Theodore Dalrymple gets a parking ticket - and ponders how a state can remain adept at revenue extraction when it is so incompetent at everything else

Theodore Dalrymple is not best pleased to be given a parking fine.

The alacrity, efficiency and speed with which monies are collected from certain members of the public are in stark contrast with the incompetence, inefficiency, and waste with which the ends for which the monies are supposedly collected are pursued. In short, the British public administration is a Moloch whose appetite grows with the feeding, and whose only real purpose is to feed itself. Existence and expansion is its very raison d'etre.

Recently I parked on a dark and rainy night in an unfamiliar road for twenty minutes. There was only one other car parked within a hundred yards. By the time of my return to the car, a fixed penalty charge ticket had been stuck on my windscreen.

It was true that I had inadvertently parked in an area of residents' parking only. I had therefore nothing to complain of, having carelessly forgotten just how regulated everything has become and that one must assume that what one wishes to do is forbidden until proven otherwise. And, in fact, I accept in general that the regulation of parking in overcrowded places is necessary, for otherwise residents might not be able to park anywhere near their homes.

However, there was something almost indecent in the haste with which I received the ticket, by comparison with what would have happened, say, if my car had been broken into and I had reported it to the police. There is no revenue to be had from policemen on the beat.

I have observed this haste in imposing fines twice before. Once I stopped outside a hotel at which I was going to stay, to take in my luggage (the nearest available parking place being several hundred yards off). I received a ticket within two minutes, while I was at the hotel reception, and when I protested - the officer was perfectly aware that I was parking only to unload, for the door of my car was open and I had stopped in a way, by no means obstructive to others, which made it perfectly clear I had no intention of staying long - I was told that I ought to have had my warning lights flashing. That was the proper procedure for unloading, according to regulations.

Were these regulations national or local, I asked? They were local, he replied. In other words, the visitor is expected to familiarise himself with local regulations (several pages long) wherever he goes. Common sense and discretion are of no avail. These are expected neither of the citizen nor, above all, of the official who applies the rules au pied de la lettre - when the rules provide an opportunity for raising funds, that is.

I had another very similar experience to the one above.

An excellent insight into the nature and purpose of parking enforcement is available on the following website. The writer shadowed an ill-paid parking attendant who in 4 hours of an 8 hour working day earned less than £30 and raised £550 in revenue to be divided between the council and the private contractor who employed him.

In not a single case of the 11 tickets issued (five to police vehicles, one to a Royal Mail vehicle and one to a British Telecom vehicle, which had a correctly-displayed emergency vehicle sign but which has its wheels very slightly on the pavement, and was therefor "done" for "obstruction", though the vehicle quite obviously obstructed no one) was the recipient inconveniencing anyone seriously: practically all the tickets were issued on technicalities. One was issued to a car with a Manchester disabled badge, that had overstayed the length of time allowed in the borough in which the owner parked, but which would have been perfectly all right in Manchester. He, too, was supposed to know the regulations, not merely from region to region, or county to county, but from borough to borough.

The parking attendants (now called civil enforcement officers and provided with baseball caps, as if to emphasise just how far the British are now but trailer-trash Americans) have minimum targets to achieve, with bonuses as the carrot to performance. It is openly acknowledged within the organisation that employs them that revenue-collection is the primary goal.

One would have no cause for complaint or grounds for suspicion if other and more important aspects of the rules were applied with similar rigour and efficiency, but of course this is not so. I know from experience, for example, how difficult it can be to get the police even to record a crime, let alone get them to do anything about it. This difficulty occurs not merely with trivial offences, but with serious ones, up to and including arson and attempted murder. My working-class patients used to tell me regularly that the police refused to entertain their complaints that their houses had been burgled. This, of course, was only natural: the police have the task not of reducing crime, but
of reducing the crime figures, and by far the easiest and most efficient way of doing that is to manipulate them.

Once, called to a police station to examine a person under arrest to determine whether he was fit to be detained and interviewed, my car was broken into while parked immediately outside the police station. When I informed the police of this (to me) surprising occurrence, they replied with perfect equanimity,

I expect that's the Smiths at number 22, they're always breaking into our cars.

The street in which I received a fine was, like so many streets in Britain, filthy with litter. Of course, the council is not responsible
for the behaviour of the residents and visitors: but it is a fact that if streets are not cleaned properly, many more people soil them because there is not much point in refraining from doing so. Some of the litter in the street had clearly been there a long time. But this is of no concern by comparison with revenue-collection.

The disparity between the bullying nature of officialdom and its manner of revenue extraction (or what in other contexts would be called extortion) from the population, on the one hand, and the very poor return the population gets for its money, on the other, creates a state of mind that oscillates between sullen resentment and pig-headed rebellion, not necessarily against well-chosen targets.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.