Footway parking

It seems that I am not the only one fighting the London councils on their petty parking tickets. Unfortunately for this guy, having taken it all the way up to the High Court, he had his over–literal interpretation of the wording of the infringement rejected by Lord Justice Moore–Bick and found himself liable to pay some 100 parking tickets plus costs.

I believe that I have fallen foul of the prohibition in question myself. It sounds very much like Penalty Charge Notice Code 62, which prohibits parking on the pavement. Only in London is there this general prohibition on parking on the pavement. Elsewhere, parking on the pavement is allowed unless specifically prohibited or an obstruction is being caused. This means that on a reasonably wide pavement out of London, you are usually OK to park a motorcycle, but in London you will get a ticket if a warden passes by.

It sounds like this bloke must have run a defence based upon a literal interpretation of the wording of the infringement, which is “Parked with one or more wheels on any part of an urban road other than a carriageway (footway parking)”. Because his bike was up on the stand, with both wheels off the ground, I assume he argued that there was no infringement. However, the judge apparently decided that the “motorcycle can quite properly be said to be parked on the pavement, even if neither wheel is directly in contact with it”.

As a matter of interpretation, that is clearly the only common sense approach. Otherwise, one could park on the pavement with impunity by jacking the car up, or even by making sure that there was a sheet of newspaper under each tyre. Still, one has to admire the balls of this guy for running up a hundred parking tickets (£10 grand’s–worth) and fighting all the way up to the High Court based upon his conviction that such a technical defence would suceeed.

Incidentally, my own route to seeking to get off was to obtain plans from the Land Registry in the hope of showing that, although parked, I was not “on any part of an urban road” but rather on private property. Sadly, the plans availed me not on that occasion, showing that the wall against which I was parked marked the limit of the private land, so I decided to pay up at the 50% discount for early settlement and live to fight another day.

Labels: driving, law, london, motorcycles

Judge cleared of rush-hour flashing

Yup, lack of video evidence. That’s how you get off in my experience too.

Labels: law, london

What do we think of this new proposal to make Sex Offenders Register background checks available to women on new boyfriends and families on new relatives? It seems to me that the result of this would be to render the Sex Offenders Register pretty close to being a public document. Is that a good thing?

Labels: law, news, UK politics

I was going to post something about the current outcry about lack of rape convictions, but Camilla Cavendish in the Times makes the point well.

Labels: law, UK politics

Sexism

I know that this site is rapidly becoming a cross between Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail, but I’m sure it’s not me: the world actually is going mad. According to Dawn Dixon, Chair of the Association of Women Solicitors, in an interview by journalist Selena Masson, “…women are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the traditional long hours culture but nothing appears to be getting done and it is high time the profession recognized the potentially detrimental effects on the workplace culture, productivity and profit and the loss of female talent that this situation may give rise to”. Dixon adds, “I am often contacted by members who have returned from maternity leave only to be told that they remained on the same PQE (Post Qualification Experience) in relation to salary reviews. Their male counterparts, however, who had not been on maternity leave, had progressed to the next year’s PQE salary bracket, thereby receiving a higher salary”. This is described by Masson as one of the “horror stories of maternity discrimination” with which “the profession is rife”.

So let’s get this straight. Basically, women are disenchanted with the legal profession because firms are unwilling to pay them for long hours that they don’t actually want to work or to bump them up a PQE pay bracket for which they haven’t actually acquired the requisite additional PQE. Like, duh. I am sure that men are similarly disenchanted by the rotten stickler firms in this regard. The only difference is that men are less likely to have the option of leaving the profession, wreaking further collateral damage to the culture, productivity and profit of firms, because they are still much less likely than women to have the option of deciding to stay at home, while another member of the household chases the pay cheque.

Dixon has one last piece of advice: open your own firm. Apparently, “then you can work as flexibly as you want in your nightgown at 10 o'clock in the morning with the children playing away in the corner!”. How lovely. I can only wish you all the best of luck with that, ladies.

Labels: law

This is pretty disturbing shit as well, on the old interference with personal liberty in a supposedly free country tip. It details the Control Order restrictions “including a 12–hour home curfew, no Internet access and a ban on visits from anyone who has not been approved by the Home Office” that have been imposed for the last two years upon some guy who has never been tried or convicted of anything but is apparently a terrorist. Unsurprisingly, his lawyers are contending that the restrictions are a breach of his human rights.

Whatever John Reid says about how nanny knows best and how we need protecting from terrible things that for reasons of national security he can’t tell us about, I cannot help feeling uncomfortable that there are now crimes to which the usual rules of habeas corpus do not fully apply. Still, the Law Lords stopped the Government from detaining this geezer in Belmarsh without trial after three and a half years, so maybe they’ll step in here and restore the time–honoured position in relation to house arrest also.

Labels: law, news, war on terror

Like, woah

There are apparently some new requirements coming in if you want to visit the US from Britain. But something in this story in the Guardian totally shocked me.

