Pernicious EU greenism

Richard Madeley: a celebrity, yes, but actually right about this

From the moment it became such an enthusiastic early adopter of the wind-farm blight, I knew that there was no hope left for Cornwall. And now Richard Madeley has confirmed it: whatever attraction the county may once have had in the days of Rebecca or Demelza Poldark has now long since been buried in a morass of green worthiness.

Madeley’s particular beef is with all the different-coloured bin bags into which the local district council now demands he wastes precious time each day sifting his rubbish:

The television presenter is one of 250,000 households forced to laboriously separate paper into blue bags, cardboard into orange sacks, glass into a black plastic box, plastics and tin into a red bag and garden waste into a brown wheelie bin – not forgetting the black bag for ‘non-recyclable’ waste.

It depresses me to note that many of the commenters below the Telegraph’s news piece on this appear to be so blinkered by their visceral loathing of Madeley/people with second homes/celebrities generally that they’re not prepared to concede him his point: these recycling schemes are a spectacular waste of time and money.

They exist, of course, primarily because of the EU’s directives on landfill, enthusiastically endorsed and gold plated as per usual by the British government, under which councils are financially penalised for the amount of rubbish they put in tips rather than recycle. In fact Britain has more than enough space for landfill and the environmental problems with this have been greatly overdone. The real reason for the directive is because of pressure put on the EU from places like the Netherlands, which don’t have nearly so much space for burying rubbish underground and which therefore felt compelled to level the playing field (ie nobble the competition) by making life equally hard for all EU members.

Aside from the pernicious, democratically unaccountable EU role in all this, there’s the issue of personal freedom. Here we have a situation in which householders are compelled to waste valuable time sorting out their rubbish (and uglifying their neighbourhood) for no serious reason whatsoever. (And furthermore being charged by their council for the privilege.)

Protected species

Interiors by Tom of Finland

Let’s get one thing straight: if and when the time comes when I become sufficiently desperate to open my home as a bed & breakfast gay couples will be more than welcome. So welcome, in fact, that I’ll advertise specially in the Gay Times and at Gaydarnation.com, as well as buying in the collected recordings of Judy Garland, plus decorating the walls with lots of prints by Robert Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland, just to make sure they feel right at home.

Why? Because the point of running a B & B is to make money. No one suffers the intrusion of strangers into their own home, nor the tedium of having to get up early in the morning to make those strangers breakfast, except in the knowledge that it will help them pay their bills. The pink pound is a strong pound. The gay tourist market will always be a thriving one because it’s not bound by school holidays and because gay people generally have money to burn because they’re not wasting all their money on children.

So just imagine for a moment that we lived in a world where there was no anti-discrimination legislation. Do you think this would lead to a massive increase in the number of B & B owners and hoteliers turning away gay couples? Do you think there would be a revival of pubs with signs on the door saying: “No dogs, blacks, Irish”? Only in the foetid imaginings of bien-pensant control freaks. Definitely not in reality.

The reason for this is, apart from the financial one mentioned above, Britain is much more cosmopolitan than it was forty or fifty years ago. A pub that put such a horrible sign outside its door would rightly be stigmatised. And social stigma is, contra what most libtard bleeding-hearts think, a generally good thing. It’s the way society signals what is acceptable and unacceptable, without the need for professional grievance mongers like Harriet Harman to stick their oar in and invoke the apparatus of state control.

And if the pub were prepared to brave that social stigma? Well, fine. It’s a business, not a government outreach programme. It’s not spending taxpayers’ money so why shouldn’t it be able to choose its clientele based on whichever criteria it wishes, be it class, race, looks or a strong interest in trainspotting? If the discriminated-against minority is offended, well, tough. There are plenty of other establishments out there catering to the needs of any number of minority interests. That’s what’s great about the free market: somewhere out there, there’s a service designed just for you.

And just suppose that gay couple which won a cool £1800 each in damages had instead gone to that hotel in Cornwall with its longstanding ban on unmarried couples. How much fun do you imagine they might have had? Not much, unless masochism is the bag they’re into. Hoteliers are very good at signalling their disapproval to guests who are not welcome: all those frosty looks the couple would have got; all that muttering just out of earshot; all that stiff, unhelpful service.

Of course I sympathise with the gay couple – Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy – if, as they say, they only realised when they turned up on the doorstep what the hotel’s policy was. But that just proves how counter-productive the discrimination law is: had it not existed, the hotel’s owners Peter and Hazelmary Bull would have been free to advertise their policy. And then none of this upset would have happened.

9 thoughts on “Why on earth shouldn’t hotel owners be free to turn away gay couples?”

Chris P says:20th January 2011 at 4:25 pmIt’s called discrimination – nitwit. Denying people services because of your preconceived bias and stupidity.
Homosexuality is very common in the animal world – but then your knowledge of science is about zero anyway so you wouldn’t know.

