COUNCILS across England are to be offered incentives to collect rat-filled bags of putrefying meat and devastating viruses more often than once a fortnight.
Government ministers are to increase funding to cash-strapped local authorities in a bid to keep their manifesto promise of preventing a new outbreak of the Black Death.
Prime minister David Cameron said: “When I arrived in Downing Street I made it clear that one of the things I really wanted to do was prevent the population of this country being decimated by an unstoppable virus carried by the trillions of fleas who live on the backs of billions of rats.
“We’re not building a Big Society of rats and as I’ve often said, ‘take care of the rats and the fleas will take care of themselves’.”
The issue has caused tension between Downing Street and the department for communities and local government where secretary of state Eric Pickles has resisted weekly bin collections because he just loves the stench of rotting pork.
But Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “In recent years we have noticed a correlation between low life expectancy and societies with massive piles of uncollected refuse.
“India, for example, still has the occasional outbreak of a disease that they – and we – call ‘the plague’. I actually gave a presentation at a conference last night about why India still has the ‘the plague’. Allow me to repeat in full.
“It’s because they don’t collect their bins. I thank you.”
Council victim Bill McKay added: “Because I’ve been alive in England for more than 20 minutes I really don’t expect very much from my local authority.
“But I do think if they are going to do something with my £1500 a year I would like it to somehow involve the weekly collection of tiny, but virulent organisms that, given the opportunity, would effectively cause me to melt from the inside out.
“As long as they just do that, then as far as I’m concerned then they can go around setting up lesbian basketball teams until they are blue in the face.”
