Stand and Deliver
Righto, get your frilly shirt on - - this is to get you in the mood for what I'm going to write about.
Yes, Adam Ant, singing in the days when highway robbery was illegal.
But now it's not - - in Britain we made it legal in the form of car clampers.
It's been an ongoing problem here for absolutely aaaaaaaaages. What happens is, you are driving in a strange city and can't find a car park, or the car parks are full, or they're horrendously expensive.
So you park on an empty bit of waste ground, bothering nobody, and when you get back you find that your car is now sporting a nasty yellow clamp on one of its wheels, and you have to pay anything up to a hundred quid to get it removed.
Up comes Neanderthal Man who has clamped it, and who only takes cash. He points to a sign. It is fifteen feet above ground level in a crevice where no light ever penetrates, and it says that you can't park there or you will be clamped, no excuses accepted, so tough.
Then Neanderthal Man marches you to the nearest cash machine and you give him lots of money and he removes the clamp and off you go.
Or, worse, you come back to find your car gone.
This happened to one girl in a television programme about it all last night - she was eighteen and had been to a pop concert, and came back to her car, eighty miles from home in Birmingham, a city that she didn't know, and there it wasn't.
It had been - amazingly, but the clampers told us so it must be true - clamped and then towed away, apparently, all in the nine minutes that she was late getting back after her parking ticket expired.
Her father offered to pay the four hundred quid (FOUR HUNDRED QUID! including forty quid for overnight storage, words fail me) by credit card so she'd get the car back the same night, but they weren't having any - - cash only.
Some undercover reporters parked an ambulance for a few minutes on a bit of waste ground to see what would happen. Guess what - they clamped it, showing no interest at all in the fact that it was an ambulance.
In this house by now we were shouting at the screen. What particularly annoyed us was that the television company had blobbed out the clampers' faces so that they couldn't be identified.
Yes, yes, we understood the legal reasons for it but by now we were past caring. "We want Vigilante Justice!" we yelled. "We want Baseball Bats!" We nearly shouted that good old cliche "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!" but we stopped ourselves just in time.
Some Jobsworth Git from the Security Industry Authority banged on ponderously and with great defensiveness about how these clamping people have licences, so everything's all right.
Apparently the Trading Standards Authority has issued 5,000 of these Licences to Print Money and has revoked about fifty of them.
The Communist once had his car clamped. He arrived home with no clamp, having parted with no money. How did he manage this?
"Oh, well, I never noticed the clamp so I just drove backwards and forwards a bit wondering what was the matter. And then the clamp broke, so I drove off."
This is not how it works usually though. What could be done about it all? Well, firstly, the notices should be HUGE, and very obvious. And secondly, once a car has been clamped it should be illegal to tow it away until at least a day has gone by, with strong penalties, rigorously enforced. And thirdly, car-clampers should be recruited entirely from a pool of retired milkmen. (Why? Did you ever know a milkman who wasn't nice? No!). And fourthly, any car clamper or tower-away person found behaving like a jobsworth moron should have a car clamp attached to their leg for about a fortnight.
Look, I didn't say my solution was going to be easy to implement, or politically acceptable in any way. But it's going to be what happens when I'm in Charge.
Yes, Adam Ant, singing in the days when highway robbery was illegal.
But now it's not - - in Britain we made it legal in the form of car clampers.
It's been an ongoing problem here for absolutely aaaaaaaaages. What happens is, you are driving in a strange city and can't find a car park, or the car parks are full, or they're horrendously expensive.
So you park on an empty bit of waste ground, bothering nobody, and when you get back you find that your car is now sporting a nasty yellow clamp on one of its wheels, and you have to pay anything up to a hundred quid to get it removed.
Up comes Neanderthal Man who has clamped it, and who only takes cash. He points to a sign. It is fifteen feet above ground level in a crevice where no light ever penetrates, and it says that you can't park there or you will be clamped, no excuses accepted, so tough.
Then Neanderthal Man marches you to the nearest cash machine and you give him lots of money and he removes the clamp and off you go.
Or, worse, you come back to find your car gone.
This happened to one girl in a television programme about it all last night - she was eighteen and had been to a pop concert, and came back to her car, eighty miles from home in Birmingham, a city that she didn't know, and there it wasn't.
It had been - amazingly, but the clampers told us so it must be true - clamped and then towed away, apparently, all in the nine minutes that she was late getting back after her parking ticket expired.
Her father offered to pay the four hundred quid (FOUR HUNDRED QUID! including forty quid for overnight storage, words fail me) by credit card so she'd get the car back the same night, but they weren't having any - - cash only.
Some undercover reporters parked an ambulance for a few minutes on a bit of waste ground to see what would happen. Guess what - they clamped it, showing no interest at all in the fact that it was an ambulance.
In this house by now we were shouting at the screen. What particularly annoyed us was that the television company had blobbed out the clampers' faces so that they couldn't be identified.
Yes, yes, we understood the legal reasons for it but by now we were past caring. "We want Vigilante Justice!" we yelled. "We want Baseball Bats!" We nearly shouted that good old cliche "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!" but we stopped ourselves just in time.
Some Jobsworth Git from the Security Industry Authority banged on ponderously and with great defensiveness about how these clamping people have licences, so everything's all right.
Apparently the Trading Standards Authority has issued 5,000 of these Licences to Print Money and has revoked about fifty of them.
The Communist once had his car clamped. He arrived home with no clamp, having parted with no money. How did he manage this?
"Oh, well, I never noticed the clamp so I just drove backwards and forwards a bit wondering what was the matter. And then the clamp broke, so I drove off."
This is not how it works usually though. What could be done about it all? Well, firstly, the notices should be HUGE, and very obvious. And secondly, once a car has been clamped it should be illegal to tow it away until at least a day has gone by, with strong penalties, rigorously enforced. And thirdly, car-clampers should be recruited entirely from a pool of retired milkmen. (Why? Did you ever know a milkman who wasn't nice? No!). And fourthly, any car clamper or tower-away person found behaving like a jobsworth moron should have a car clamp attached to their leg for about a fortnight.
Look, I didn't say my solution was going to be easy to implement, or politically acceptable in any way. But it's going to be what happens when I'm in Charge.
posted by Daphne at 6:10 pm
3 Comments:
You get my vote!
Sounds good to me, Daphne. Do you fancy teaming up with Keith to run the country? He's always talking about his plans for when he's in charge. ;)
In NZ the record for clamping is within 30 seconds of leaving the vehicle. They are a disease & a blight who are given a licence to steal by the same businesses who will tell you " Customer service " is their key focus.
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