Roger

Where is this? I'm assuming it might be Hereford but you don't say. Obviously a situation that requires to be reported.

The taxi driver was used as a cash cow to subsidise the running of the court system ~ in my opinion. Same as the hard up woman who conned Hereford Asda out of £75 worth of food with a gift card she got by returning stuff she had never bought. She's obviously got little money or no money so the court let her off. But she had to pay £100 to keep the lights on at the court. HT

The chap in that Aldi meat case obviously likes meat. This is him in a 2009 case in a Somerset court. It's quite clear that petty thieving really is quite a good way of offending as nothing really happens if you get caught. In fact it seems that the more you get caught the less and less the punishments become. What you have to be really careful about is not getting caught for litter/smoking offences as the magistrates throw the book at you. Or for minor motoring offences as well ....

The problem with that is that dumping rubbish by a bin and not in it is called 'fly tipping'. Plenty of examples of people getting fined for doing that. Or for leaving stuff next to a recycling skip when the actual skip is full. I wouldn't be surprised if the Council mounted a full inquiry into that GWW fly tipping.

Guesses are on Twitter for anyone deluded enough to be interested .....

I tend to agree. This was the bin at the bottom of Aylestone Hill at 12.23 hrs this lunchtime .... It's not as if the bin is in a low profile hidden away location .... They seem to have given up on certain bins' unless someone moans on social media. Then they probably send someone out special to empty one bin at treble the cost of emptying it as part of a 'round' .....

I'm not a total pedant over spelling but that was slightly ridiculous ....

Archive from 2013 ... Iain Duncan Smith claimed £39 breakfast on expenses (that’d leave him £14 for the rest of the week) Iain Duncan Smith’s claim he could live on £53 a week fell apart last night after evidence emerged of a £39 breakfast he tried to put on expenses. Black Triangle

By the way .... The Council operate a taxi penalty point scheme where a driver gets hauled up before the Regulatory Committee if they hit 12 Council points in a 12 month period. Getting caught smoking in the cab is a 4 point offence. So you should be able to get caught smoking twice and still avoid an appearance before The Council.

The actual sentence is a 6 month conditional discharge. Which means he has zero punishment if he keeps his nose clean for 6 months. It's virtually as low as it gets. Other than an absolute discharge. The £250 costs do seem high as the case sounds as simple as could be. One witness. No massive enquiry to undertake and you could probably read and digest the case file in 2 minutes. I see a fella got sentenced to a conditional discharge on 19th February at the same court (link) for a fighting related incident. He had to pay £135 costs. All a bit random as to what costs are awarded it would appear. I see the informant for this smoking offence was an off duty Council employee. I wonder if you would get a court case if it was just a general shopper having a moan? Why was the Council person so aggrieved that they felt that they had to make it all official ?

The average net monthly wage in Portugal is 50% of that in the UK. For Poland it is 30%. I'm sure these people know the work is not the best ever but they exercise a free choice to move here and complete work that pays a wage that they are over the moon about.

Tax on hand rolling tobacco has been hiked by 5% today in the budget. This will only strengthen the position of the dodgy shops like Zabka that sell cheap imported stuff (very often genuine) that is evading duty. I think I overheard George say that the penalties for selling dodgy tobacco would be increased. But the existing penalties, if applied, are very harsh already. And it's obviously no deterrent. These shops will just front up a disposable fall guy to take the hit as and when they are caught.

Link

When I posted this I was unaware that in June 2013 a 'firestarter' had torched a pile of rubbish/pallets at the rear of the Natalka Polskie Delikatesy shop just down the same street ~ link. So this massive pile of detritus was piled up by the Zabka manager to tempt somebody to do it again. Having said that Zardashit Salh was probably worrying more about his illegal tobacco operation at the shop ...

One of his serf's would have wrote that. But at the risk of going off topic I think that the new 'Top Gear' is seriously in trouble. Chris Evans is multi tasking too much. TFI/R2/TopGear .... Seriously ? Plus the Producer of the old show has defected to Amazon. The new Top Gear Executive Producer ditched. I think the new show will be a car crash.

It's probably a camera phone photo as it didn't need resizing when I linked to the image off the HT website. Camera shy Phil Edwards seems to have generated some free propaganda ......

Brian Davis getting his back into some hard graft there!

That was the global financial crisis for you. Still not fully out of it and more financial uncertainty brewing in the last few weeks. We've been on a 0.5% BoE base interest rate for donkeys years. Budget tomorrow.

They both voted through the disability cuts recently as well. Was this a 'whipped' vote ? I'm still not sure which side of the fence Jesse Norman is on about Brexit. But I haven't looked for a while.

The article doesn't answer the obvious question about why they lost the contract with Asda. The answer is that they lost a competitive tendering process.

We'll have to keep an eye on this. It could be perceived that The Council reacted to negative publicity on here ....

Americans would never accept EU restrictions – so why should we? Barack Obama's plan to urge voters to remain in the European Union is a 'piece of outrageous and exorbitant hypocrisy', Boris Johnson writes Telegraph

This bin had been emptied when I went past today. Also the rubbish around it had been removed. Post a pic on a forum and you get a result ....

German Leader Pays Price At Polls For Migrants Sky News

Jeremy Corbyn and the mosque leader who blames the UK for Isil Telegraph