Interfering Busybodies-Disabled Motoring UK

Jeremy Clarkson is in the doo doo again. It seems that once someone gets a reputation for being normal, meaning not politically correct, it's open season on them by all the self-important, pompous nutters and pressure groups in the world. Today it's the turn of Disabled Motoring UK. This outfit is in high dudgeon without bothering to find out the facts. Clarkson and James May are being lambasted for parking in a car park's disabled bays. Nasty, evil monsters!!

Now, you don't have to be a TV actor, cameraman, producer or whatever to know that filming something like Top Gear you do not just turn up in a car park and start filming. No, days, weeks or even months before a car park will have been located, the owners contacted and an area agreed to be sealed off at a certain time, on a certain day for filming.  In this, as in all cases I hope, the car park owners had ensured there was ample disabled parking still available. But no, Disabled Motoring UK went into a self-righteous rage about the evil Clarkson.

I have every sympathy with disabled drivers needing to park in bays that allow them to access to where they happen to be visiting. My mother-in-law needs a wheelchair and, although she doesn't have a Blue Badge, has to be parked in a disabled bay so that her driver (usually my wife) has enough space to take her wheelchair from the boot, take it to the passenger door and ease her from the passenger seat into the wheelchair. Please note, she never uses Blue Badge bays.

But on the other side of the coin I find it somewhat galling when I see a Blue Badge holder park in a special bay then get out, without any evident mobility problem, to spend the next couple of hours trotting around the city centre or the local shopping centre. Yes, I know that a disability isn't always evident, but I also know that the Blue Badge system is being widely abused which means that our taxes, yours and mine, are being wasted on people who are effectively defrauding us. I know of one person who has a neck problem, but often goes walking in the Lakes. Why does she get a Blue Badge? Even though she is registered disabled, it affects neither her driving apparently nor her ability to yomp up Scafell!

On one shopping trip with her mother recently my wife got back to her car to find an abusive note from a 'militant' Blue Badge holder because she had parked in a disabled bay without a Blue Badge. The bay didn't say 'Blue Badge holders only' merely 'disabled only'. A major difference. If the 'militant', who had probably been waiting all day to be morally outraged and angered by someone more fortunate, had waited by the car he would have seen that my mother-in-law can barely walk five paces, even with the help of a zimmer frame.

God preserve us from the self-righteous militants who are forever seeking to be offended so that they can get on their morally superior soapboxes and preach their holier-than-thou sermons at those of us more fortunate. That includes Disabled Motoring UK.

Interfering Busybodies-Road Peace

It sometimes feels like we're moving towards a real DDR style Stalinist state in this country. A state where the people spy and hector each other in addition to an overbearing and nannying state.

We have the police driving around with telephone numbers on their cars so that you can inform on somebody confidentially. Also known as grassing. Maybe in extreme circumstances that's ok, but I am extremely uneasy with anonymous information being acted upon by the police or anybody in authority.

Then you have the mithering busybody organisations like ASH. A group of militant anti-smokers campaigning to have smokers strung up from lampposts then flogged to death by the offended populace. Well, not quite, but why do they feel the need to badger and mither people who do something that they choose not to. I think jogging is the most hideous form of self-flagellation and probably costs the NHS a fortune in treating related injuries and heart attacks, but I wouldn't dream of campaigning against it. God made us able to run so that we could leg it from danger, not so that we can wheeze around town looking fit to collapse in the most appalling clothing ever seen on man.

Then in the last couple of days there has been a bit of a fuss about drivers being still on the road having passed the 12 penalty point mark that usually means a ban. My mind works such that when I heard about a man still on the road with 30 points on his licence I thought "wow, nice one, I'll have to find out how he managed that". It seems others got angry and want him stringing up from a lamppost and flogged to death too. Why? They don't know what he accumulated those points for. I very much doubt he mowed down a whole classroom of kids on a pedestrian crossing while speeding having drunk fifteen pints. I imagine he would have been banned then.

Maybe like me, he'd been caught a few times doing 80mph on a desserted motorway at 2-00 in the morning. Would you really want a man to lose his licence and his job for that? Maybe putting him on the dole with a wife and two kids to support? I have only caused one accident on the roads and that was when I had no points on my licence. In the '90s I got up to 9 points at one stage but didn't have a single accident. There's not necessarily a corellation between points and bad driving.

So I would like to warn you about a bunch of interfering misfits called Road Peace. A bunch of emotional incontinents who want to string up motorists. They have a picture of a child's empty bed on their website, complete with bereaved teddy bear on pillow, to show how very 'caring' they are. They may as well just write 'motorists kill children but we love children'. The worst and most sickening kind of hypocrisy and stinking bad taste, using dead children for the purpose of emotional blackmail.

Their contribution to real road safety is zero, and I would urge people not to donate to them. Starving them of funds will metaphorically string them up from a lamppost, and hopefully finish them off. We have more than enough badgering from the state, the police, traffic wardens, yellow lines and more. We don't need emotional retards like Road Peace mithering us too.

I think they've modelled themselves on the Stasi.

Interfering Busybodies III

At this time of year lots of worthy causes pop up to appeal for donations. Quite right too. Then there are dodgy outfits such as Manchester homeless charity Barnabus.

Barnabus claim that homeless people will die in Manchester if they do not receive money for at least 30 more beds. This is what Manchester City Council say:

"We do currently have 20 spaces available for rough sleepers in supported housing schemes, and on top of that, we will find spaces in B&Bs and hotels if we need to.


"These are extreme weather conditions but we are confident there is no reason for anyone to sleep rough in Manchester."

Barnabus, screwing you and the homeless!

Unlikely any rough sleepers will read this but, just in case, here is a link to the Manchester City Council Homeless Section.

Personally I'd rather take in a homeless person for Christmas than give a penny to a cowboy outfit like Barnabus.

BBC coverage here. 

Interfering Busybodies II

Step forward UK Uncut. A bunch of scummy, self-righteous parasites who think it's clever to terrify shoppers and shop workers because they think companies should pay more tax.

Well why don't you lot do the truly self-righteous thing and volunteer to pay more tax, assuming any of you actually earn anything.

And before any idiots whine about what good use our taxes are put to, remember that the bombs for Iraq, the money going into politicians' back pockets and millions more wasted by the government is your tax money and my tax money.

We have a moral duty to avoid paying tax as best we possibly can, a bit like avoiding a nasty accident or the edge of a cliff.

Taxation is theft.

Interfering Busybodies

Every now and then a campaign pops up and I can't help but wonder what perfect lives some people have if they think what they are campaigning for/against is the biggest problem facing the world. Alternatively I wonder why people have to campaign against people doing what they want to do, such as smoking. If people don't smoke fair enough, but why do they become so obsessed by people who do that they waste hours, days, weeks, months, years of their lives campaigning against it?

One such organisation I came across this week was Close the Door. It's a campaign started by a group of bored housewives in Cambridge who want to save the environment by getting businesses to stop leaving their doors open. At first I had to check it wasn't April 1st.

Don't get me wrong, I admire people who campaign for things they feel strongly about, but there are far worse things in the world than a shop leaving its front doors open to entice customers in.  In fact if Mrs B came home frothing with rage, red of face and with steam coming from her ears and I discovered that her fury had been unleashed by the sight of an open shop door, I would be seriously worried about her mental state. In fact I'd tranquilize her with a few shots of Bacardi and Coke then, when suitably sedated, would whip her off to the nearest mental health unit for an assessment.