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Everywhere we turn, nanny is there and ready to hit us
When Gwyneth Paltrow said recently that one of the things she most dislikes about this country is the traffic wardens, few people took her seriously. Not everyone looks to an American actress resident here for comment on the checks and balances of the civic weal. However, in her Olympian way she had touched a nerve.
Traffic wardens infuriate most of us out of all proportion to what they do. After all, illegal parking is something up with which we should not put, and they are only obeying orders. But somehow their officious bullying has come to stand for something significant in the public imagination; traffic wardens are the storm troopers of the forces of state interference.
Of all the functionaries who control, restrain, regulate, fine and tax us, traffic wardens have the most public face. And increasingly they have to confront the long pent-up rage of the over-regulated.
Last week The Sun ran a spoof story about the despair of Joe Public, the proverbial decent, hard-working family man, who on one all too plausible day gets stung for £880 in fines for doing little wrong. First of all, poor Joe realises that although he has filled in his self-assessment income tax form, he has forgotten to post it in time for the deadline. This means that he has incurred a new automatic £100 fine. He also realises that he has forgotten to renew his road tax disc and that means another new automatic fine of £80.
Joe dashes for the post office to put things right, but in his haste he forgets to put on his seat belt and strays a couple of miles per hour over the speed limit.
He is caught by three speed cameras in succession, although in bright sunlight he sees none of them. The fine is £180. When his mobile phone rings, he parks so as to answer it but leaves his engine running. A policeman, miraculously free of the desk duties that prevent him catching real villains, appears at his window and Joe is fined £30 for driving while using a mobile phone and £30 for not wearing a seat belt.
Proceeding to the post office and struggling to find a parking space, he squeezes into the end of a bay and pays for a ticket. Unfortunately the end of his car is hanging slightly over the painted line. His fine for incorrect parking is £40. He crushes the offensive ticket in his fist and throws it to the ground, whereupon a litter warden fines him £50.
Now late for work, Joe forgets to pay London's congestion charge and drifts into a bus lane a few yards early when planning to turn left, something which is often unavoidable and one of the many reasons why bus lanes are worse than useless. He is caught on camera both times and the fines are £80 and £100. Back at home and walking the family dog, he loses sight of the beastly mutt, who disappears and defecates in sight of a neighbour, who reports it. The fine is £50.
At home his wife points out that their pre-paid cheap off-peak holiday with the children will expose them to a new fine of £100 if the school doesn't give permission of absence. Then, drowning his sorrows in the pub and complaining histrionically to a policeman, he is fined £40 for being drunk and disorderly. His total bill is £880.
Poor Joe is beginning to think that Someone is after him. He is right. They are after both us and our money. People up and down the country have stories like Joe's. Many of these taxes are new and the excess of zeal with which they are being demanded is an offence against good citizens and good sense. It is not as though these intrusions necessarily serve any useful purpose.
Of course, speeding, especially in residential streets, is a bad thing. But the extraordinary rash of humps and bumps and pavement extensions and painted hieroglyphics on streets and roads is quite obviously daft as well as bewildering and probably a safety hazard in itself.
I could not at first help smiling when I learnt that traffic humps are not only damaging ambulances and fire engines but are also slowing them down so much as to prevent them doing their work, but it is not funny. The London Ambulance Service estimates that about 500 lives a year are lost to speed humps.
Equally I often wonder about the assumptions made by zealous traffic supremos. A bold theorist from Buckinghamshire, Ralph Ingham-Johnson, claims that graphs relating the introduction of speed cameras and the rate of road deaths indicate that speed cameras cost 1,000 lives a year. My point is that the effectiveness of speed control methods is at least debatable.
If nothing else, one might hope that the money raised, whether sneakily or pointlessly, serves some social good. However, the sad truth, as people are at last beginning to believe, is that it is often wasted, like most of our taxes. The National Audit Office has reported to parliament the risk that the extra money going into public services will be wasted.
The government itself admits that council taxes are at the "edge of tolerance".
