It seems Brighton is not the only place in the U.K. being overrun with weeds, as the Mail reports that green councils across Britain are choosing to ‘rewild’ their streets. Here’s an excerpt:
Streets across Britain are being choked with weeds as councils abandon a chemical spray they claim harms wildlife.
Many roads which have been well-tended for decades have sprouted mini-jungles over the summer as some councils have stopped using the chemical glyphosate and say other treatments are less effective.
Other councils blame the rainy summer, which restricted spraying, and admit they stopped weeding to cut costs.
Yet middle class homes have been hit by huge hikes in council tax, pushing the average Band D bill above £2,000 a year.
Some fed-up residents have formed their own weeding patrols.
“These plants taking over feels like a scene from The Day of the Triffids,” said Yvonne Wright, who has formed a Civic Pride Team of pensioners to do the job of council contractors in Tottington, in Bury, Greater Manchester.
They use their gardening tools to eradicate the weeds.
Ms. Wright said: “Our town used to look fantastic but the spread of weeds has been dreadful. There’s a lot of anger because people have highly rated homes for council tax.” …
Cambridgeshire County Council said it is “supporting the natural environment” and reducing running costs while Suffolk insisted it is spraying urban areas but using low-toxicity acetic acid, described as less efficient but more environmentally friendly than glyphosate. …
In Bath’s Georgian streets, homeowner Janice Legge weeds her entire pavement.
“The council is not interested because it is calling it the ‘rewilding of Bath’,” she said. “But that should not mean pavements.”
Bath and North East Somerset Council said it has stopped using glyphosate in “response to the climate and ecological emergency”.
Worth reading in full.
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I suspect it’s often a good excuse to do less work
It’s so that they can employ more DIE staff. And we’re not talking about killing the weeds.
Every village and and town in the UK used to have council lengthmen who swept and weeded the pavement and roadsides. They were armed with brush and shovel -no chemicals used. We the ratepayer enjoyed far more bang for our buck from the lengthmen than the the despicable, toxic DIE officers.
“I suspect”
So diplomatic
There is no climate emergency.
How do they think glyphosate adds to the claimed emergency?
Anything can be added to the climate emergency. Imagination is a wonderful thing.
Next up – school meals to be cancelled in order to protect children’s health and to stop the climate emergency.
I thought school meals had been improved by Jamie Oliver?
Shrubs and trees will start to grow and start to dislodge the street paving stones. Dogs will enjoy the increase in facilities, dirt and rubbish will accumulate and rot, rats will thrive, as they are in Glasgow.
Another delightful way for the councillors to line their pockets whilst trashing our surroundings.
No, only James Oliver’s bank balance.
Have a look at the estate owned by Network Rail. Invasive Buddleia is growing in the cracks of brickwork at every station and bridge throughout the land.
Planned obsolescence perhaps?
Acetic acid? That’s vinegar to you and me…Heavens preserve us.
Yep. It’s preferred over glyphosate because it doesn’t kill the wild flora (aka weeds).
And if my aim is to kill the weeds?
Do some weeding like our forefathers…
I have a proper job to make my life outside of that job easier, I’ll get a copuple of gallons of weedkiller.
My mate uses anti-freeze to kill the weeds. No idea what it does when it runs off into the rest of the garden though.
Wanting to kill the weeds probably qualifies as being a Bad Person.
Weeds have rights too!
Was that a deliberate pun? ‘Acetic acid’ and ‘..preserve us’ in the same line?
I prefer getting pickled using a different chemical.
The reason not to use glyphospate is that there is strong evidence it is a nasty carcinogen.
So while councils should be keeping our streets free of weeds, the non-use of glyphosphate is a good thing.
Of course not using glyphosphate is nothing to do with the (non-existent) climate emergency and so for Bath and North East Somerset Council to say that is nonsense.
I don’t actually care if it is or isn’t …. if the council don’t do the pavements outside my house I WILL be using glyphosate.
Glyphosate is in a very odd situation. In the US I believe that judges have awarded damages to users on the basis that it is a carcinogen (although in my opinion judges are probably not best placed to decide such things) while here it is legal and used regularly on the majority of farmland. I can see why councils might want to shy away from using it, mindful of potential litigation, but there is a reason why herbicides are so widely used – hand weeding is laborious and terribly expensive.
It is safe, IMHO, if used responsibly accoreding to instructins. Of course, if you emerge ten rats in it for a week they might get ill.
It’s the same here, with many gutters full of hearty, tufty plants. The other day the sweeper lorry came round and gave all these weeds a good watering and brushed them with its rotating brush, thus spreading the seeds even further afield. Gutters blocked with weeds don’t help with the swift removal of rainfall either. It all down to saving money. Everywhere looks a mess.
Councils are broke, it’s not just Birmingham..
One of my employees was in magistrates last Monday, he got fined 375 for leaving a cardboard box, no larger than a shoe box next to his wheelie as his bin was full outside his house a day before collection….
First it was a fine for flytipping, then he pointed out flytipping definition was bin bag or larger so they then changed it to littering. He went to court to stand his ground but to no avail.. No appeal process either… Screams of desperation to me..
But that’s what happens when you close the economy down over the flu and throw 400 billion around like confetti.. Then spend 60 billion a year on keeping immigrants happy..
The average man pays.. This county is finished
And that#’s why ypu leave it nect to your neighbour’s bin.
Do these councils also support wildlife by failing to clear drains, maintain roads and verges with resultant worse car damage and pollution from tyres, brake pads etc.
The modern eco-loon orthodoxy is ‘do nothing’ and ‘let nature take its course’. That’s incredibly stupid and flies in the face of millennia of accumulated wisdom. The refusal to dredge rivers is why we get flooding where we didn’t before. Refusing to cut down older trees in forests and do burn backs means more old and dried up, dead trees, leading to fires that destroy towns and city suburbs. The eco-loons don’t realise that tending to these things saves lives, and saves animal species.
Talk about ‘mental health’, the dreadful state of our cities – I’ve written before about how our local council has mowed the public grass around us once this year and once last year and not touched the trees in the area in five years – is depressing to see. It looks like a country fallen apart. And our council tax is extortionate. I’d have pressure hosed the weeds in my at the front of our house, in the storm drain and growing out of the parking bay, but we had a hosepipe ban from early spring that still hasn’t been lifted!! We had non-stop rain for all of July and August!
Surely the reason for stopping using glyphosate is because it is extremely harmful to wildlife (eg bees). I haven’t used anything like that in my garden for years and am pleased that it’s not being used on the pavements around our house, which I try to weed myself. However, the councils should either be weeding the pavements themselves or lowering our council tax. Fat chance, of course. I don’t ascribe good motives to the councils, that’s for sure – it’s just a handy excuse for them.
Nah they’re just lazy good for nothing idiots using their eco zealot green agenda to do f all. End of.