The latest evil in the cross hairs of the political big guns both here in Reading and nationally is the humble plastic bag. Several trillion of these things are made ever year, allegedly at an enormous environmental cost. Now the powers in the lands have concluded that a trillion of anything is rather a lot, so – you guessed it – the bag must be banned.

Another triumphant announcement for Gordon as he fearlessly fights climate change! So that’s OK then!

But it’s not as if we haven’t known for years exactly how wasteful these things are. We’ve also known for years why supermarkets give them out free – whenever one retailer put a charge on bags their rivals made a virtue of giving them away like confetti and the charge was dropped. Now it’s finally understood that regulating the market is the only answer. Conveniently for politicians, the big supermarkets are easy targets – good copy for a press release or the targets of an eye-catching initiative. But headline grabbing proposals to ‘ban’ plastic bags only scratch the surface of the problems of excessive packaging.

So last week we received a dense twelve page tract from Reading Borough Council attempting to explain its recycling policy. It tried to tell me what I can and what I can’t throw away, what I can and what I can’t put in each bin. Forgive me for not much caring about the difference between cardboard boxes and cardboard juice cartons, but life is too short. If a policy is so complex that it needs this level of explanation then something is seriously wrong somewhere.

Over the years I’ve argued with both colleagues and opponents that only the most dedicated section of the public will go out of their way to ‘act green’. Exhorting people to change their ways to ‘be better citizens’ is evangelism not environmentalism.

The job of politicians should be to make it easy for the 90% of people to act virtuously or to focus their choices through the tax system. Instead starry-eyed politicos insist on dealing with the world as they would like it to be, rather than the world as it is. In doing so they reach only the 10% who are already converted.

Not everyone has the garden space to compost their food waste and not everyone wants to live a pigsty as dictated by the Eco-Taliban and nobody but the most bonkers wants to live entirely on mung beans and hand woven yoghurt from a damp paper bag. Wake up and smell the soap!

Back in the days when the main worries about refuse collection were black bins splitting, binmen being injured by sharps and incurring serious back problems, Reading Borough Council introduced wheeled bins the size of a small county. Few said at the time said it was a bad idea. Of course this was way back in simpler times, before landfill taxes and greenhouse gases were of concern to local politicians.

It is a bit rich to criticise ordinary people with busy lives for throwing away too much garbage when our politicians are not prepared to prevent the generation of that garbage in the first place. And as for the idea of being taxed for what we throw away, many will share my view penalising the people who deal as best they can with crazy amounts of packaging they receive is getting things backwards. Such tax is the sort of thing thought up by waste disposal bureaucrat in ivory towers. It will be seen be the public as unfair and inequitable and will prove impractical avoidable and hideously expensive.