Daily Mail promotes thieves and vandals charter
An article in today’s Daily Mail shows all the signs of a cut and shut story which has seriously lost its way. The piece entitled ‘Minor ‘crimes’ of the middle classes raking in a £400m fortune for cash-hungry councils’ starts with the usual Mailesque jibe at fines for putting your rubbish bin out on the wrong day, feeding the birds and parking on a yellow line.
But also listed by the Mail in the ‘soft’ or ‘minor’ crimes category are speeding, litter, dog fouling and vandalism. Now I personally wouldn’t list those crimes as minor or protest against people being prosecuted for them. As a local councillor in a fairly middle class area, I get hundreds of complaints about those offences every year from local people. All of them can have a serious effect on the quality of life of residents.
Of course crimes such as murder, rape and burglary are very serious. But thankfully most people aren’t affected by these crimes. Their lives can be affected every day though by the offences listed above. In my area we have residents of a road leading to fields complaining about dog mess left by those canines who couldn’t wait and whose owners couldn’t be bothered to clear it up, children suffering from a lack of play facilities every time a local yob decides to spend an evening destroying equipment in the park, and a man whose front wall was demolished four times in a few years by speeding vehicles, with one car ending up perilously close to his living room window. Litter dropping, graffiti and dog fouling have an ongoing lowering of the community feel of a neighbourhood and usually leads to others ceasing to take real care of the area in which they live.
But what really annoyed me was the paper’s attitude towards the use of ANPR systems to catch those driving without tax and/or insurance on their cars. Driving without insurance places an additional burden on those of us who do drive legally and may often mean that the driver is disqualified or the car has failed its MOT and is dangerous, whilst failing to pay for your tax disc is plain and simple theft from the rest of us.
So get on your high horse if you must about the occasional stupidities of jobsworths, Daily Mail. Take your line from the Taxpayers’ Alliance if it makes you feel soperior. But don’t underestimate the effect that the crimes you define as ‘soft’ or minor are having on your beloved middle classes.
Related posts:
- High on drugs, yet soft on drivers?
- Maybe the Daily Mail should keep its mouth shut?
- The Daily Mail are pants
Comments
18 January 2010, 11:00 am
Biting! But oh so true, I have had the misfortune to live in areas where
‘Litter dropping, graffiti and dog fouling have an ongoing lowering of the community feel of a neighbourhood and usually leads to others ceasing to take real care of the area in which they live.’
is undoubtedly the case… its incredibly disheartening to those that live there and remember when people in the area did used to genuinely care! The question do the perpetrators of these crimes genuinely want to live in a down-trodden community or is it driven by a ‘everyone else does it’ mentality.
Would be interesting to see whether there are areas where residents have come together to turn there communities around and stop the constant littering, fouling, petty vandalism etc. Because I’m sure there are communities that are dying to know their secret!