I was horrified to read that Bristol Mayor George Ferguson wishes to introduce public flogging and even beheadings for people who pick blackberries. How else could you explain the Mail’s headline, “Foodies fear council wants to ban foraging for blackberries, apples or mushrooms in case it damages the local plants.”
Can you just imagine the scene in fields around Bristol, with Council Inspectors, quite possibly backed with squads of heavily tooled-up police officers, ‘cracking down’ on newly assigned criminals picking blackberries, apples and mushrooms? Let’s not bother too much with pesky law and order matters such as drug dealing, burglary and serious assaults: the real criminals are the blackberry pickers.
There is a petition about this too which is hardly a surprise. One Daily Mail headline and there’s a new petition and, like everything else in the newspaper, the first thing you need to do is check whether its true.
Oddly enough, the Mail story doesn’t always say what the headline indicates and in this case it adds, quite early in the ‘story’, such as it is, that “Bristol City Council has suggested 34 new bylaws for 212 parks and green spaces around the city including one banning the removal of ‘the whole or any part of any plant, shrub or tree.” Note the word, “suggested”; it’s consulting with the public and it’s consulting the public as part of a process of seeking to safeguard and preserve the parks and green spaces that come within its jurisdiction. Nowhere, as part of the consultation, does the council say that people will no longer be able to collect blackberries and find themselves in the courts for so doing.
If you are signing a petition to stop what isn’t actually going to happen, then you are an idiot. Petitions seem to be the new way of setting aside rational debate and discussion by adding your name to something that will be roundly ignored, as all petitions are.
Well, you say. They’ve already tried to ban Christmas by banning nativity plays, replacing the name Christmas with Winterval and to even stop using the word Christmas for fearing of offending muslims. This is the thin end of the wedge. Except that none of this was true, either. But start up a rumour, circulate it on the internet, it gets picked up by an irresponsible tabloid newspaper and soon it becomes a fact. “They’re stopping us picking blackberries. This is political correctness gone mad.”
Bristol City Council is actually doing something worthwhile, to protect and maintain our lovely parks and green spaces and they are asking us what we think about it. Instead of signing pointless petitions, has it occurred to Mr or Ms Angry of Henleaze (or anywhere else in Bristol) to get involved in the consultation. She or he might actually agree with what’s being done and why.