They have risen by 70% on average since 1997. Yet even in such a penny pinching climate, Solihull borough council seems to think that it takes six men in three vans to plant three tiny saplings on a public green. A pensioner was so horrified by the waste that he recently took photographs of one workman digging while the others watched.
Yet at the same time councils are facing Whitehall-imposed fines of £100 a day for every pensioner in a National Health Service hospital who is a "bed blocker", owing to the decline in council care-home places for said pensioner, owing in turn to council and Whitehall over-regulation. This is the spectacle of an over-busy bee frantically chasing its own sting.
According to Richard Bacon MP, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, there is a black hole at the heart of British government. The public sector is losing billions. The Department for Work and Pensions, for instance, loses between £3billion and £7billion every year through fraud and error. Each year taxpayers spend £100m training teachers who never set foot in a classroom.
The government itself thinks the NHS loses 16%-20% of its budget through waste, mismanagement, incompetence and fraud, while critics would suggest a much bigger estimate.
There are 40 new Apache helicopters worth more than £1.2billion stored idly in a Salisbury Plain warehouse at a cost of £6m, because the Ministry of Defence didn't train enough pilots in time. We have 103,000 civil servants to support 189,000 military personnel. Civil servants don't know whether housing benefit fraud is going up or down. And so on. It defies belief.
We feel the weight of rules and punishments everywhere. Yet the benefits, such as they are, we feel less and less. Predictably enough, the response from the left and from government is that we need more control, not less.
Tessa Jowell, secretary of state for culture and so forth, wrote an article last week called "Learn to love the nanny state", and singing from the same hymn sheet Jackie Ashley published a piece in The Guardian entitled "Britain needs the nanny state now more than ever". They are more than ever wrong.
All stick and no carrot makes Joe Public an angry boy. And angry boys and girls tend to turn upon nanny and tell her they don't love her any more.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 04, 2004
Comments:
I was shocked when I received a Penalty Charge Notice from Transport for London, dated 02/05/07 for £100 that I was not aware of. So I phoned the office to clarify the notice, and I was directed to the photo on page 2 by a staff, then I remembered the incident. The traffic was very heavy at the time. The lights was on green and the traffic was moving when I entered the box; then the traffic suddenly came to a halt while I was in the box, because the lights had changed to red and vehicles in front of me could not go any further (photo shows that also) as traffic to my right began to move, so I had to stay where I was. I did not know I was committing an offence because, there was no traffic coming from my left at the time, therefore, I was not causing any obstruction, (the photo shows that also) even to when the lights had changed back to green.
I have contacted Transport for London by email: enquiries@tflcroydon.co.uk also, 03 May 2007, protesting about the charge and requesting that the penalty charge should be withdrawn, as it was not my fault that I had to stay in the box; but I have not had an acknowledgement or reply.
I have written to the Mayor's office also; am now waiting for a reply.
Posted by: Norbert Glasgow | 12 May 2007 10:58:14
The individual featured above as 'Joe' deserved everything he got.
Bright sunlight meant he had such severe vision problems, he was unable to see big yellow boxes suspended ten feet off the ground or the gateway or speed camera signs.
His parking was so bad, his vehicle extended outside the bay. His tax form was 'forgetten' about, also too his seatbelt and the rules regarding mobile phone use behind the wheel. Then late for work? I ask how such an individual ever got through any interview process?
Posted by: Carl Matthews | 25 Apr 2008 08:48:13
Carl Matthews, the perfect citizen. I think not, somehow.
Posted by: Mike Smithson | 10 May 2008 23:20:30
Indeed, I sense a big move to live with the swiss is in order for Carl, fool.
Posted by: Col J Richardson | 11 Sep 2008 15:20:39
Speed humps cost 500 lives annually? How many do you suppose they save? Or does that not factor in to your calculus?
Your citation of The Sun's Joe Public article is absurd. This is nothing less than a hypothetical exercise involving a fictional character who would be ranked nothing short of cosmically stupid for failing to pay attention to laws and regulation that serve and punish us all equally.
Instead of blaming various Governments for all our problems, why don't we all take responsibility for living like adults? You're starting to sound like a right-wing American.
Posted by: No Sympathy | 1 Mar 2009 20:56:42
