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They put the price up from £60 to £130 and I was not going to take it lying down. Obviously, the most effective way to win this battle would be to convince the entire population of the London borough in which I live to join me in the mass civil disobedience of not renewing our permits together. If tens of thousands of us all refused to buy a permit this year on the basis that a more than 100 per cent increase in the cost of parking outside our house was undemocratic, unjust, exploitative and downright fraudulent, then Lambeth Council would be powerless to do anything but back down and reduce the cost.
Here’s the science: a few minutes’ walk to the much nicer next-door borough of Wandsworth, the permits are half that cost, and over the river in Kensington and Chelsea, where residents surely enjoy a pleasanter set of amenities still, the permits are cheaper again. You see? I’m not some tetchy middle-class girl who moved to South London and got all uppity about Lefties raising taxes. Oh no. I’m fighting for the People, man. The only problem with my strategy was that I could not think of a way to talk even my next-door neighbour into joining the resistance, never mind the whole borough. Call me defeatist, but I doubted I had the strength to give birth to an entire civil rights movement in time for my permit running out in a few weeks. So I decided I would have to act alone.
At 10 p.m. on the night before the permit’s expiration, I got into my car and drove it under cover of darkness to a street in Streatham where there are no parking restrictions and left it there. I walked the 15 minutes back to my house in Balham and went to bed feeling strangely satisfied. When I next had to drive somewhere I left the house an extra 15 minutes early to walk to my car. When I got back I drove to Streatham and parked then walked the 15 minutes back to my house.
Now, you might say, what is the point in this? I am inconveniencing myself massively. I might as well pay to park outside my house. Well, here is the really clever bit. I never intended to live like this. I merely kept it up for four weeks. At the end of the four weeks, I took myself off to the cheese-counter ticketing circle of hell that is the customer care centre of Lambeth Council and renewed my permit. But, and this is the key thing, the permit now runs until 13 July, not 13 June next year. Therefore — and here you do have to do a bit of elastic thinking — I can just about persuade myself that I have extracted an extra month’s parking out of Lambeth Council for my £130. It’s not perfect. But it’s something.
Unfortunately, as I was attaching the ‘emissions permit’ to my windscreen — don’t you just love the state-sponsored lie that they are now, magically, charging us for ‘emissions’, not boring old parking? — it struck me that there is an even bigger battle to be fought. Something about the unnecessarily large and eye-catching permit on my windscreen made me feel uncomfortable. In this digital age where parking attendants walk down the street with little computers, all that is required is for the cars who have paid to be entered into a computer system. Why the big, blue ‘Lambeth’ badge?
My thoughts on this issue crystallised when I came home the next day and found an enormous scary sign at the end of my street, obscuring residents’ view of the Common. The huge, ugly placard was the height and width of a house and said ‘Welcome to Lambeth’. I walked into a newsagent right next to it and asked if they had seen what happened. The man said gloomily: ‘They came yesterday and put it up.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it can come down, can’t it? It’s overbearing, authoritarian bullying and we won’t stand for it, will we?’ The man shrugged his shoulders and stared blankly at me. He looked like he was waiting for the number on his cheese-counter ticket to be called.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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