pumpkinstrokemarrow

Times change though and there are often enough cars on the block now to be a problem. And some people, as always, make sure the system busts by being greedy, by having several cars. Maybe the odd van. So one comes up with allocated places and passes for legitimate parkers. The idea is that legitimate parkers put the pass on their dash when they park. These are inspected by the car parking police hired by the flat management people. The arrangment is that you don't pay the car parking police but they can keep all the fines they manage to collect. Which they do by clamping any car which does not have a valid pass displayed on the front offside of the dash and charging £200 to remove the clamp. Premium rate for silent hours, bank holidays and so on and so forth. An even better premium rate available on application if you need to get to work. Owning a valid pass no defence in the event of it being misplaced, near the dash or otherwise. Given that the car parking police on the ground get to put in their pocket 66% of what they collect, an excellent way to make sure that they are not snoozing away their shifts in the pub. And you probably get to be able to park in your own slot.

An arrangement which is not that different from that operated by local authorities on public highways. But it strikes me as very unpleasant and aggressive in a private parking area. Perhaps we have all got so unpleasant and aggressive ourselves that without this sort of scheme we are not going to stick to the parking rules. But not a good reflection on society as a whole, so I was pleased to see that one of the little carrots thrown to the LibDems to keep them sweet is a new law to ban such clamping on private premises by private operators.

And very similar arrangement to that operated by the banks. Reported on previously but whereby most personal banking services are free but if you break the rules, god help you. And enough of us manage to break the rules in one way or another for the banks to do very nicely thank you. A scheme which I believe the banks paid a lot of expensive lawyers a great deal of money to sustain in the High Courts against challenge from some gang or other. A gang which might have moved by the fact that the scheme is, in effect, an additional tax on the lower paid.

On a more cheerful note, the National Trust sent the BH, in her newly acquired status as a member, an invitation to their annual general meeting in a railway shed in Swindon. The invitation contained enough stuff for us to be able to work out that the National Trust has pots of governance. Would make the rule book for our local bowls club look very thin indeed; perhaps they are up there with the Wiki foundation, which I understand is big on governance too. A board of trustees, a council of councillors, a director general and a raft of area and subject committees, all with their own secretariats. As befits a voluntary organisation with an annual income of around £400m. Presumably the trust is awash with serious minded retired folk from offices who know all about committee work. Plus a certain amount of grass-roots activation from other serious minded retired folk who only make it to volunteer. As there are 60,000 of them, only a very small proportion are going to make it onto the committees. Hence the activation. Nicely presented annual report available from their website, which I would only fault on my not being able to find many statistics about employees and volunteers. Do they have a diversity officer? A picture of the council on the stroll in the garden looked very white.