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Wayne’s World
By
Wayne Casey
The views expressed in this column may not be those of the National Taxi Association
For numerous reasons, and mainly for the love of not boring you to death, I wasn’t going to return to the differences of local authorities in respect of allocating additional restriction grants to licensed drivers.
I mean, you’re bored, sitting waiting for work, possibly listening to James O’Brien, why would you want some sad wee man from Cumbria telling you what you already know and making the situation worse?
My mission, evidently, is to relieve boredom and not be the boredom, many of you know you’re being screwed over, why should I highlight it.......again?
Thankfully some local authorities have seen the light during the past month, others haven’t been so generous and others haven’t changed their policies at all.
During this past month of reflection I have listened to various tales and stories, the best of which I bought on Audible.
Due to technology, I am able to listen to this through my mobile phone via some new fangled thing my daughter called ‘Bluetooth’.
This month’s choice was Alexi Sayle’s “Stalin ate my homework”, in which he describes his upbringing in the Anfield area of Liverpool.
Sayle’s parents were communists. For the purposes of this article they were definitely not to blame for the qualification criteria of the Additional Restrictions Grant (ARG), although, arguably, they may have well have been.
One chapter that did make my ears [edited by admin] up was the description Sayle’s parents made of traders such as taxi drivers, commonly known as the self-employed, but in communist circles known as the “petty bourgeoisie”.
The petty bourgeoisie, in communist thinking, is a class of people between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, apparently because they own the means of their production.
A semi-autonomous peasantry that politically blow with the wind.
For example, they appear to believe we will agree to send a cab for Mr & Mrs Smith, but if, the Duke of Edinburgh calls, for a trip perhaps to the dog track, well, Mr & Mrs Smith can go phooey, our deference to our betters means the Duke gets the cab.
It is therefore reasonably apparent that local government has been infiltrated by communists. What other reason could there possibly be for so many, predominantly labour controlled local authorities, to ignore the carnage inflicted by the pandemic on the licensed trades.
I know many of you enjoyed my analogy from last month regarding Camberwick Green; letters of complaint and the shattering of childhood illusions do have that type of effect.
I won’t disappoint, it turns out that Trumpton town hall has been infected by communists and the entire town is now under the grip of the ‘red menace’, occasionally known as Derek Cummins.
After a series of show trials Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble & Grubb have been executed by firing squad for crimes against the Peoples Republic of Trumpton (PRT). The central committee now running Trumpton has decided that Mr Philby, the driver of the mayor (now known as the supreme leader) should keep his job, for services to the party, after all we can’t have a state without a large black limousine and a suitably attired driver, (what would Camberwick Green think).
Suddenly (and entirely due to international capitalism and globalism), a pandemic hits Trumpton, Mr Toni Antonio, the ice cream man is amongst the first to contract covid-19 and sadly die a truly horrible death. No more tutti frutti ice cream for the kids of Trumpton.
As you will all be aware, Trumpton is kept going, on the whole, by the self-employed industries, the petty bourgeoisie as the PRT call them. If these trades wither and die, such as Mr Wilkins - the plumber, Miss Lovelace - the hat maker or indeed Mr Walter Harkin - the painter and decorator, who will be there to serve the community when this goddamned capitalist mess is over and done with, they urge the PRT for financial assistance.
A zoom meeting of the PRT takes place, despite Mr Troop (the Town Clerk) wearing his filtered ‘Cat Face’, they decide that Wilkins, Lovelace & Harkin are subversive enemies of the state and party, for merely pointing out that they can’t trade properly, they are arrested and placed in a gulag, they now face a show trial.
The above seems implausible, but as Sherlock Holmes once did say “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.
So, either councils have been taken by Communist revolutionaries or they are deliberately choosing to make people suffer.
As pointed out last month, the ARG policy of Birmingham council is different to the majority of other councils; they chose to interpret who has been affected by the pandemic differently to other local authorities.
