OR MORE APT- BACKWARD IN TWATTERY”.
The demise of The West Midlands County Council in 1986 saw local authorities once again taking on the responsibility of waste management and matters involving regulation. In anticipation of this April Fools day handover, a piece in the 21st March Coventry Evening Telegraph claimed that the new Hazardous Waste Unit as it would be called would regulate the activities. Quoted is none other than Thelma Hillman, who is now “assistant waste disposal officer for pollution control in The West Midlands”. 😆
You can see that from this, it was just business as usual, or polluting business as usual to be more apt. The WMCC had totally failed to stop flytipping waste crime of toxic waste, and had failed to ensure that licensing for tipping said hazardous waste was “tightly controlled” at all- as we can see from the useless fucking licences that they passed. Hillman and co during these dark years, were very much the problem and not the solution, and the name change brought no change at all, as we shall see.
A couple of years later, after the Walsall Council based cretins had assumed , or kept their roles, a piece from the Sunday Mercury 24th January 1988 posed the provocative question, “Why must we be turned into the world’s poison dustbin?”
The short answer to this is that The Conservative Government at the time, the ministers and the civil service were all bent and corrupt fucking stains who kept the system for polluting business growth. The article talks of that word “timebomb” in relation to toxic waste producing methane gas being evolved from landfill sites, but poorly links this to waste being imported from other countries.
We of course had the same article in 1971 bemoaning exactly the same thing.
Factually, the Mercury article is utter bollocks in this regard, given the waste that Britain and the rest of the developed world itself exported to third world countries for young children to die from and cause them cancer and other health maladies. It is obviously intended to enflame tensions that existed around this time in that the West Midlands was receiving a disproportionate amount of this foreign crap, particularly with crook firms like Leigh Environmental and co handling it in the HWU back yard. “Our safety” the piece claims, is all down to the Walsall based office wonders . 😮
We get a full PR treatment of this useless vessel. This anti foreign bullshit belies the fact that British firms like Albright and Wilson were poisoning their communities for decades and dumping fucking toxic waste in their communities unregulated, and when “regulated” by the likes of the HWU was a regulation not fit for purpose. Somehow, this red herring makes it more saleable to voters of a certain persuasion perhaps that it is a foreign problem, when the complete opposite is the case. Dirty Britain made it, dirty Britain dumped it.
It states that 40 people are employed in this team, with Hillman playing a prominent role.
She makes some very prophetic comments, the most shocking being
“I worry about the future and the problems that we are storing up… we have good records of what has been put where, but you never know what will happen in 30 or 40 years. Records can get lost”.
Well, dear Thelma, all I can say to that is your records at the WMCC were fucking shite. You personally were unable to point out where 250,000 gallons of toxic waste had been tipped on a new housing estate, so did not know “what had been put where”, let alone the records of waste dumping before licensing at places such as Rattlechain lagoon which they did not know anything about at all!
I’m not sure how a civil servant came to talk to the press in this way, or whether it was even apt to do so, but it was not the first time she had done this, as a 1981 New Scientist article titled “Toxic waste- the political connections” again quotes her bemoaning the lack of political will and how lack of staff will lead to fly-tipping waste disposal “cowboys” operating. This was during the time of the WMCC and there had now just been a change in political leadership of that council from Labour to Conservative. One might question the political motives of an officer making comments of this type. 😕 The Lords Select Committee obviously failed to take anything on board or make any meaningful contribution to the debate.
As for the 30-40 years she speaks of, we know of course that thanks to her team who morphed and got jobs in the Environment Agency, the records were quite deliberately obfuscated, the chemicals hidden from members of the public into meaningless phrases, probably for the same bent political bastards in Government who now pursue “brownfield first” building on the said toxic time bomb sites for their crook developer party political donors!
I wonder how many of those working for this team at this time went into environmental consultancy for the bent land banking house building sector?
The final joke is that the unit is considered ” a centre of excellence” in the UK, but that “standards were slipping”. I honestly cannot believe how out of touch this woman was with reality at this time, but perhaps at least she did not jump ship like at least two of her treacherous colleagues, who obviously knew that there was more money to be made in the private sector of helping firms avoiding being caught than catching the criminals at work.
The only thing that she is right about is the lack of political will to change the situation, though this was apparent, and remains apparent with all Governments since this article was written. Perhaps the HWU speaking out about foreign waste thought that there were votes to be made in talking up imported foreign waste instead of that made locally? This perhaps shows how apathetic people are, but only because they were not told of the real risks of the chemicals- by those who had worked at the West Midlands County Council to start with.
They added the mercury tilt switches by bloody useless licences, and set double wires by the pathetically worded conditions which created loopholes in themselves. The fuses were set by them, and they should own that instead of talking shite.
Nice to put a face to the waste…..of space
Just a few months later, the same title followed up with a piece on 12th March 1989.
A Government Select committee, (yet another one just 8 years after the Lords), had looked into waste disposal issues, and concluded that the system was crap. The trouble with scrutiny committees of MP’s such as this is that that put forth some holier than thou points urging urgency, yet are safe in the knowledge that nothing will change. It is their role to play the alarmist, because it generates them headlines, and only continues the system of political failure when nothing happens. We were now 17 years after The Deposit of Poisonous Wastes Act, and 15 years after The Control of Pollution Act, so all failures of these laws were on Parliament themselves, and no one else. A Conservative talks of “near misses” yet is blind to places such as Rattlechain lagoon which were not near misses, they had been allowed to happen, as had all the other SL licences passed by the WMCC.
The article mentions Hillman and the MP’s who share her concerns, but also astutely states;
“But where are the politicians and the environmentalist lobby when it comes to the unglamorous question of toxic waste buried under the feet of ordinary people here in the West Midlands? “
Quite right, because today in 2022 they are all veering us away with the bollocks of “climate change” ,planned policies of globalist change and coercion, taking us away from local issues and happy to build houses on top of these toxic waste tips. I know history will record how such environmental groups , (probably political plant confederates), and politicians were all really just pissing in the same pot.
In the report, Rossi talks a good fight, but is blind to what he is actually stating.
“All old landfill sites are suspect. Nobody knows what chemistry is taking place. No testing is done, no monitoring. “
Well, is that not what the licensing system was supposed to do when introduced by Parliament and upheld by the likes of Thelma Hillman? FFS!
The Mercury also states that the report does not mention any single tip or location- thus its authors were part of the problem, blowing hot air and protecting the system they were claiming to condemn. This is why politicians of the like of Hugh Rossi are not to be trusted when coming out with hot air headlines such as this. They are nothing but cowards, and are totally insincere in changing things. Theirs is a world where they cosy up to CEO’s of scum like Leigh Environmental and Albright and Wilson, or even become their advisers such as at least two fuckwit MP’s were doing at this time. They then claim credit for reductions in what they are doing instead of outright bans. No one of course can possibly measure this horseshit or prove it is happening.
It does mention the unfolding Leigh Environmental protests in Walsall and the distrust of people in the operation being regulated properly.
Some 33 years later, nothing has changed at all, and the timebomb fuse is still ticking. Unfortunately, it will have exploded in some people who have had their homes built on toxic tips in the form of cancers which they will have to prove came from the crap that Hillman and co failed to stop happening all those years ago. Failures like Rossi have also snuffed it and are now, to use an apt paraphrased term for him “sleeping with the two headed fishes”, and that at least it is no loss at all. The records of toxic waste tipped and buried have been deleted for this very purpose, and this is the real legacy of The West Midlands County Council- complicit with industrialists in harming people and the Environment for purely economic gain. #SCUM.