Confessions of a middle-class anarchist

If Gordon Brown really wants to start appealing to the middle-class vote, he could start by picking up my rubbish. The bin bags outside my flat in Kentish Town, north London, weren’t collected for four weeks over Christmas because of the snow. When the foxes started to rip them apart and left a trail of chicken carcasses and half-chewed bread across my front garden, I cracked.

Patching up the most damaged bag and strapping it to my handlebars, I pedalled along the snowy roads — if my bike could negotiate the streets, so could a rubbish truck, by the way — to my local park. There, I poured the rubbish into a large, metal-mesh bin. As I did so, a plump, unshaven man in an official council fleece stopped casually scattering grit on the park footpaths and accelerated towards me.

‘Bag that up and take it home,’ he said, in the flat, passive-aggressive tone of the jobsworth bolstered by a tiny measure of official authority.