More litter madness -WTF?

Okay, I am all for keeping your place, your home, your city tidy. But to be fined for your grandchild dropping 2 crisps on the ground, or feeding the pigeons or the ducks? English people seem to have lost all common sense and reason.

My mouth fell open with unbelief at the following, (all from the BBC website):

Barbara Jubb's granddaughter, two-year-old Emily, dropped a packet of Quavers in Crawley, West Sussex.

Mrs Jubb, 57, picked up the bag but kicked two stray crisps into the gutter - and was given an on-the-spot fine of £80 by two council wardens.

A teenager fined £75 this week for leaving an ice lolly stick on a wall in Manchester city centre said she started crying when she was ordered to pay up even though she offered to put the stick in a bin.

Sorrell Walsh, 16, said the council warden told her: "It's too late for that, you've just got yourself a £75 fine."

Last week, 66-year-old Bernard Hambleton from Stockport was given an ASBO (AntiSocial Behaviour Order) for feeding pigeons outside his home, after 22 complaints in four years from neighbours.

And last July, three women, aged between 55 and 76, were warned they could face a £60 litter fine if they carried on feeding ducks at Hilsea Lido in Portsmouth.

In December 2004 bargain shopping proved a false economy for a woman who was fined £100 when she dropped a receipt as she left Poundland in Dudley.

And a Gateshead woman was fined £50 in February 2005 for littering after a parking ticket fell off her car windscreen onto the ground.

In March a 35-year-old fish merchant from Hull was fined £1,500 for breaching noise abatement orders when a group of friends sang Beatles songs in his garden hot tub early in the morning.

Judge Tom Cracknell told Charles Roach: "It is bad enough people singing Yellow Submarine in a hot tub at 9 pm, let alone at nine in the morning."

As silly as Americans come across, the English seem to be in fierce competition. Maybe the next great war will be a war of stupidity.