Do you remember the sepia-tinted days when shopkeepers would give you 5p for
the return of an empty fizzy-drink bottle? For me the memory of this early
recycling venture excites a flush of shame. As children, our gang would
pilfer the glass bottles from neighbours’ porches and backyards and stuff
our faces with sherbert on the profit. My more hard-faced schoolfriends went
farther and would steal full bottles of Tizer from shop shelves, empty the
contents down the grate, then return them to the same outlet, smiling
innocently, to collect their wages of sin.
Fizzy-pop bottle crime was my instant thought when I read that the Government
is considering giving fat people cash or vouchers to lose weight. What kind
of crazed, inverted logic is this? Pay people to lose weight and you give
them a motive to gain it in the first place. Don’t be thin and a loser,
folks. Eat all the pies and - wayhay! - it’s payday. If history has taught
us anything it is that where state-sponsored financial incentives are
involved, human beings will find a way to double bluff the system.
We all heard the allegations during the foot-and-mouth epidemic that some
farmers were deliberately infecting their livestock to claim the handsome
compensation. Or the stories about people nicking M%26amp;S clothes just so
they could return them sans receipt and take advantage of their generous
refund policy. And the theory that some parents in this country push for
their children to be prescribed Ritalin, the drug that combats attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder, because they will then qualify for the %26pound;40
or so a week %26ldquo;attendance allowance%26rdquo; that accompanies it.
Few anecdotes illustrate the point better than one submitted to the letters
page of The Times this week about a town in Italy plagued by snakes where
locals were paid each time they brought in a skin to the authorities. Guess
what? It emerged that people were breeding snakes to trouser the money.
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