Another fantastic mess! Now they’re punishing grannies for ‘fly-tipping’ whereas legal gangs get away with it: RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

Until the advent of blanket 20mph speed limits – actor Idris Elba is the latest high-profile victim, nicked doing 28mph on the Chelsea Embankment – I probably got more letters and emails about Britain’s deranged rubbish and recycling regime than anything else.

I’m expecting another deluge from March onwards, when new rules come into force mandating four separate bins per household.

There’ll be different-coloured containers for dry recyclables, mixed recyclables, garden waste and a ‘food caddy’ – which sounds like someone you’d find on a golf course, delivering sausage sandwiches to the four-ball on the 10th tee.

Confused? You’re supposed to be. All this in the name of ‘Simpler Recycling’, a contradition in terms if ever I heard one. Even More Complicated Recycling would be more accurate.

The new rules will be enthusiastically embraced and enforced by local councils everywhere, salivating at the prospect of imposing harsh fines on those found to be putting the ‘wrong’ kind of rubbish in the ‘wrong’ bin.

Householders are being issued with a list of 37 different types of waste – everything from coffee pods to crisp packets and Pyrex dishes – specifying what goes where.

The new regime will cost councils a small fortune to implement. It’s estimated that at least one local authority will have to spend £21 million on new vehicles and bins. This will have to be recouped by employing an army of Stasi-style rubbish inspectors to issue fines of up to £400 to those who fall foul of the rules.

That will involve sifting through bins to search for a disposable nappy or stray milk carton unwittingly dropped in the bin marked ‘dry recyclables’. Quite who’d want to do that for a living is beyond me. File it under What’s The Worst Job You Ever Had?

Idris Elba is the latest high-profile victim of the 20mph speed limit blanket – he was nicked doing 28mph on the Chelsea Embankment (pictured)

Then again, there’s never any shortage of Warden Hodges wannabe jobsworths who take a perverse, sadistic delight in punishing their fellow citizens for crimes real or imagined. It’s a consequence of Britain’s punishment culture, which I’ve been writing about for donkey’s years.

Take the case of 83-year-old grandmother Carole Wright, reported in the Mail in the past week. She’s been fined £600 for ‘fly tipping’ – allegedly failing to dispose properly of a cardboard box from a new egg-poaching pan. She is now being threatened with a criminal conviction because she can’t afford to pay.

And where did she dump it – in a hedgerow or next to a children’s playground? Er, not exactly. This heinous crime was apparently committed… at a local council recycling drop-off centre. You couldn’t make it up.

Mrs Wright received a letter from a contractor employed by Reading Council, complete with a photo showing a worker triumphantly holding up the box bearing her address. She is accused of failing to put the box in the bins provided – even though in the photo’s background, all the bins are overflowing.

That doesn’t surprise me. There used to be a drop-off at a car park near where we live in North London. The skips were always full and there was rubbish scattered everywhere.

Grandmother Carole Wright, 83, was fined £600 for ‘fly-tipping’ after allegedly failing to dispose properly of a cardboard box from a new egg-poaching pan

It has since closed because the council couldn’t be bothered to empty the bins regularly enough.

In the former country lanes close to our home, on the Hertfordshire border, the verges are continually littered with genuine ‘fly-tipping’, everything from builders’ rubble and household black bin liners to washing machines and even asbestos. Nobody responsible ever seems to be prosecuted. Try putting out your dustbin on the wrong day or leaving the lid slightly ajar, though, and the council will come down on you like a ton of hot wossname.

In the Mail this week, an investigation by Rory Tingle exposed the way in which illegal dumping is now big business – the ‘new narcotics’, according to police. Yet even when the gangs involved are caught, the authorities seem either unwilling or incapable of enforcing the penalties, which can include unlimited fines and even prison sentences.

My best guess is that the new complicated ‘Simpler Recycling’ regime will lead to even more fly tipping, not less, especially as it will be coupled with councils cutting refuse collections still further, from the now standard every two weeks to three weeks and even monthly.

Meanwhile the criminal gangs will continue to get away with it and the full force of the law will be applied to evil soft-target ‘fly tippers’ like 83-year-old Carole Wright.

Makes you proud to be British.

The Royal Navy has ordered sailors to abstain from alcohol two days a week. So much for rum, sodomy and the lash. The daily rum ration went years ago along with the lash.

Now sodomy will be the only tradition left – and with the Navy exclusively seeking under-represented ‘diverse’ recruits these days, it will probably be compulsory.

ITV is rebooting Dalziel and Pascoe, which starred the late, great Warren Clarke, who embodied brilliantly the character of Superintendent Andy Dee-yell, and co-starred Colin Buchanan as his sidekick Peter Pascoe.

The heart sinks, especially on the evidence of other awful modern remakes of The Sweeney, Minder, Bergerac and now Inspector Lynley. No doubt this will be a female-heavy woke-fest, like most other modern dramas. ‘Andi’ Dalziel will inevitably be played by a pro-EU, vegan, black lesbian and ‘Peta’ Pascoe portrayed as a mixed-race, pro-Palestinian trans-sexual with pronoun issues, who identifies as a police dog.

First case: Our dynamic duo bring down a ‘far-Right’ white supremicist rape gang linked to Reform UK, led by a sinister neo-Nazi called Garage, carrying out a terror campaign against mosques and asylum hostels. Don’t do it ITV – it ain’t worth it!

British delegates in China with Surkeir have been issued with burner phones and advised to take precautions against espionage and ‘kompromat’.

I still can’t shake the image of our Prime Minister Theresa May getting undressed under a duvet in Beijing a few years ago in case there were hidden cameras in her bedroom.

She must have looked like Harry Houdini trying to escape from a sack.

My old friend Bill (now Lord) Jordan, former engineering union leader – who I’ve known for almost 50 years since he was young AUEW official in Birmingham and I was an even younger industrial correspondent – turned 90 this week.

Bill is a lifelong moderate, who was instrumental in routing Militant in the Eighties, and a reminder of the days Labour really did represent ‘working people’, not the smug, far-Left metropolitan wokerati and indolent benefits scroungers it does today.

He’s one of the wisest, sharpest, most sensible minds in the Upper Chamber and living proof of Labour’s folly in planning to jettison all peers over 80. And he still looks younger than me!