Local councils are becoming more and more adventurous in their bid to fill the gap between the funding increases they were promised by Gordon Brown and the reality of the empty coffers inherited by Cameron – commonly referred to in shorthand by the misleading ‘Cuts’, or even ‘vicious and heartless cuts’.
Oop in Darlington, they racked their brains until some bright spark pointed out that the expanding elderly population were being cremated along with their expensive metal hip replacements – no one was callous enough to mention their gold teeth, or even the titanium wire holding their fractured bones together, or the gold wedding ring that no one had the heart to take off grandma’s finger, so we shan’t, shall we children?
Enquiries were made and it turned out that the crematorium attendants were in the habit of gathering all this scrap metal together and giving it a fine and decent burial – don’t be so cynical at the back there!
The Borough Council’s Neighbourhood Services committee has now decreed that a ‘national company’ will collect the metal and recycle it, all profits going to charity….
Darlington Crematorium has been in business since 1901 – now there’s a challenge for the scrap metal thieves, find this mythical dump where 110 years worth of gold teeth and wedding rings and other precious metals have been given a fine and decent burial…..
SBML is the landlord of the Raccoon Arms. He lives North of Watford and has an eclictic range of interests from Science and Technology to Politics including Woodwork and Genealogy. His political viewpoint has evolved from being a student demonstrator to more liberal views and has now seen the light in Libertarianism.
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Disgusting, if true. Britain continues its New Labour induced descent into oblivion, only now the “cuts” are to blame.
Surely this has to be another nail in the ‘rule by council’ coffin. These entities are now totally irrelevant and have no place in my world.
They parisitize the people they allege they serve and do not provide the level of service they promise in their ‘offer’.
Speaking of which the ‘offer’ masquerading as a “How we spend YOUR money” booklet, will be arriving on doormats across the land in a couple of weeks time along with an invoice.
It behoves all of us to go through that offer and reject the bits we don’t want and formally accepting the bits we are happy to pay for by sending it back to the council for them to issue a revised offer.
Every day offers arrive on the doormat and are rejected by ignorance. If BT offer you a service by leaflet you ignore it and BT cannot force their offer upon you by tacit acceptance because you didn’t explicitly reject it.
If the council send their offer and you ignore it they assume you have actually accepted it in full by tacit acceptance and will pursue you through their fake courts to extract money from you.
Instead please take the time to go through it and send it back by return of post along with a letter telling them what you are willing to pay for and what you are not.
At the very least it will make those who take the state’s coin think, if only for a second or two and it might turn out that actually you can alter the way councils do things simply by making a conditional offer of contract with them and reduce their income accordingly.
Apologies for rambling a bit and straying off topic slightly but I am trying to get my head round how a council (aka the state) can provide a service without a contract. No other entity can do this.
“… a ‘national company’ will collect the metal …”
I can’t figure a way round Godwin for this. Any suggestions?
The Northern Echo article on this topic suggests that it would be voluntary, that the council would donate any profits to a charity and that it wouldn’t include jewellery. It also suggests that other councils already do the same thing.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/8854769.Plans_for_crematorium_recycling/
It may sound gruesome but you can’t hand over large chunks of metal in the ashes container, so something else has to be done. It’s either this or burying the metal, and in a way it is similar to organ donation.
It’s certainly similar to organ donation, in that increasingly the state presumes ownership of the organic bits too!
So let me get this straight, if I go down to the local ‘recycling’ centre (Council Dump) and remove a chair that is capaable of repair and reuse, I am guilty of an ‘offence’. If the Council however remove artifacts from a coffin, it does not constitute grave robbing or theft.
Not a crime because to meet regulations all metals and other non-organic materials need to removed from the body prior to cremation. Sometimes done by the undertaker, or done at autopsy, or if no-one else does at the crematorium.
The reason the stuff is removed is because metals don’t burn and other stuff can cause an environmental hazard, eg. the mercury in teeth filings.
Are you saying all corpses have any teeth with fillings extracted before cremation?
Yep.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article402237.ece
http://www.fbca.org.uk/defra-oct06.asp
OK, teeth are visible, but on some of the other stuff, how do they know? Especially if there’s no autopsy?
Do they x-ray all bodies?
There is of course a precedent for all this, but those earlier pioneers did not actually wait for the owners of those valuable metals to die naturally first.
APW,
Surely you must realise that if lots of people are scavenging rubbish tips in order to make a profit, that makes us look like a third world country, sorry, “developing nation,” and we can’t have that, can we? Nor can we allow anyone to make a few bob without paying the elite for it.
Sometimes I despair at the thoughtlessness of our civic guv’nors. I suppose they leave the skip to hold the scrap metal discretely behind the crematorium furnace.
It’s a wonder they aren’t they aren’t trying to sell the ashes as plant food.
- and I note, we are all politely assuming that crematorium employees all over the country aren’t ‘burying’ these precious metals at the bottom of their garden…
Perish the thought that anyone should have a secret pension fund building up…..
