care workers. Under TUPE, of course. (Interestingly, one comes across a fair number of ex-forces people in the mental health industry).
Talking of dustbin bags, I also learn from TB of an anomaly in the waste recycling and recovery regulations (as amended 2008 and to be amended 2010, 2011 and 2012.5). If our household sorts our rubbish into the four different containers now provided, those containers are emptied free of charge at regular intervals. The only hitch is that sometimes we wind up with someone else's wheelie bin which causes much huffing and puffing over the Kellogs. However, if TB, which generates much larger quantities of glass waste and food waste than we do, sort that rubbish into the same four containers large size, they have to pay to have them emptied. If they don't bother to sort and just chuck it into one container, even larger size, they don't have to pay to have it emptied. The management consultants hired to sort all this out by the ecos who have infiltrated New Labour seemed to have missed a beat here. Incentives all the wrong way around. Can they be trusted on more important matters? Should I write to my local councillor or my local MP, that redoubtable former television journalist, Chris Grayling? Does he mind having the name of a fish? Was he called fishy at school? (A factlet picked up from Chief Inspector Morse).
# posted by Jim @ 3:58 AM 
