RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The struggle on motorists has gone nuclear

The war on motorists has turned ugly, with increasing numbers of drivers fighting back. Literally.

Physical attacks on traffic wardens have soared. They have been kicked, strangled, headbutted and, in one case, sprayed with urine.

Analysis of 660 incidents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that one warden in Bradford was shot with a BB gun and another attacked with scissors.

In Wolverhampton, a parking enforcement officer was splattered with a paintball gun.

In Reading, a driver given a ticket punched the warden in the face three times and threatened him with a knife. In Oldham, an inspector was kicked to the ground and dragged along the street.

A mob in Croydon, South London, battered a terrified warden, breaking his leg, and stole his ticket machine.

In my neck of the woods, Enfield, North London, a parking enforcer was strangled by an angry motorist.

No one can condone these vicious assaults on low-paid staff simply doing their job. But it’s not difficult to understand the frustration which tipped some people over the edge and led them to resort to violence.

Councils and the police treat motorists as Public Enemy Number One, cash cows to be milked regularly. The introduction of fiendishly complicated parking apps, which can only be accessed by smart phone, appears to have been designed deliberately to confuse and extract fines.

I’ve described before how replacing pay-and-display machines at my local parade with an app-based system, subject to the unreliability of the patchy mobile phone signal, tripled parking charges overnight and drove people away from shops and restaurants.

As I wrote here back in August, and have argued for more than 25 years, we now live in a punishment culture, where the police work hand-in-glove with the far-Left anti-car fanatics who have seized control of transport policies to persecute otherwise law-abiding citizens for trivial, and invented, motoring infringements.

That was in a column about the introduction of citywide 20mph limits in London and elsewhere, which has seen an astronomical increase in the number of speeding tickets issued.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury is nicked and fined £300 for doing 25mph on the Albert Embankment, a road which has always been safe to drive at 30mph, something has gone horribly wrong with the concept of law enforcement.

Welby was also ordered to pay £90 costs and a £120 victim surcharge. A what? This was a victimless ‘crime’. No one was hurt. There is no suggestion he was driving dangerously. The only ‘victim’ here was Welby himself.

Millions of drivers with hitherto clean licences have also fallen foul of the 20mph terror.

While there’s a case for lower limits in some residential areas and outside schools and hospitals, imposing a 20mph limit on main roads, dual and triple-carriageways included, is sheer, vindictive lunacy.

A black cab driver complained that he had been nicked driving at 25mph over a deserted Tower Bridge at 3am. A few more accidental misjudgments and he could lose his livelihood.

In London, Mayor Genghis Khan’s war on the car has turned much of our capital city into a No-Go Zone. Road space has been reduced to make room for deserted cycle lanes and parking is either impossible, or impossibly expensive

Same goes increasingly for the outer boroughs and other big cities. Then there’s the Congestion Charge and the ULEZ scam, which means drivers of older, non-compliant vehicles have to find £27.50 a day to drive anywhere.

I wasn’t surprised to read Andrew Pierce’s report in yesterday’s Mail which revealed that although Genghis’s low-emissions scheme had raked in £500 million, a staggering £376 million is still owed in unpaid fines.

Thousands are refusing to pay the daily £12.50 charge – on top of the extortionate £15 congestion charge – and either can’t or won’t pay the resultant £180 fine. Since the scheme was expanded last year, 975,0000 penalty notices have not been paid.

That’s inevitable when harsh laws are imposed without consent and enforced with Stalinist zeal. Civil unrest and disobedience follows in the form of vandalism and violence.

Speed and ULEZ cameras are regularly attacked with everything from chainsaws to paint, to the delight of most motorists – even if they are reluctant to say so publicly.

Fortunately, physical attacks on traffic wardens while reprehensible are still few and far between. One would be too many. But I’m prepared to bet that some were carried out by tradesmen and delivery drivers trying to go about their lawful business being slapped with tickets for stopping temporarily on a yellow line.

Wardens are given no discretion and are incentivised to hand out as many fines as possible.

Zey are only obeying orders, but confrontations with furious White Van Men trying to make an honest living are a dead cert.

Councils are constantly coming up with new ways to punish drivers, such as narrowing parking bays so owners of larger vehicles can be ticketed for overhanging their allotted space.

With Labour in charge of central government and our biggest cities, and captured by Net Zero nutjobs and two-bob chancers like Khan, there’s sadly little prospect of a ceasefire in the war on motorists.

Which is bad news for drivers and traffic wardens. So we are going to see more violence and more wardens getting assaulted. Like any war, there will be casualties.

At this rate it will only be a matter of time before someone is killed.

A former police officer’s daughter has been jailed for three years for posting explicit naked photos of her father’s ex-mistress on a sex-for-sale website. One question: Where did she get them from?

Last week it was Ozempic-style weight loss jabs on the NHS. This week, it’s free Apple-style smart watches.

They would allow patients to monitor everything from blood pressure to glucose spikes. But at what cost?

When the Ozempic plan was first mooted, four million fatties were said to be eligible.

On my back of an envelope calculations, four million doses at £125 a pop worked out at £5 billion a year.

How many would be given smart watches, which cost anything from around £25 for a basic model up to the thick end of a grand for an all-singing, all dancing, top-of-the-line Apple job? 

Your guess is as good as mine, but the NHS isn’t known for financial continence. They wouldn’t go for the cheapest option. New Health Secretary Wes Streeting talks a great game, but this is just another costly gimmick.

Nobody should be given free Ozempic or watches until he’s slashed the seven million plus backlog for operations, tackled the third world disaster area that is A&E, and everyone can get a same day doctor’s appointment.

That would be the really smart way to ‘save’ the NHS.

They said you were getting old if you’d never heard of Kurt Cobain when he died. And that was 30 years ago. Now I’m positively ancient, can someone tell me exactly who Liam Payne was?

Public bodies, including the police and NHS, spaffed £650,000 of taxpayers’ money celebrating Pride Month. I don’t want to ban it, but I’ve never understood why this self-indulgent circus has to last a whole month.

After all, we only have one Remembrance Day. And as for ‘raising awareness’, is there anybody unaware of the noisy LGBTQWERTY+ lobby? The love that dared not speak its name won’t shut up these days.

Nor do I see why taxpayers should have to foot the bill. Despite constantly pleading poverty and cutting frontline services, public bodies have no hesitation in splashing our hard-earned on everything from drag bingo, whatever that is, to pronoun badges  and something called rainbow fudge.

You don’t like to ask.