“Britons already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security. Now passengers face having all their credit card transactions traced when using one to book a flight. And travellers giving an email address to an airline will be open to having all messages they send and receive from that address scrutinised”.

So US authorities are already permitted to inspect credit card details and email accounts for anyone visiting the US from Britain, pursuant to a deal done with the EU, and now just dealing with an airline by email means that US authorities can inspect all messages to and from that address and if you pay by card they can review all transactions on your account?! Sorry for all the emphasis, but holy shit. Did I miss the memo on this? Isn’t that, like, a bit of an invasion of privacy if there’s, say, no actual evidence whatsoever that you might have done anything wrong?

Labels: law, news, war on terror

£1m barristers

The first legal aid barrister to trouser over £1m for a financial year defends his income in the Times. His defence is predictably based upon how incredibly hard he works, how good he is and how if you can’t make £1m doing it, the best people would give up and do something else.

The real problem that people have with this comes out elsewhere in the piece: — “Premier league barristers do premier league work, he adds. Like premier league footballers? It’s a fair comparison”. Premier league footballers, paid huge amounts because they are rare and brilliant, are not paid out of taxpayers’ money. In this country, we are happy to allow the market to operate unchecked in the private sector, leading to multi–million pound bonuses for people who happen to be good at selling equity derivatives or £100,000 a week salaries for those who are great at kicking a ball about. But when it is public funds, we baulk at paying £1m in a year to any one individual, irrespective of brilliance or diligence. That’s why the Prime Minister doesn’t get paid tens of millions as CEO of the country. (Some of you may be able to suggest other reasons. I am not going to go into that here).

But why is that? There must be an equal, if not greater, interest in applying market forces to get the best people in public sector roles as compared with the private sector. I think what it comes down to is views about relative amounts of wedge and about who is the boss in each case. In the private sector, your bosses/paymasters generally make significantly more money than you. A manager who is on £100,000 is happy to pay his junior £30,000. A banker who is on a £7m bonus is happy to see his junior getting a £3m bonus. But in the public sector, we are the paymasters, in that all the money ultimately comes out of our pockets. And most of us do not earn anything like £1m/year. To most people in the country — in many cases, hardworking people, who consider their work to be an important contribution — £1m/year is an obscene, unobtainable salary. It is more than 20 times the average household income. A taxpayer who is on £40k, and is taxed £15k, is very unlikely to agree that a publicly funded legal aid barrister is worth every penny of his £1m, even if the barrister combines the wisdom of King Solomon with the work ethic of Aleksei Stakhanov.

Labels: law

A motorcyclist is making a Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority Claim for injuries suffered in the process of running over and killing a 12–year–old who was playing chicken on a dual carriageway A–road.

The CICA is set up to provide compensation out of public funds to victims of violent crime. This is said to be the first time that a person has tried to claim compensation from the CICA for injuries sustained as a result of an accident in which the ‘guilty’ party died. A particular difficulty seems to be whether or not a ‘violent act’ can be said to have been committed against the motorcyclist.

I can’t see why his claim should not be allowed to succeed. If the kid had deliberately run out for a prank and caused the motorcyclist to crash and be injured, but without the kid being hurt himself, it seems to me that there is a decent arguable case for section 20 OAPA 1861 grievous boldily harm on the basis of recklessness (subject to the additional complication of establishing that the person committing the offence knew that what he was doing was seriously wrong — required when an accused is between the ages of 10 and 14), with a corresponding claim for CICA compo. The fact that the kid managed to kill himself in the course of committing the act which consitutes the violent crime is neither here nor there with respect to the motorcyclist victim. Sad of course that the kid died, but that is no reason why the motorcyclist should be denied his compo.

Labels: law, motorcycles

"The John in your life" my arse

This is complete bollocks from the well known “all men are potential rapists” school of logic.

“…isn’t it understandable if a woman does not care to contemplate her man’s weakness for whores? But it does matter. In a book she wrote after reporting on the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, Joan Smith argued powerfully that the reason Peter Sutcliffe remained at large for so long — and survived nine police interviews — was that detectives were looking for a bogeyman. They had convinced themselves he was probably a loner and a weirdo. One senior officer said: “If we had 20 or 30 suspects in one room we would know very quickly which one was the Ripper.” In fact he was just a local bloke, a married man who, said Smith, shared the police’s “background and attitudes to a remarkable degree”. An acceptance of this would have saved a lot of lives”.

So the point is a warning to women is that they had better watch out, because not only might your apparently normal man be sleeping with prostitutes, but he might also be a serial killer like Peter Sutcliffe? Because men are all the same. Just a bunch of ’ho shagging, kiddy–fiddling, raping, serial killers in waiting.

Is it just me, or is the world a better place if we conduct ourselves on the basis that everyone is a decent, ordinary person until proven otherwise rather than assuming the absolute worst about everyone because “you never can tell”. Reggie Kray was allegedly nice to his mother. This does not mean as a matter of logic that we should treat everyone who is nice to his mother as a suspected Reggie Kray.

Labels: law, news