I CANNOT imagine a more perfect example of the duplicitous way Wyre Forest District Council conduct their affairs, than the response of Becky Robinson concerning recycling (Letters, February 16).

For a start, the people of Wyre Forest did not vote for a fortnightly waste collection, they were simply given a pair of unpalatable options and told to choose the lesser of two evils.

At no time were they allowed the choice of leaving things as they were because, of course, that is what most of us would have preferred. To come along now and state that we voted for this ridiculous system is the politics of a banana republic.

Carping on about landfill tax, fines and the necessity to stop burying rubbish is a monumental con trick. The fact is that landfill has been reduced by only just over one per cent- which is a drop in the ocean.

When these "waste minimalisation officers" get on their pompous high-horses and start lecturing us about the environment, they studiously avoid mentioning the fact that the purchase of thousands upon thousands of recycling boxes, a fleet of new refuse vehicles and specialist handling equipment, has consumed far more in raw materials than they can ever hope to recycle.

It has also been necessary to build processing centres to deal with all this material, yet the end product has so little value the council effectively gives it away.

This is what we have had in exchange for the millions of pounds of extra council tax we have been forced to pay - a gang of people who call themselves "public servants", but who are, in fact, public dictators who use this revenue to force upon us the dictates of central government or a bunch of crazed EC politicians. What fools we are.

The greatest good we could do for the environment would be to recycle Wyre Forest District Council, in the hope that out of a small plastic tub might emerge an organisation which would actually be of some use to us.

MICHAEL DUNN

Sandbourne Drive, Bewdley