Wednesday 12 September 2018

Consultation period my arse

I heard the other day that Bath City Council are to allow a private company to patrol the streets looking for people dropping litter and issuing on-the-spot fines of £150. Drop a cigarette end in the gutter and the private company's bounty-hunter will approach you from their hiding-place and demand £150, or else.

Or else what? Well if you refuse to give them your name and address, they will follow you around wherever you go, and f that doesn't work they will call the police. The police don't really have the time to attend the scenes of such serious crimes against society, so they will demand a high fee from the private company to do so, and the fine you will eventually be forced to pay on pain of imprisonment will double or triple.

The councillor who instigated this latest money-spinner was on TV saying that of course the private company will make a lot of money from this new enforcement of an old by-law. After all, what would be the point of paying their officers to patrol the streets if they did not? Patronising cunt.

We are currently undergoing a 'period of consultation' about  measures to be taken to clean the air of the city of exhaust fumes and pollution. They have already set up number-plate recognition cameras on all key routes in and out and invested in the software and operatives to run them. This will have cost a great deal of money, but it will be a very good investment. The daily charge to get in to the 'clean air zone' will be extremely high. They are talking of £16 for a car and £100 for a coach or lorry.

People like me who live in the centre and have to drive a car to suit their job or budget, and who cannot afford to buy a brand new car or electric vehicle will be - on top of the council taxes and parking fees - charged £96 a week for the privilege of holding down part-time work in old age, plus an extra £16 if we want to go out of town and go back home on Sunday.

Central government is all for this, because it means - guess what? - extra revenue all round. They have been preparing everyone for schemes like this one to be rolled out across the country by putting out highly spurious statistics on how many people die every year from air pollution. They measure the fatalities in the hundreds of thousands. It's bollocks, and they know it.

Bath's 'consultation period' is, in fact, just 18 months to allow everyone's anger to burn out so that when the time comes we are wearily resigned to being fleeced - yet again. They don't want our opinions. They have already made their minds up.

Somebody has to pay for this prolonged period of austerity, and it's not going to be the people who caused the need for it.

22 comments:

  1. Someone will tell you they are introducing the charges in order to save the planet. They will believe what they are saying because they have been brainwashed into believing this and nobody has challenged it so you will have to pay up.

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    1. Nobody believes that the prime motive is saving the planet. Lying is now a standard practice in all forms of government.

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    2. I bet that wouldn't stop them giving it to you chapter and verse.

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  2. Hey, I am all for the trash police. Don't give their name - billy club. You should see all the trash in the culverts and on highways where I live. Now, the car fees are another thing. I would definitely have a problem with the exorbitant fees. We have toll booths on highways that charge to use the roadways. Supposedly they pay for the highways and upkeep, but they would have been paid for decades ago.

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    1. I am all for prosecuting litterers and fly-tippers too, but not by a private company which is purely out to make as much money as possible. We no longer have toll roads, but will still have pot holes deep enough to wreck your car's suspension.

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  3. Your last sentence says it all. Something like this is a naked money grab.

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  4. Surprised at how quiet people are about radioactive mud being dumped off Penarth in S.Wales ?

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    1. See here
      https://penarthnews.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/in-the-dark-the-first-2000-tons-of-pollution-is-dumped-off-penarth/comment-page-1/

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    2. This has to be illegal doesn't it? EDF must be laughing at us. Never mind scallops.

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  5. Strange as it may seem the litter problem is not too bad in our little town and it is quite rare to see a dog poo bag lying around - there are plenty of bins and they are used.

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    1. Most of the litter here is caused by drunks at night, throwing take-away boxes and things around the streets. The new litter police will not be going out at night, so must make their money by fining sober people. There is hardly any dog poo on the pavements here these days.

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  6. It's just been reported on BBC TV that Brighton and Hove use a private company called 3GS to hand out littering fines. Over the last year the company have handed out fines of over £200,000 The council don't pay the company, the company keep 60% of the fines and the council keep 40%.

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  7. Our court system, sort of the derivative of your court system, has found these private schemes mostly illegal.

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    Replies
    1. We would never find against the private schemes in this country, until they overstep the mark by a long way.

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  8. I think you should stand for Mayor.

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    1. I think you should. That way you may not have got a pretty little holiday village on your doorstep. It can be done. An English friend of mine moved to France and became the mayor of his town in a few years. We in Bath have a German MP.

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  9. My daughter says that it has become so gentrified in Bath that being poor is not an option. Fleecing everyone is obviously the councils prime goal, one should ask where the money goes?

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    1. The money goes to all the private companies doing work which should be done by the corporation.

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