One experiences politics through direct encounters with the state, and since the first wave of austerity that experience has diverged enormously across income brackets. Benefits claimants can expect constantly hostile interactions, their disabilities relentlessly interrogated, their work hours pored over, their child-rearing examined, their benefits rescinded on specious or cruel grounds – all on an act-first-ask-questions-later principle.
As incomes increase, there is a sweet spot, particularly for those who are in fine health and have no children in state education. This demographic occupies a world where nobody can touch you but a traffic warden, or a guy from the council who disapproves of your rubbish disposal. The issue of traffic itself has now also entered into that world – whether it is 20mph limits, London’s ultra-low emission zone or the policy of low-traffic neighbourhooods – and has become a massive site of political activism.
And then there’s fly-tipping – or, to give it its full name, middle-class fly-tipping. The local government ombudsman said last month that councils had become over-zealous in their fines, with two Bournemouth residents fined £500 each: one for leaving Ikea furniture on the street, free for anyone to take; another, a carpet-fitter, for leaving an off-cut that he thought, probably rightly, someone would find handy.
However much we may like the idea of our tatty old belongings finding a new home, this kind of street trash is undoubtedly an assertion of middle-class entitlement, which is hard to justify – even if you personally would be delighted by a free Ikea bookcase and a piece of carpet. The rule is if it’s middle class, it doesn’t count as rubbish – it’s more of an impromptu car boot sale. So any book, even a mad one – 1980s facial yoga, recipes from the Hay diet – is allowable.
Fair play, though, there’s an equal and opposite force, always ready to pounce: a middle-class person who will pick up literally any book. I tested this proposition to its very limits when (no offence, cabinet) I put out books by every single member of the government (I’d read them before the election). They were gone in an hour, even (no offence) Ian Murray’s history of the football club Hearts. Likewise, food cannot count as rubbish, so long as it’s “natural” – you couldn’t leave Pop-Tarts out, but you can leave as many maggot-pitted windfall apples as you like, or wild garlic. I’ve picked up a celeriac off a garden wall and eaten it, which I’m neither proud nor ashamed of.
In this milieu, anything you could plausibly claim was recycling (furniture, clothes, electronics) you can leave out on environmental grounds. There are plenty of thrills, too. The audacious act of sticking a printer on the street, with a sign saying “in good working order”, when that definitely was not true even before it started raining, is matched only by the patrician nod you’ll get while you’re picking up that incredibly old and manky fleece, for a reason you couldn’t name, from its original owner. “Be my guest, fellow climate-lover,” it says. “Wrap yourself in my M&S bounty.”
I can totally see why a small-beans utility corporation would want to fine us all within an inch of our lives, in other words. But I’m never going to stop doing it.
As well as being indicative of the way class works in Britain, it is also a story about the monetisation of the civic relationship. Extravagant fines for the simple act of placing your old wares on the front doorstep tend to be handed out by private contractors, engaged by the council and given a guide on maximum fines which they find it commercially beneficial to push to their very limits. Alongside the two unlucky sods in Bournemouth, it’s a pattern also visible in recent airport parking-fine “scandals” (the scare quotes indicate that the rage is utterly understandable yet completely disproportionate).
Not only do private contractors jack up fines to the max, but they give no quarter. There is, after all, no incentive for a company to see both sides or turn a blind eye, because their relationship is with the council or authority, not the individual. The council, which does, in fact, have a long-term relationship with its residents to protect, is not blameless in this. If there’s no sense of mutual sympathy and care between the finer and the fined, it’s because it wasn’t written into the contract. But how could it be?
What would a “we all have to live here, we’re going to have to get along” clause even look like? The drum beat of discontent that, for instance, united my mother’s entire street in umbrage when her neighbour’s daughter got a £100 fine for putting her rubbish out not in the wrong place, not on the wrong day, but one hour too early (Wandsworth council, I’m looking at you) is the assertion of a community’s interests against the market’s. The issue feels bigger than a bag of rubbish, bigger even than £100.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
