WHEEL-CLAMPING
By Anglegrinder Man

Wheel-clamping, along with Speed Cameras, Congestion Charging, proposed I.D. cards, CCTV Cameras and new toll-roads are all good examples of inept administrators attempting to make their lives easier and solve their own mis-management problems by persecuting the people that they have failed. For them public opinion is not something that they have to listen to, but something to try and manipulate…with our money!! They do the only job in the world that doesn’t have to be cost effective and where you can set your own salary.

The letter of the law actually states that placing a wheel-clamp on someone else’s vehicle, is technically trespass upon their property. This is what you would expect. If anyone else were to disable somebody’s car and hold it to ransom, as a means of extorting money from it’s owner, then that person would spend the night in a Police cell! The Mafia, Triads, and Yakusa are all banned from demanding payment through coercion, but if you have a shiny peaked cap and a council uniform, then it seems to be allowed.

Apart from the actual clampers (who, I have it on very good authority, turn a blind eye to their colleague’s cars, when found illegally parked), it would appear that the only people who actually approve of vehicle immobilization, are the bureaucrats and politicians themselves. Not that Alistair Darling or Ken Livingston would know anything about driving in London….they both have chauffeurs paid for by the tax payer. And Jack Straw’s flunkey doesn’t even have to obey the speed limits!

In the late 1980’s, the then Conservative government introduced the unwanted Community Charge which millions of people refused to pay. The Prime Minister was out of step with public opinion but through haughty disdain for the electorate, dug in her heels, and declared that all non-payers would go to prison. What actually happened, was that nobody went to prison. Margaret Thatcher was swept from power and the hated Poll Tax was scrapped.

Because the public had stood together, and more importantly, because they had realised that they really could set the agenda and were not bound by the demands of Parliament, the perception (and it really is only a perception) that we are powerless to affect change, was broken. The stranglehold that politicians hold over us is only a stranglehold because we usually choose to see it as such. After all…..THOSE BERKS WORK FOR US!! (look up ‘berk’ in the Oxford English or a good rhyming slang dictionary).