They did not win - by Richard... Thursday, October 13, 2011

They did not win - by Richard... Thursday, October 13, 2011

A report from The Daily Mail appears to portray the victory of plucky fighters against the system in what could be presented as the classic "David and Goliath" story. In fact, it is no such thing.

The essence of the report is that a small number of motorists, wrongly issued with penalty notices for parking infringements that they did not commit, have reclaimed the fees or had their fines set aside. And this is hailed as a victory.

The system, though, goes on unchanged, not in any way harmed or damaged, continuing in exactly the same way, issuing millions of penalties, a huge number of which are actually fraudulent, and deliberately so.

It is part of the system though that where a few vociferous complainants are persistent enough to surmount the bureaucratic obstacles placed in their way, they are given their money back. But no action is taken against the people who issued the penalties, or those who sought to enforce them – not even when they use vehicles which themselves are in actual breach of parking regulations (below).

Criminal fraudsters would love this sort of system. They could go door-to-door, taking money with gay abandon. Only when caught out would they required to give back the money to the individual complainants, with no further action then taken. You might call this a fraudsters' charter.

And that is what we are dealing with here – criminal fraud. Parking enforcement in many areas has long ceased to be a matter of traffic control and is now primarily a revenue generating exercise – for which there is no legal sanction. Council officials try it on, because they can get away with it, and the system has degenerated into a structured fraud.

Thus, there will be no victory until these criminals are brought to book and some are actually jailed. On the face of it, these council officials are breaching S.2 of the Fraud Act 2006. People wrongly issued with a penalty should be reporting their councils to the police.

And yes, we know exactly what the initial reaction of the police would be – but we have persevered with two cases against bailiffs, where the reaction of the police was dismissive, and will shortly have encouraging news to report.

The long stop is, of course, a private prosecution. Fraud us triable either way, so it is possible to take out a summons and commence criminal proceedings. When a few local authority finance officers start being put in the dock and made answerable for their crimes, we might start seeing some changes.

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A last hurrah? - by Richard...

Anthony Watts notes the early opening of the ski season in Colorado, 10-plus inches of snow at higher elevations in Tahoe and Mammoth, and nine inches on West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain. Unexpected snow has also covered resorts in British Columbia.

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the port city of Magadan also suffered early snows, at the end of last month finding itself at the centre of a cold weather cyclone which brought freezing temperatures and winds gusting in excess of 60 mph.

Winds and blowing snow downed high power lines throughout the region, and area emergency response crews were struggling to restore electricity to hundreds of homes. The city airport was unable to operate for much of the morning as clearing equipment could not keep up with falling snow.

Elsewhere, we learn of a rapid return of ice to the Arctic, with the fastest growth on record - yet still the scare story persists. Ice-free by 2013 is the latest.

Yet, for all the tales of an ice-free Northern Sea Route, shipping still requires icebreaker escorts, which must erode the profitability of the route – to say nothing of the need for ice-hardened ships. The biggest barrier is not the ice, but Russian bureaucracy, it seems. That is far more formidable than the ice-pack.

In the United States, however, the worry is of lack of ice-breaker capacity, with only two 70s-era ships left, one of which is laid up, while the other undergoes a refit. Years of global warming hype have robbed the programme of funds.

But for this, and for the global warming religion in general, one senses that this winter is going to be make or break. And although the Australians are committing economic suicide, this may be its last hurrah, as the hype is buried in the expected avalanche of snow and reality bites back.

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No easy life - by Richard...

Picked up early by TBF, the resignation of Roger Helmer has been reviewed by Autonomous Mind, who has been careful to applaud "an honourable course of action". Helmer hints darkly that he will have more to say about his imminent departure from the EU parliament, parking his expense account in exchange for a not-ungenerous pension.

However, those who saw him at the Tory conference remarked how unwell he looked. A disillusionment with Tory Party duplicity, therefore, may have combined with other issues, which made a precipitate retirement both desirable and necessary.

Meanwhile, life goes on – on not, when it comes to the British fishing industry – as we find revealed "Spanish Practices ", supposedly recently smoked out by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

This is an issue untouched by MEPs, including the egregious Helmer – despite them telling us how much they are needed, in order to look after British interests. Yet this is an area where Britain has been comprehensively shafted, in preference to rapacious Spanish fishermen who have plundered our seas and many others besides.

The root of this, though, goes back to Franco, who ploughed funds into modernising the national fishing fleet, as a means of buying co-operation in communities which were far from loyal to the Fascist dictatorship.

Thus, when Spain joined the Community in 1986, having to cease "state aid" for the fishing industry, a condition of entry became that the EEC and then the EU would keep the funds flowing, all in the interests of political stability.

The direct losses to the British economy – without taking into account the environmental damage – run to at least £2 billion a year. Add the collateral damage, in terms of the destruction of shore-side industries and the loss of business and employment to traditional fishing communities, and the losses exceed £5 billion annually.

Cumulatively, this means an unmeasured cash drain of about £100 billion has flowed from the UK, largely to Spain, which acquired rights in UK waters from 1995 onwards.

Taking on board that single metric, for Helmer, then – but also every other British MEP – their careers end in failure. They do nothing for us, except consume our money, while charting our degradation and humiliation at the hands of the Union.

AM wishes Helmer the best for the future. I wish I could join him, but the collective failure of our politicians – of which Helmer is still one – has meant that many of our fishermen, and the communities that they used to support, no longer have a future.

At least Helmer has a decent pension – paid-for by us – to reward him for his failures. The aimless, drug-soaked kids of Arbroath, who would have once manned our trawlers and brought home the fish we eat, have no such compensation. Until that is sorted, no British politician – of any persuasion – deserves an easy life.