Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
The Stranglers sang “Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?” but what ever did happen to all those Trots who were apparently threatening British Democracy, who (apparently) got run out of the Labour Party by Neil Kinnock? What did happen to Militant Tendency?
Well, I don’t think we have to look far. They smartened up, got proper jobs and wormed their way into the Civil Service, the NHS and similar bodies, forming the basis for the current obsession with collecting data on fellow citizens as exemplified in the push for ID Cards, the NHS IT system, and the spread of CCTV and the ‘surveillance society’. The tactics of the East German Stasi reinvented and re-imagined for the 21st century. British refuse bins have RFID chips in them, east German bins had cameras. The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but the extreme left didn’t lose. They are actually winning.
...ravings from the Shell... 
I couldn’t agree more. The wheelie bin thing is positively spine chilling: rather goes against the whole social democratic ideal that I thought most forward-thinking European countries had espoused. For instance, families with kids will automatically have to pay more for their waste collection, when they should be effectively cross-subsidised by the better-off members of society, for producing the next generation.
I live not too far from a “recycling centre” and there is enough fly-tipping going on when it’s closed. If people are expected to pay disproportionately, then they’ll be a whole lot more fly-tipping, which in turn will be opposed by an increase in ‘surveillance’. And so it goes…