Parking Wars

I was given a speeding ticket in Spain a number of years ago which I found a bit harsh as most drivers do - even when you know you're in the wrong.

But after a day or two of feeling sorry for myself I stumped up and paid the Spanish authorities  their 90 Euro fine - although by that time I was back in sunny Scotland.

So I had to laugh at this recent article in The Times by Giles Coren - in which he demands tough action against the thousands of outstanding parking fines owed by  'Johnny Foreigner'.

Now some in the Tory Party might worry that chasing up cross border parking fines might hasten the United States of Europe - but I agree wholeheartedly with Giles Coren.

By the ashes of Margaret Thatcher - make the buggers pay up. 

We’ll fight in the streets. And in the car parks

Giles Coren

Foreign drivers owe us half a million quid in unpaid fines. Frankly, it’s unpatriotic not to chase every penny

I spent some of last week in the South of England, funeral dodging, looking for half decent restaurants and hunting for evidence of spring in quiet nooks. I can thus reveal that a confused Prunus autumnalis in Salisbury has burst suddenly pink against the desolate winterscape like a transsexual strippergram who has arrived at a party in full feather boa-ed regalia and sung “Ta da!” to a roomful of long-faced middle-aged men, none of whom had thought to inform her that the birthday boy had died of a heart attack half an hour before.

And I have been watching the local television news, as one does in domestic business hotels where the pornography is no more exotic or liberal than the stuff one gets at home, and I have been shocked by the revelation, after a Freedom of Information request by BBC South Today, that £521,026 is owed in parking fines in Oxfordshire, Southampton and Portsmouth that remain unpaid by 10,423 foreign vehicle owners since 2009.

In short, that is ten thousand foreign Johnnies coming over here and leaving their Volkswagens and their Seat Ibizas at the side of our roads willy nilly, receiving a ticket from a hard-working and conscientious West African migrant worker employed by the good grace of some forward-looking and admirably internationalist local council and then simply swanning the hell off home without so much as a by your leave.

And that is just in the southern boondocks. Imagine, just imagine, how many millions of pounds in unpaid fines must have built up in London, where we have shops with things in that people might genuinely want to park their cars and go in and buy, instead of just tea towels featuring the local cathedral and aprons decorated with useful nautical knots.

And for it to come out in this of all weeks. By God, we did not fight and win the Falklands war so that some moustachioed Argie could come over here and leave his fancy hatchback on a clearly marked loading bay in Southampton and “just pop into Asda for a pound of tomatoes” at the expense of the British taxpayer. Hell, no. We fought and won the Falklands war because otherwise Michael Foot would have got in and by now we would all be living in caves, eating thistles and string. And speaking Spanish.

£521,026. Half a million pounds. That’s about a four thousandth of the amount by which the British national debt increases every week. We could do with that money. So it’s a good job that Michael Robinson, parking operations manager at Portsmouth City Council, has got the ball rolling by hiring a company called European Parking Collection (EPC) to go after the £143,666 he is owed by garlic-smelling alien rogue parkers.

“We felt it was unfair British people were having to pay,” he told the BBC, “while foreign-registered vehicles were getting away with it.” That is the Dunkirk spirit right there, that is. That is the sort of stuff you could set to Elgar.

Not like the craven-arse defeatist surrender monkeys at, say, West Oxfordshire District Council, which admitted to the BBC that its parking wardens no longer issue PCNs to foreign vehicles because “it is not in the public interest to incur irrecoverable expenditure in pursuing these matters”. Which was basically Neville Chamberlain’s attitude to Hitler and the Nazis. Luckily, back then, we had Winston Churchill to pursue victory at all costs, victory no matter what the terror, victory however long and hard the road may be. Only for these grovelling 21st-century council toadies to squeal appeasement at the first sign of a kraut-owned Mercedes Benz double-parked on the high street while Fritz nips into Micky D’s for a Gross Mac mit fries und vun of zose telicious epple pies . . .

Nor are Thames Valley Police any better, the BBC revealing that 10,725 foreign vehicles were caught speeding by its cameras over the past four years without ONE of them being given a penalty (and to think of all the tickets I’ve had on the M40 while racing after a speeding Ferrari to shout abuse at the owner in pidgin Italian). Come on, Mr Oxford Plod, either driving fast is dangerous or it ain’t. But as far as I understand the physics, my daughter is not going to get any less squished because the car that hit her at speed in a built-up area was driven by a Belgian who might not necessarily respond to your first letter.

It isn’t as if this sort of fiscal patriotism would be expensive for the councils in question: EPC operates on a no-win, no-fee basis, obtaining keeper details from the country’s Vehicle Licensing Authority (VLA) and sending letters to owners in their native language, asking for the money. Personally, I think they go too far in stooping to communicate in the native babble of these felons, when simply telling them more loudly in English that they have “PARKED IN A RESTRICTED AREA, PEDRO, NOW GIVE US THE MONEY!!” would do the trick just as easily.

Because, frankly, lowering oneself to the respective local lingo is only going to encourage evasive appeals along the lines of: “Merde, J’étais deux minutes! J’avais une broken jambe. Ma femme est pregnant. Le dog a mangé le ticket. Avoir un coeur, mate, j’étais simplement unloading. Il y avait un tree sticking out devant le sign. Je n’ai jamais copped it. C’est la guerre contre le driver is what this is! C’est le political correctness gone fou! C’est les bicyclistes de Brussels, les lesbian ramblers de Strasbourg. C’est le prejudice, pur et simple. Il s’agit du global warming nonsense, les bloody vegan gauchistes. Le warden n’a jamais put le ticket sur le window. Il n’était pas legally served. Je connais mes droits. C’est pour ça que nous avons gagné la guerre? Hang on, c’était pas nous qui l’ont gagné, mais tu sais ce que je veux dire . .

Except, wait, what’s this? According to Stuart Hendry of the EPC: “Not all VLAs in each country will give out keeper details. France for example don’t, but the majority will.”

So wait, so hang on, so tell me again slowly: Frenchie comes over here in his bloody little doox chevoox and he sticks it on a zebra in the middle of, let’s say, Basingstoke, and he goes in to buy some snail traps and a box of suppositories and he comes out in his own good time, having probably stopped for a pint of wine and a Gauloise, finds a good honest British parking ticket on his windscreen and he tears it up and throws it in the road and he spits on it and says “To ’ell weez you, Eengleesh peeg of a parkeeng teecket!” and he goes home to France, and we try to get the payment to which we are entitled by habeas corpus and Magna Carta, and the French Government presumes to stand in our way?

In the name of all that is holy, by the ashes of Margaret Thatcher, by the word and spirit of the Highway Code: This. Means. WAR.