Richard Littlejohn on Britain's punishment cultureÂ
This time last week it was a five-year-old girl reduced to tears after being handed a £150 fine for selling lemonade without a licence from a stall outside a music festival in East London.
Following a formal complaint from the girl’s father and a healthy dollop of what’s known in the trade as ‘adverse publicity’, Tower Hamlets Council apologised and rescinded the fixed penalty, promising that something like this would not happen again.
‘We expect our enforcement officers to show common sense and use their powers sensibly,’ a spokesman said. Fat chance.
Clearly, the council’s ever-vigilant street patrol team didn’t get the memo. Or, if they did, they chose deliberately to ignore it â€" which would be my guess. How else to explain their latest crackdown on ‘unauthorised’ behaviour?
Enforcement officers forced the five-year-old to stop selling lemonade and issued a £150 fine
They followed up their bold campaign to stop the ‘illegal’ sale of lemonade on the pavements of Tower Hamlets with a threat to prosecute the owners of a local bike shop.
The latest heinous ‘crime’ they’ve identified was the provision of a pump outside the shop for any passing cyclist suffering from a flat tyre. They claimed the pump was an ‘obstruction of the highway’. Officials told the owners they would have to pay for the ‘privilege’ of using the footpath to provide the free service and threatened them with a fine if it wasn’t removed.
For years, it has been a constant theme of this column that if you give anyone any modicum of authority, especially if it comes with a cap and a hi-viz jacket, they will always, always abuse it.
< p class="mol-para-with-font">The rot really set in when the then Labour Home Secretary ‘Jackboots Jacqui’ Smith introduced ‘Accredited Persons’ â€" legions of jumped-up Warden Hodges wannabes with the power to dish out fines for trivial ‘offences’. Overnight, the number of people being criminalised rocketed.
Isambard's Cycles tweeted that it will no longer offer the pump to passing bikers, after Tower Hamlets Council threatened them with a fine
The council said: 'The area outside the shop is narrow and it is already difficult to get a pram or a wheelchair past the shop, without these items being displayed'
They’ve included a blind man fined because he didn’t notice his guide dog had fouled the pavement and a young mum given a penalty notice because her toddler dropped an apple core from her pushchair. In one of the more surreal incidents, a disabled man in Ayr was fined for littering when a £10 note fell out of his pocket.
Things went from bad to worse in 2014, when the Coalition brought in Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs). This was a godsend to the Accredited Persons and assorted Town Hall jobsworths who get their jollies by throwing their weight around.
According to the latest figures, for 2016, the number of PSPO penalties issued has increased by 400 per cent. Although the y were designed specifically to deter violence and threatening behaviour, almost 2,000 people have been punished for a variety of alleged ‘crimes’, including feeding the birds, walking dogs and playing loud bhangra music.
Other victims of the Town Hall Taliban have been pavement artists, fined for harmless chalk drawings, unsuspecting motorists who have left their engines running, and people singing in public. One man was even apprehended for carrying a golf bag, although the circumstances are not fully explained.
Still, there’s almost no aspect of human behaviour which some jobsworth somewhere can’t interpret as the crime of the century.
Daily Mail cartoonist Gary's take on the 'Town Hall Taliban' imposing ridiculous punishments
We live in a punishment culture. Government at every level exists not to serve the public, but to show us who’s boss and extract ever-increasing amounts of money on the most spurious of pretexts.
Just look at the way the straightforward task of emptying the dustbins has been turned into a Byzantine system of rules, regulations and financial penalties.
Speed cameras have virtually nothing whatsoever to do with road safety, and are set cynically to milk motorists who stray inadvertently a few miles an hour over the limit on deserted motorways.
Stewart Smith was fined £50 after a £10 note fell out of his pocket in Ayr
But it is the proliferation of petty officials with quasi-police powers which is the most sinister development. As the real police have withdrawn from the streets, they have been replaced by a standing army of pseudo-coppers, all determined to justify their existence by nicking as many people as possible, often by making up the rules as they go along.
In the case of private parking firms and traffic wardens employed by councils, they are incentivised financially to dish out fines on the flimsiest grounds.
There is no discretion, no sense of proportion. The harassed mum who strays into a bus lane for a few seconds is treated just as harshly as the boy racer who parks his go-faster hatchback on the pavement next to a pedestrian crossing.
No one objects to firm action against genuinely anti-social behaviour â€" whether a bunch of thugs drinking in the street and chucking their empty cans in the gutter, or selfish dog owners who let their animals foul parks and children’s playgrounds.
Most of us would come down like the proverbial ton of bricks on fly-tippers and slobs who deposit their half-eaten fast food in the street. Nor do we want aggressive beggars bothering shoppers and sightseers in our cities. But sometimes councils announce crackdowns without giving any thought to the consequences.
For instance, Oxford City Council has a problem with rough sleepers. But their solution is not to move them to a temporary hostel or, if all else fails, turn a fire hose on them. No, they are proposing to impose fines of £2,500 on those who leave their belongings in shop doorways.
Where do they think the average homeless person is g oing to get £2,500 to pay a fine?
Speed cameras have virtually nothing whatsoever to do with road safety, and are set cynically to milk motorists who stray inadvertently a few miles an hour over the limit
If they had a spare two-and-a-half grand they wouldn’t be dossing down in a doorway, they’d book in to the presidential suite in the city’s famous five-star Randolph Hotel.Â
The homeless have always been with us. We used to call them ‘tramps’. Fining them a couple of thousand quid they haven’t got isn’t going to solve the problem.
There’s another aspect to this, quite apart from the exponential increase in the number of enforcement officers and the criminalisation of thousands of innocent citizens. And that’s the way local authorities and private companies have begun to colonise public space, claiming it as their own.
In the cas e of private firms who own, say, indoor shopping malls, it’s possible to argue that they should be allowed to set rules of behaviour on their premises.
But now they’re trying to extend that control to open spaces. As for councils, where do they get the idea the streets belong to them â€" and not to the people who pay their wages through council tax?
Why should any small shopkeeper have to pay for the ‘privilege’ of putting a bike pump on the pavement outside his store?
And what business is it of ‘trading standards’ if a five-year-old girl wants to sell home-made lemonade to consenting adults on their way to a music festival?
Where do Oxford City Council think the average homeless person is going to get £2,500 to pay a fine?
Ultimately, this isn’t about lemonade, or littering, or bike pumps, it’s about freedom and democracy. There’s no point expecting enforcement officers (or anyone else who works for the State) to behave proportionately and exercise common sense.
We’re talking scorpions and frogs here. It’s what they do. They’ll only stop when they are fired and the Government repeals the laws which give them their authority. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.
The totalitarian state is on the march. Britain’s punishment culture has already advanced from telling us what we can do to dictating how we’re allowed to think.
While Accredited Persons scour the streets for toddlers dropping apple cores and persecute shopkeeper s giving away free air, the proper police patrol cyberspace in search of ‘inappropriate’ comments and people they can prosecute for ‘hate crime’.
Sadly, we have learned to our cost that nobody in authority ever dispenses their powers sensibly.
We used to live in a free country, where everything was permitted unless specifically prohibited by statute. Over the past 20 years, we have morphed into a virtual dictatorship, in which nothing â€" up to and including genuine free speech â€" is permitted unless it is licensed, policed and sanctioned by the State.
We are all criminals now.
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