The flaw in carrier bag tax

Pardon me for thinking but is there not a serious flaw in Darlings first budget and the proposal to impose a backdoor tax on the use of carrier bags by making shops charge for them or face a fine. Presumably this cunning plan is to force us all to use traditional reusable shopping bags and cut down on the production of plastic and therefore greenhouse gases.

But if you're like me and everyone else on the planet whats the most common use we put our carrier bags to when we get home.........yes that's right we all use them to put our household waste in and means we don't have to go and buy er.......big bin bags made of plastic.

Now let me get this right...........because we're all going to be charged to buy plastic carrier bags we're now all going to stop putting our shopping into plastic carrier bags and instead buy even more plastic bin bags to put our rubbish into instead.

And because the plastic bags you buy for bins are usually a lot bigger than the bin itself we'll all invariably take it out of the kitchen bin before its even half full and pop it outside or, we leave it until its full and stink the place out which I doubt any houseproud person will accept.

So in fact rather than reducing the amount of plastic produced to make bags we'll actually end up making even more and the only people who will win are the bin bag manufacturers and the shops themselves who will see an increase in bin bag sales and a reduction in overheads as a result of no longer supplying free carrier bags.

Would it not not have made more sense, rather than to have gone off half cocked and just placed a "tax" on the public, to have also proposed a bill forcing local authorities to only collect refuse sacks made of 100% biodegradable material and to also replace their plastic bins with galvanised steel ones that we can dump our rubbish into without putting in a bag first.

All he's managed to do is to remove the carrier bag problem and replace it with a bin bag problem.

One word Darling.....Duh !!!!