Whether it actually happens or not, the proposal by Labour that we should stump up an extra £75 a year to have our brown bins emptied amounts to a five per cent equivalent stealth hike on my Band D council tax, presumably as well as the proposed approximately 1.5 per cent tax increase. There is seemingly oodles of money available for iPads for councillors, expensive colour printers and re-employing a chief executive.

We paid a shedload to remove miles of useless yellow lines on potholed roads, spent loads on rearranging the chairs in the civic centre and, of course, around £3million for public relations.

It is, as usual, all blamed on the ‘cuts’, with visible frontline service cuts, repairs neglected and library closures, while residents are forced to pay, on threat of punishment by our ‘caring’ feather-bedded functionaries These ‘bleeding-stump politics’ — conveniently just before an election — are cynically designed to wind up the electorate and no doubt Harrow councillors will tell us that it’s ‘only’ £1.50 a week to ‘save our services’ and that the £75 isn’t really a tax increase, but a ‘sundry charge’, which is how Labour intends to get around the two per cent tax increase cap.

Apparently, the £75 will not be compulsory, so for my part, I will return my brown bin and putting the waste either into compost, or the green/grey bin, on the very reasonable grounds that I am not paying twice for a statutory service that is already paid for in my council tax.

Meanwhile, now that Labour has put a price on the brown bin collection, if I compost all of my garden waste, may I assume that I can now deduct £75 from my council tax or will a V-formation of flying pigs be coming into land at Northolt first?

Jeremy Zeid

Harrow UKIP chairman