Parking amnesty thanks to cockupitis

LIFE AND OTHER BITS;

WHO said crime doesn’t pay?

Well, the 9,000 or so folk who committed the “crime’’ of parking illegally, didn’t pay their fine and now find that they are among thousands who got away with it, thanks to a council cock up, are living, smirking proof that when the council is your accomplice crime definitely does pay.

Whether it’s laptops in a wheelie bin or free parking on double yellow lines, Oldham is the place to be.

This, of course, poses a dilemma for the rest of us. Do we pay our parking fines promptly or do we wait to see if they catch up with us — costing us double — and rely on the spread of cockupitis which has caused a red rash of incompetence to break out at the civic centre to let us get away with it?

Of course, compared with the potential £5 million costs of the court case against Oldham’s Mr Kitchens and possible extra cost of damages to his reputation (no, don’t laugh, it’ll cost you) the £283,000 of unpaid fines is small change.

Little more, in fact, than a couple of conferences, some modest entertaining and a crucial full cabinet trip to the other side of the world to look at pothole repairs.

As deputy leader Jackie Stanton said recently: “The council is committed to recovering money owed to it.”

Yes, well . . .


SIR Nicholas Winterton, Tory MP but surely a closet member of the Monster Raving Loony Party, says that you and I, who have to pay our own train fares rather than dipping our hand in taxpayers’ pockets for the dosh, are a different type of people to MPs.

And he’s right. We don’t cheat, we don’t steal and we don’t tell barefaced lies much of the time. But I suspect that isn’t what he means.

Sir Nick, a pompous twit who, along with his wife (another MP, far saner than her nutty husband but far scarier) fiddled £80,000 in expenses in rent for a London flat owned by their children, believes it is disgraceful that MPs should no longer be allowed to travel first-class on trains because: “They (you and me) are a totally different type of people, they have a different outlook on life. It’s not for the public to decide how MPs travel,” he added, forgetting conveniently that it is the public who pay his wages, his expenses and his train fare and who, misguidedly, voted him into office.

What Sir Nick means is that first-class train travel is too good for the rest of us.


FINAL WORD: We take no responsibility for the virtual-ageing picture of council leader Howard Sykes on Wednesday that showed him looking as though he had just eaten Cllr Mark Alcock and was having trouble digesting his shoes.