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As a bike shop is threatened with a fine for leaving a pump outside, RICHARD LITTLEJOHN says it’s another example of the advance of Britain’s punishment culture

By Richard Littlejohn

This time last week it was a five-year-old girl reduced to tears after being handed a £150 fine for selling lemonade without a licence from a stall outside a music festival in East London.

Following a formal complaint from the girl’s father and a healthy dollop of what’s known in the trade as ‘adverse publicity’, Tower Hamlets Council apologised and rescinded the fixed penalty, promising that something like this would not happen again.

‘We expect our enforcement officers to show common sense and use their powers sensibly,’ a spokesman said. Fat chance.

Clearly, the council’s ever-vigilant street patrol team didn’t get the memo. Or, if they did, they chose deliberately to ignore it — which would be my guess. How else to explain their latest crackdown on ‘unauthorised’ behaviour?

They followed up their bold campaign to stop the ‘illegal’ sale of lemonade on the pavements of Tower Hamlets with a threat to prosecute the owners of a local bike shop.

The latest heinous ‘crime’ they’ve identified was the provision of a pump outside the shop for any passing cyclist suffering from a flat tyre. They claimed the pump was an ‘obstruction of the highway’. Officials told the owners they would have to pay for the ‘privilege’ of using the footpath to provide the free service and threatened them with a fine if it wasn’t removed.

For years, it has been a constant theme of this column that if you give anyone any modicum of authority, especially if it comes with a cap and a hi-viz jacket, they will always, always abuse it.

The rot really set in when the then Labour Home Secretary ‘Jackboots Jacqui’ Smith introduced ‘Accredited Persons’ — legions of jumped-up Warden Hodges wannabes with the power to dish out fines for trivial ‘offences’. Overnight, the number of people being criminalised rocketed.

They’ve included a blind man fined because he didn’t notice his guide dog had fouled the pavement and a young mum given a penalty notice because her toddler dropped an apple core from her pushchair. In one of the more surreal incidents, a disabled man in Ayr was fined for littering when a £10 note fell out of his pocket.

Things went from bad to worse in 2014, when the Coalition brought in Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs). This was a godsend to the Accredited Persons and assorted Town Hall jobsworths who get their jollies by throwing their weight around.

According to the latest figures, for 2016, the number of PSPO penalties issued has increased by 400 per cent. Although they were designed specifically to deter violence and threatening behaviour, almost 2,000 people have been punished for a variety of alleged ‘crimes’, including feeding the birds, walking dogs and playing loud bhangra music.

Other victims of the Town Hall Taliban have been pavement artists, fined for harmless chalk drawings, unsuspecting motorists who have left their engines running, and people singing in public. One man was even apprehended for carrying a golf bag, although the circumstances are not fully explained.

Still, there’s almost no aspect of human behaviour which some jobsworth somewhere can’t interpret as the crime of the century.

We live in a punishment culture. Government at every level exists not to serve the public, but to show us who’s boss and extract ever-increasing amounts of money on the most spurious of pretexts.

Just look at the way the straightforward task of emptying the dustbins has been turned into a Byzantine system of rules, regulations and financial penalties.

Speed cameras have virtually nothing whatsoever to do with road safety, and are set cynically to milk motorists who stray inadvertently a few miles an hour over the limit on deserted motorways.

But it is the proliferation of petty officials with quasi-police powers which is the most sinister development. As the real police have withdrawn from the streets, they have been replaced by a standing army of pseudo-coppers, all determined to justify their existence by nicking as many people as possible, often by making up the rules as they go along.

In the case of private parking firms and traffic wardens employed by councils, they are incentivised financially to dish out fines on the flimsiest grounds.

There is no discretion, no sense of proportion. The harassed mum who strays into a bus lane for a few seconds is treated just as harshly as the boy racer who parks his go-faster hatchback on the pavement next to a pedestrian crossing.

No one objects to firm action against genuinely anti-social behaviour — whether a bunch of thugs drinking in the street and chucking their empty cans in the gutter, or selfish dog owners who let their animals foul parks and children’s playgrounds.

Most of us would come down like the proverbial ton of bricks on fly-tippers and slobs who deposit their half-eaten fast food in the street. Nor do we want aggressive beggars bothering shoppers and sightseers in our cities. But sometimes councils announce crackdowns without giving any thought to the consequences.

For instance, Oxford City Council has a problem with rough sleepers. But their solution is not to move them to a temporary hostel or, if all else fails, turn a fire hose on them. No, they are proposing to impose fines of £2,500 on those who leave their belongings in shop doorways.

Where do they think the average homeless person is going to get £2,500 to pay a fine?