PSD has the solution: eat more snacks
Friday 29th October 2010, 2:30PM BST.
AT A time when Guernsey is closing wards because of a shortage of nurses, has failed to find any savings under the much vaunted Financial Transformation Programme and has a stalled anti-poverty programme that forces a 72-year-old woman back to work, it is gratifying that Public Services is resolutely focused on the important issues.
What really matters, it says, is the ‘scary’ and ‘frightening’ amount of waste islanders allegedly create celebrating Halloween by recklessly binning their pumpkins and pointy hats.
Saving planet Guernsey can be achieved as simply as turning your discarded jack-o’-lantern into delicious soup or a decorative planter.
Even more inventively, and this will resonate with the 2,200 local households currently struggling to survive on supplementary benefit, buying loose sweets or biscuits will, again allegedly, reduce the torrent of Halloween-induced refuse pouring into Mont Cuet.
This nonsense would be funny if it wasn’t being generated at taxpayers’ expense and wasn’t effectively a call for islanders to boycott legitimate businesses selling costumes and decorations for the event.
The release that PSD managed to issue with a straight face and, worse, expected to be taken seriously, involved the States recycling officer, a former PR spinner recruited by the department, a spinneret from an external agency and the deputy minister.
That there is time in a supposedly economising public body at a time of restraint to peddle this level of hokum is disturbing – and counter-productive.
Islanders are enthusiastic recyclers. Despite the dirty, muddy conditions at Chouet, the overflowing bring banks and the unmanageable cardboard containers, they do their bit in all weathers and would do even more if kerbside collections were available.
What they do not need, however, is pointless ‘advice’ no matter how creatively or expensively presented by PSD’s media manipulators.
People recycle because they understand the need and are not moved by civil service humbuggery – for all PSD insists that pumpkin seeds can be made into a nutritious snack.
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So your suggesting that the recycling officer should be doing nursing, or should be working on the ftp, or should be working on the anti-poverty strategy then?
Please run for the States Mr Digard, you clearly know so much better how the Island should be run, the Island needs you! Or is it just easier to rant about how stupid States members are and how all civil servants are good for nothing but eating biscuits from behind your keyboard?
I’d vote for you, if only to watch you slowly realise that it isn’t all as cut and dry as you make it out to be and that you didn’t know it all after all.
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