Yup APW, the other day saw 2 bits of angle iron in a skip in council “recycling centre” …. absolutely perfect for a project I’m working on. Could I have em … no way pal feck off, those are going for recycling … I was going to recycle them without transporting them for miles and firing up a furnace producing nasty toxic fumes to melt em down, transporting the result to another factory who would make em into …. bits af angle iron!!
I’ll get my shovel.
@JuliaM – Simple metal detector would find things. Obviously you could use the type used by treasure hunters, but this is the goverment regulation beaucracy so it’s probably some £100K machine.
This is turning into one of those fascinating conversations on here that throws up so much information!
Apparently ‘pacemakers’ explode during the cremation process, and thus have to be removed by someone along the line before cremation….
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279940/
Teeth, pacemakers, artificial hips, wedding rings, these crematoria are regular recycling experts aren’t they? I had no idea!
It’s too gruesome: poor old Granny – teeth pulled out, hips cut open & pacemaker torn out of her chest. That’s it, I’m opting for burial in one piece and to let the bacteria feast on my rotten corpse in time-honoured fashion.
I’m with you Ed P – I think I’ll opt for gentle decay and do the soil good. This all sounds too much like a production line for me…..
It sounds like something the Nazis would do.
I suppose some militant Crem staff could threaten to strike over the loss of a (very) valuable ‘perk’.
[Whilst supermarket staff & those in the various transport industries get 10% staff discount, 10% off your forthcoming cremation isn't much of an incentive to take up that particular career.]
I have always been told that gold teeth from the corpses were a standard perk of the job for crematorium workers; I never doubted it for a moment.
As for the useful things in the council skips, well of course you’re not allowed to take them: those people don’t get paid very well you know, they need that stuff to make a decent living.
Sinister!
Sounds very like the socialist dystopian future portrayed in the film Soylent Green, (spoiler alert, don’t read this if you want to see the film).. It was quite a good thought-provoking film, made in the early 1970s with Charlton Heston and Edward G.Robinson.
It looks like all the Fabian elements are being set in place to push us towards this kind of nightmare.
The similarities between that film and our current socialist state are:
– We have assisted suicides and suicide clinics that the state almost sanctions.
– The state allows or encourages the old to suffer (such as negligent healthcare, being forced to sell their homes for care fees, rising fuel costs and the destruction of their pensions).
– The state is increasingly dictating to us what we should eat.
– The state is making us adopt the perverted socialist forms of “Green” and “Global Warming” ideologies which force us plebs to pay double the price for heating than freer countries and forces us to accept declining standards and less democracy.
I have to say I’m somewhat in sympathy with Daedalus, it is worrying.
Even more chilling is the tendency for science fiction to become science fact.
At some point, a disturbingly large amount of the horrors envisaged by the authors of classic fiction has either become, or is becoming, fact.
I have to say too, that I boycotted the Internet for years, because of similar worries. Even now, I’m not entirely comfortable with it. It brings out the best in human nature sometimes, like on here with good and caring people, but it also facilitates the absolute worst, because it is so easy and so accessible and we can have conversations with almost anyone around the world at the touch of very easy buttons.
Just wish I knew the remedy, that’s all.
Oh my God, I never thought of this. Thanks for the tip. I must remind my children to hack out all of my gold teeth before they bury me. The Government will be digging up coffins before much longer.
Whoops, I forgot. They already do.
How long before some zealots from Greenpeace go up to the government with a proposal like this:
GREENPEACE PRESS RELEASE – 01-April-2017
“A report today from the campaigning group Greenpeace described how a new initiative could revolutionise recycling. They are confident that the new Labour/Conservative coalition government will give it consideration.
They propose a revolutionary new system for recycling and bereavement therapy and they say it will also create many new green jobs and boost the economy.
The system, called Out of Body, requires all humans to carry an Out of Body permit card which describes the manner in which the government will allow their body to be recycled. Any person not signing up for one of these cards will be denied any services from the government industries such as the NHS, the National Supermarket Group (the nationalised chain which was formed from Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s by our glorious leader, Ed Miliband in 2015), or from Gazprom, the nation’s single and favourite energy provider.
Users of this system will be allowed to specify how each of their valuable body parts are to be recycled and to specify which rendering factory the rest of their flesh and bone are to be boiled down in.
The report describes the huge amounts of trace elements, minerals and nutrients that could be reclaimed by this system, for the good of us all.
Another revolutionary part of the scheme is the “Sell By Date”, which is a date beyond which the human will be given a free, but mandatory, recycle for the good of the People. Already, many in political circles are showing great enthusiasm for these proposals, especially the bit where they get to decide the rules for applying a “Sell By Date”.
Some industry leaders are queuing up to make it known that will be very interested in singing up for the huge contracts for rendering facilities and slaughterhouses that this scheme requires. ”
Extremists form the political centre have been denounced by all of the liberal media for objecting to this. Their unfounded claims that this is “dehumanising” and “destroys peoples’ liberties” were widely denounced as irresponsible and typical of the bigoted attitude from far right extremists.
The Sell By Date will be decided by the advent of individual Pensions, but this could change as time goes by, extending eventually to those of 90 years old
There will be an delay for some at the start as they catch up with the backlog