... instrument of the left against the middle class

[empip]

A good read...

[quote"Simon Jenkins - Guardian"].........Parking revenue has become big money to all local councils, reportedly as much as a penny on income tax. London rakes in £500m of this. Even Tory-controlled Westminster's parking revenue, at £130m, is three times its council-tax yield. It is more a parking authority than an elected council. But since Gordon Brown insists that the money be spent not on schools or social services but on transport improvements, the distortion of priorities is crazy. Camden has so much money for road works that its mascot is a plastic cone and its borough anthem a pneumatic drill.
In recent years maximising revenue from this source has become an obsession of Camden Labour. The local NCP contract target last year was 250,000 tickets, 28,000 clamps and 7,000 tow-aways. The Hampstead and Highgate Express portrayed the then leader, Jane Roberts, as little short of Pol Pot. Even the most careful car owners found themselves trapped into spending hundreds of pounds a year on disproportionate fines for trivial offences......[/quote]

The pennies will slowly drop !!

 

[noodlz]

It already has in Camden a bit...there used to be a strongly Labour controlled local council and now after the last local elections, partly over this issue, it is now a shared Lib/Dem Conservative controlled council. One of the first things they've done is to stop council clamping which was so widespread and over the top(a ticket not enough...many times I'd see a ticket issued, then soon after someone else came along and clamp or tow it, even in out of the way streets!) It was not so much about traffic improvement, but generating money

At last a bit of common sense, not just dodgy ways of creating a revenue stream.