29/05/2013
Its nickname
Daily Wail is well merited, describing a newspaper which is very good at highlighting some of the more egregious wrongs in our society. And that is the fare for today with writer A N Wilson
describing the depredations of the "little Hitler" traffic wardens who are causing so much indignation and upset.
The downside of such treatment is that the subject matter is invariably trivialised and the core issues are rarely rehearsed. It thus opens the way to the inevitable comments from the apologists, such as, "amyh" from Leeds who writes: "Park legally in the first place then. It doesn't matter how old you are the law is the law!"
What is missed, of course, is the substantive point, that local authorities, charged with parking control as a contribution to traffic management, in the context of increasingly short space and expanding demand, have largely abandoned any attempts at rational and equitable management and are abusing their powers in order to generate revenue.
This was, in fact, raised in the
Daily Mail by Christopher Booker
last February, but the paper has never referred to his piece again and not followed through with the theme, about how local authorities are systematically abusing their powers over a wide range of their duties, all to circumvent headline restraints on Council Tax changes.
When it comes to obeying the law, therefore, it is largely the local authorities themselves which are
acting illegally â as indeed we
reminded readers recently. And where there are not actual breaches of the law, very often the authorities are skating on very thin ice indeed, breaching the spirit if not the letter of the law.
But, in keeping the "outrage quotient" high while not exploring the bigger picture, the
Mail offers nothing but frustration. Nowhere in its pages will you see any advice or direction as to how to deal with these "little Hitlers", and without addressing the bigger picture, it is difficult to decide where to go next.
As Mary Ann Sieghart
pointed out though â back in December 2011 â we are talking about democratic accountability here, as issue we
then explored, noting the inability of most journalists to get the point.
If the "bigger picture", therefore, is autocratic local authorities acting without even the pretence of a democratic mandate,
milking us of funds, then simply complaining about unfair parking fines is hardly an adequate response. What we have, in effect, is a layer of government acting without democratic consent, which makes it an autocracy rather than a democracy.
The problem is that local councils assume the "consent" of the people by virtue of periodic elections, even though turnout is so low as to make the contests a travesty of the democratic process. And even if there were higher turnouts, so similar are the policies of the different political groups (and largely dictated by central government) that the idea of democratic choice is merely a cruel myth.
Thus, what we need is a better mechanism for communicating the withdrawal of consent from our rulers, with
civil disobedience high up the list of techniques we can use. Where government - as it so often does â acts in its usual disproportionate and mean-spirited way to any challenge to its authority - we need to be more canny, and avoid direct confrontation which puts people in harm's way.
Rather than overt disobedience, then, we perhaps need to be thinking in terms of non-co-operation, adopting almost a guerrilla warfare approach to our authorities, all directed to making ourselves very difficult if not impossible to govern. Thus, for instance, we do with withhold Council Tax, but simply delay payment and make it as expensive to collect as is legally possible.
My preferred tactic here is to send several odd amounts direct to the chief executive's office, by cheque â without the "customer reference number" so often demanded - leaving payments to the last possible minute and then, on the year, perhaps under-paying by five or ten pence. This but a minor irritation, of course, except when thousands do it.
The local authorities will squawk that such tactics are "unfair" to other Council Tax payers. They are always very quick to invoke the "fairness" card. But one never hears them talk of fairness when it comes to overpaying their chief executives, paying themselves over-generous pensions or spending millions on climate change advisors and other non-jobs.
Our response is quite simply that we owe no duty to any authority that has ceased to be (and perhaps never was) democratically accountable. It is not "fair" that local councils should extract tax from us without our consent. And since they are ignoring the normal democratic signals, we have to find different ways of sending them our message.
Our point is that, if we are not sending our rulers a message, then we can hardly complain if they assume from our silence, that they have our implied consent to act. Only when the
geese hiss, demonstrating that we have withdrawn our consent, will they be aware that we have had enough.
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