15/10/2013
After his mother had died in June last year â shortly after his father had also passed away - Peter Troy had the unenviable task of clearing out the family home and dealing with the inevitable bureaucracy.
His task was not made easier by the execrable behaviour of Capita which, as collection agency for the BBC television tax, continually sought to extract a full fee, despite being told many times that there was no television in what were by then empty premises.
As the
Mail now records, Peter did not leave it there. Turning the tables on this loathsome corporate, he billed them a £1,000 for stress and inconvenience, and threatened to take them to court to force them to pay.
Under this sustained counter-attack, the company initially responded with the usual attempts at a fob-off but Peter was not letting go. Eventually they buckled, paying him £250 in "compensation" and making a formal apology.
Not least which sustained the attack was the pretence by Capita that this was a one-off mistake, when Peter knew full well that there were many other examples of the same thing. The demands on him represented a systemic fault in the system and the aggressive recovery process is simply legalised extortion.
The subsequent publicity is also part of the fight-back, with Troy seeking to demonstrate that it is possible to take on the corporates and win. We do not have to sit back and take it. Furthermore, the fight was part of the test-bed for The Harrogate Agenda, where we are experimenting with ideas of how to take the fight to the enemy.
Peter will be at the Harrogate Agenda workshop this Saturday, when he will be showing for the first time the two films we have been working on during the summer. This current success will inform the process, and perhaps lead to another workshop (and even another film), where we explore ways of beating the system.
And this, when it comes down to it, is how "over-regulation" is going to be beaten â not by fatuous initiatives of the sort we saw this morning, but by individuals taking a stand, and fighting back. Too often, we see people just
roll over, and allowing themselves to be fleeced.
For many, this is the "easy way" but, in the longer term, it is very much the hard way. The more you give, the more the system will take, and it is only when enough people say "no", and start fighting back, that we will regain control.
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