I cannot possibly imagine any council disregarding something as important as the taxi and private hire trades on purpose, therefore, and going on from the logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I must regrettably state, those councils haven’t forgotten, they haven’t either (and much to my despair) probably been taken over by communists, it’s a simple if not brutal answer......they just don’t give a toss, you aren’t that important.
I may be alone with these thoughts, I mean, these metro mayor thingies. I mean what do they do?
What is their point? I’m sure they’re fine upstanding people. But being of Irish descent, it’s almost always the fine upstanding folk you have to keep your eye on. The reason being, according to Shashi Tharoor, “The sun never set on the British empire, because even God couldn't trust the Englishman in the dark” I guess it’s a similar thing with councils.
A quick Google (although other search platforms are available) led me to the ‘Institute for government’ website; apparently, metro mayors were invented in the dying years of the previous labour government (over a decade ago). It was part of devolution to local government from, presumably, national government.
Judging by their response to this particular part of the pandemic, the allocation of grants, I sincerely suggest they are scrapped. Not only in terms of the pandemic have they proven to be a distraction, it does appear they are just another level of bureaucracy.
And yes, I’m going to bring the Brexit thing into this.
One of the reasons cited for leaving the EU, well for those who aren’t racist xenophobes anyway, was to get away from UK politicians blaming someone else (i.e. the EU) as the penultimate reason they couldn’t do anything. Well, now we have a situation where we see UK politicians blaming other UK politicians as a reason for them not being able to help. As already proven, I’m no Sherlock Homes, but you don’t have to be Sherlock to conclude this isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
Sorry, not my fault guv, it’s them over there. Fish, blue passports, damned foreigners. Does all of this sound familiar?
The truth is that local authorities have been allocated money from national government, and it is for the local authorities to determine who is allocated funding – despite all of the b/s.
A group of people that have been seemingly completely forgotten in all of this are those taxis who pay for permits to work ranks on Railway property. People have been told not to travel without good reason, it is illegal to go on holiday, and therefore the footfall through railway stations is minimal.
Way back in June 2020 the financial times wrote ‘UK taxpayers face a bill of at least £3.5bn to bail out train companies because of the coronavirus crisis, according to government estimates.’ Yet despite receiving billions of pounds of taxpayers money rail firms continue to charge taxis the full amount to stand waiting for virtually no passengers getting off trains.
If you are affected by this, please write in to PHTM.
As I write this we are just a few short hours past the Supreme Court ruling on Uber and the self employed / or are they employed rights shenanigans. I’ll give a larger view next month, due to copy deadlines, but time and space permits me to write a few words.
First of all, I congratulate James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, two blokes who took on a giant, and like David vs. Goliath these guys won. The judgement will undoubtedly have an affect far beyond what they ever thought possible.
The fact Uber took the claim as far as it did, does seem to completely undo what they stated in their press release a few minutes after the final judgement, that the judgement only affects a few of their drivers. I mean, if it only affected a few, why would they spend hundreds of thousands of pounds pushing this thing as far as they could?
I wager a multitude of private hire companies are currently celebrating this victory, but are they?
The way I see it, they celebrate a ‘pyrrhic victory’ like Brexit with the fishing industry, sure we can catch all the British shellfish we can, but we can’t sell them to anyone who actually wants eat them, like those EU countries, despite what John Redwood says.
Uber is the head of the fish and according to the Turkish legend ‘a fish rots from the head down’.
Virtually every other private hire company in the country operate in a manner similar to Uber, there is of course one key difference. Practically every other company will tell you to remove their equipment, if you as a driver work for another operator and this is probably right, but the problem with this comes the responsibilities.
Following on with the godly quotes, the modus operandi is ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ or in more straightforward terms, ‘if you do any work for them, then you’re out on your arse sunshine’. And we are then told, laughably, there is no ‘master and servant’ relationship.
Of course, Uber very probably has a backup plan, just be the platform and brand, all they need to do is buy other app based platforms, like perhaps ‘autocab’.
Till next month, keep safe.
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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin
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