Photo credit: Oliver Quinlan
I wrote a while back about the sheer stupidity of throwing litter out of cars, and I am glad to see that the House of Lords have decided to do something about it.
I am not saying that I am responsible for the new proposals which are being put forward, but I can’t help thinking that is more than a coincidence. Anyway, I was thinking about this the other day when the guy in front of me threw a beer can out of his window and almost hit a passing cow.
We were in the countryside at the time (as you might have guessed by the cow reference) and presumably he thought that this made it ok. Having said that, I now live in a country which is a little behind the times, so he probably didn’t even know that littering was a crime.
One Small Step for Whom?
I say this because of a strange conversation which happened just afterwards, when I arrived at my in-laws farm. The whole family was there and they were shocked when one my wife’s uncles said that he had just heard that man might not really have landed on the Moon after all. Here, they listened to the Moon landing on the radio, as there was no telly in those days. They all seemed a bit stunned to hear that Neil Armstrong’s grammatically incorrect speech might have been part of a US Government ploy. I wasn’t heartless enough to tell them that the Titanic has sunk.
Back to the House of Lords though, and the idea is that you will get fined up to 80 quid if you are silly enough to throw litter from your car. Under the proposed new law you will be tracked using the registration number of the car and made to cough up. The Private Member’s Bill detailing this has been put forward by Lord Marlesford.