14 June 2004
Green badge ploy nets disabled
Of all the bureaucratic, misleading and misconceived systems operating in the city of Norwich (and there are a few), the green badge scheme must come near the top of the list.
Let us say that you are a disabled person – a holder of the national blue badge which enables you to park on yellow lines and in certain designated bays. You do not have a green badge and have probably never heard of it.
You drive round the city and eventually spy a disabled parking space. It says so in big white letters, and you confirm it by checking a nearby lamp-post, which has a blue badge on it. You park for two hours.
On your return, you find you have a parking ticket. Why? Cunningly, the council has placed a green badge bay next to the blue badge bay, and you have inadvertently slipped into it. On searching further, you find that a green badge adorns a second lamp-post which you had neglected to spot. After all, you are disabled, and have no desire to carry out a survey of nearby lamp-posts.
Is this a deliberate ploy by the council to fleece the disabled? We know that the council favours fit people, because of its strenuous efforts to help cyclists and pedestrians, but working on the principle that one should not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The green badge fee is £5 a year, and it generates the usual ton of paperwork – all to no purpose, because anyone with a blue badge would almost certainly qualify for a green one if they applied. And anyone rejected has the right to an independent doctor’s examination, at a cost probably slightly in excess of £5.
So why does the council persist with it? Chief executive officer Anne Seex admits that bringing the scheme to an end would save money and reduce bureaucracy. The 22 spaces reserved for green badge holders would be available for blue badge holders, and the shame felt by people receiving a ticket unfairly would be removed.
I understand a consultation process is taking place. I wish this did not worry me as much as it does.
Giant whelk on Stiffkey marshes
I have received a call from world-famous local explorer Richard “Volcano” Meek, following publication on this page of his plans to distract tourists from the over-visited western part of North Norfolk and lure them into the Empty Quarter, east of Cromer.
This, he says, “may appear to sit uncomfortably with my plan to open Whelk World – a leisure complex involving 1000 glass fibre boat-like holiday chalets on Stiffkey marshes and a giant illuminated whelk visible from Holland on clear nights”. But in fact he intends to make this a magnet for the more discerning and artistically sensitive visitor, taking a lead from the success of the Millennium Dome and the Lowestoft kipper. And he has further plans for the so-called Empty Quarter. He adds: “I am in negotiations with the owners of Blackpool's Golden Mile and hope soon to be able to announce that each year after the illuminations are switched off, they will be transferred to Bacton and used to adorn the terminal which is currently little visited in December.”
You knew where the Vikings stood
Viking hordes pitched their tents near Cow Tower on the banks of the Wensum in Norwich over Whit weekend and behaved in such an eco-friendly way that I suspected they were city councillors in disguise. They certainly had a Lib-Dem look about them, despite the absence of road humps. Maybe it was an election ploy, but if so I am afraid it failed to fire my enthusiasm for a politically united Europe, Viking or otherwise.
Despite this late evidence of greenish tendencies, you knew where the Vikings stood – for the kind of rape and pillage not yet disguised as EU directives. The problem with politics nowadays is not that the public is apathetic, but that the parties have no distinctive principles – just a series of half-baked ideas lumped together in response to market research. The result is that you don’t really want any of them. Hence the stubborn support for fringe groups with a narrow but sharp focus. All three major parties are so seduced by the idea of being politicians on a bigger stage that they don’t seem to grasp the fact that most people don’t want to be part of a Europe that has a totally different legal basis and tradition, without UK freedom safeguards.
Some of you may think we’re already way down the road in that direction, but perhaps it’s not too late. After all, the Vikings have moved on.
Don't slow down: we need the money
The anti-car lobby continues its campaign of quarter-truths and misinformation – something we can only expect to continue with the Government’s appointment of a programme assurance officer at a salary of £35,000 a year to help manage speed cameras.
I know a number of people who would love to manage speed cameras for nothing, but their methods might not suit the Government. Meanwhile we have the police in Hampshire to thank for making it as clear as it can possibly be that money, and not road safety, is what they are after.
A man of 71 put up a placard warning oncoming traffic of a speed trap at a danger spot. As a result, everyone slowed down, which must be good, mustn’t it?
The police didn’t think so, because they weren’t getting any money out of it. They took him to court, and the glove puppets who pose as magistrates nowadays found him guilty – and bizarrely banned him from driving! Not only that, they refused to suspend the sentence pending his appeal, which some might say was admitting the injustice by making sure it was administered before it could be put right.
But it doesn’t matter, because speed cameras increase road safety, don’t they? Well, road deaths in Norfolk are up by a third so far this year. They are also up in Suffolk, which doesn’t stop them claiming that cameras have saved 44 lives. Perhaps they could tell us which 44.