Most talking heads are like this – they appeal to the lowest common denominators in society – revelling in ignorance – just like Queen Sarah.
Groper says:21st January 2011 at 4:41 amActually I agree with Delingpole here. There should be discrimination. Likes of Delingpole and Palin should be denied access to the media and politics respectively. Delingpole doesn’t even understand the difference between anthropogenic and anthropomorphic, just as Palin doesn’t know the difference between North and South Korea.
Velocity says:24th January 2011 at 11:02 pmGroper
You only know the difference between North (bankrupt, backward and everyone impoverished by socialism) and South (wealthy, everyone on the up, technologically advanced fro capitalism) Korea because your dream of a socialist republic of bankrupt after-Brown Britain is failing (again!)

No matter how many times the loonatic left fails you just don’t get the message do you retard?
Velocity says:24th January 2011 at 11:16 pmChris P
I can’t speak for animals but i discriminate when choosing a mate. I go for females, tall, blonde, curvy, busty with character.

That discriminates against all gay men, ugly lesbians (i’m prepared to try ‘converting’ attractive lesbians for no fee) and all females at least not an ‘8’ on my Totty Score Chart. Is that ok with you or am i pinging some HR Laws here?

As for the B&B contrary to that Marxist turd David Milliband on BBC Question Time, the B&B is not a “public business” it is a private business and they can choose whatever customers they want.

I was trying to get a flat in Rome for 2 months recently. 50% of the landlords/ladies turned me down flat for being a ‘foreigner’. It wasn’t my black American chum who spoke fluent Italian that was the problem, but me a British white male.

And you know what? It’s their bloody right because it’s their bloody property. If they want to turn away custom then stuff them, they lose biz because of their beliefs. But I’d never force my arse into their private property if they didn’t want it.

That’s life which you just don ‘t understand with your droll belief about ‘equality’. Nothing is equal and never will be. You have to earn a living and earn your status. You’re not handed it by a bunch of ignorant socialist scum that want to bully people with their dumb-arsed beliefs.

That’s not democracy, it’s tyranny as practised by all socialist left long enough in power.
Rob says:25th January 2011 at 10:52 pmWell Said Chris P,
Its time we all stood up to the tyranny of the team players. Remember this: If you don’t like heterosexual BnB’s then stay at a gay one, There are plenty of them. You don’t get heterosexuals queuing to stay at gay BnB’s. There needs to be separation from differences or it spoils everyone’s lives. I see this as the gay community forcing its sexuality on those with are different orientation to them and that’s NAZISM.
David Heffron says:26th January 2011 at 10:48 amI do feel sorry for the Bulls in a way. There’s been a massive change in the way society regards all sorts of things and it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to change at the same rate.
However I am also surprised that they did not their court case. The Bulls always maintained that they turned they guys away because the were not married. It had nothing to do with them being gay.

I would have thought their lawyer would has simply submitted the BnB guest book as evidence. This would have proved that the Bulls has checked the marital status of all of their guests and were satisifed that they were all married (perhaps asking to see a copy of a marriage certificate or photographs from their wedding day). Case closed.

I also agree with James. If I am providing a service then I should decide who gets to use that service. For example, if I ran a bus company, I should be well within my rights to tell homosexuals to sit at the back of the bus. If there were too many hetrosexuals on the bus, I should be able to tell the homosexuals to stand up at the back so a hetrosexual could sit down.

My house. My rules.
Hardy says:28th February 2011 at 7:39 pmTry harder, David. Your witty response was pretty much anticipated in the article when mention was made of “bien-pensant control freaks” who imagine that the moment their guiding hand is removed from everyday human interaction we will all erupt in all-out war over trivial differences.
How long do you think your putative bus company would last?
David Heffron says:27th June 2011 at 7:20 amLet me think. How long could that bus model last….
The last time someone operated a bus model liek that it only came to an end after a massive civil right movement demanded that people should be treated equally. There were marches, riots, deaths, assassinations, lynchings and coarse language.
So my answer would be “as long as it ran on time, it would last ages”.
Andrew Ryan says:27th June 2011 at 9:36 amRob: “I see this as the gay community forcing its sexuality on those with are different orientation to them and that’s NAZISM.”
You’re right, Rob, it’s just like the Nazis. Not allowing people to discriminate on the grounds of sexuality, gender or race is a slippery slope to putting gays and Jews in concentration camps and murdering them. The only way to prevent this Nazi-ism taking hold is by making it easier for B&B owners like the Bulls by forcing gays to wear some kind of symbol to alert us all that they’re gay. How’s about a pink triangle? It may sound harsh, but it’s the only way to hold back the increasing Nazi-fication of our culture. It’s already started – what is a wind farm but some kind of concentration camp in disguise?