Andy Burnham’s parked his tank in just the right spot

S o farewell, then, insane and exploitative private parking fines. Ah, we’ve had some times! I remember the first time I encountered you, maybe 25 years ago, when I had the temerity to park my old Mini Mayfair for 30 seconds in the car park of a building in which I actually lived, and one of your ogres leapt out and put a clamp on it, which cost me £200 to get off. This, for a car that only cost me £625 in the first place. Or during the pandemic there was the time I got fined for leaving my car in very marginally the wrong part of a car park — and I think I’ll say this in capitals because I’m still so cross — WHILE GIVING BLOOD. “Pay up,” said the letter, “or we’ll send the bailiffs.” God knows what they’d have taken. More blood, I suppose. Most commented 1 The Horses review — lunch with an influencer, Topjaw’s Jesse Burgess Food & Drink 87 comments 2 My father’s Facebook posts about ‘our special angel’ make me cringe Parenting 32 comments 3 Tripsnacking? Finally a travel trend I can get on board with Advice 49 comments 4 Bill Bailey: A heckler told me to get a haircut — I refused for 40 years Theatre & Dance 34 comments 5 What we’re reading — by the Times books team Books 541 comments Have you ever had the bailiffs? We did once, shortly before I was due to take my youngest daughter to a music exam. Doorbell goes, foot in the gap, huge demands, scary guy, ample menaces. Turned out we had failed, twice, to pay the London congestion charge . Our fault, yes, because we had changed both our car and our address, which meant we’d lost track. Still, you don’t expect Sadiq Khan to sell your debt to the actual mafia. Or for them to multiply it by about 25. Top stories 1 Tripsnacking? 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Such firms issued 16.5 million fines last year. Some consider this rather beneath him; more the work of a mayor than a prime minister. At PMQS on Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch chided him for focusing on small ideas rather than bigger ones. Only, it’s not a small idea. And it doesn’t end with parking, either. Advertisement Here in Britain we have a service economy. We may vaguely think that phrase refers to something huge; concierges for oligarchs, perhaps. What it usually means, though, is multiple options for financial services, and utilities, and entertainment, and yes, parking, which now come at us in a blizzard. Top stories 1 Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: ‘My kids tell me to back off when they cook’ The Sunday Times Magazine 2 From gold to tech stocks: how to build the perfect investment portfolio Saving & Investing 3 High street banks are on borrowed time Saving & Investing 4 Belgium’s most stylish autumn weekend break — and it’s not Bruges Belgium This blizzard is supposed to work in our favour. Shop around for the right deal, and I suppose it does. Where our service economy really thrives, though, is when we get it slightly wrong. According to the Financial Conduct Authority, British banks benefit by £12 billion a year from people failing to take advantage of favourable savings rates. Lord knows how much they benefit from people who slip up while redoing their mortgages. I’m currently in the midst of that nightmare myself. Who knows what tiny mistakes I’ll have made, at a cost of literally thousands? What fun it will be finding out! See also pensions. See credit cards. See insurance. See basically everything. One answer to this is supposed to be comparison websites. The coalition government was particularly big on them, you’ll recall, with David Cameron encouraging people to shop around for their energy deals. What that means, though, is you end up with a huge new service industry sitting atop the old ones. So now we need price comparison websites for our price comparison websites. A meerkat to compare the meerkat. Implicit here is the idea that it’s all on you. Every aspect of life starts to feel like a trap. I do not know how much real political philosophy lies behind Burnham’s vague commitment to, as he put it yesterday, “do the small things that help people have better lives”. If he tried, though, there’s a whole big picture up for grabs. For starters, much as local government enthusiasts may struggle with this, I don’t think people really distinguish much between private parking services, whether they mug you or not, and privately contracted public ones, which use 50 different apps thus ensuring you always have the wrong one. Not least because they all end up siccing the same thugs on you when you mess up. This stuff is corrosive. It corrodes our trust in the state even when it technically isn’t the state, because when I park outside a hospital it damn well feels like the state to me. Advertisement More to the point, it corrodes faith in everything else. We all know enthusiasm for capitalism is faltering, and we are apt to diagnose lofty reasons for that, from regional and generational inequality to the inability of younger people to amass capital and feel like capitalists at all. Thus, they begin to yearn for some friendly strongman to come along, to rip wealth from the wealthy and make it all better. Don’t forget, though, the direction that so much British capitalism has been allowed to take for the past 20 years or so. Particularly when our relationship with public services and utilities has become essentially capitalist too. Because there is a flipside to unmanaged choice and it is the ability to make a bad one. It is a creeping sense that the relationship between seller and buyer, or between provider and consumer, is one of a conman and his mark. They are condoned, you’re on your own. Your mistakes are their profit margin. So yes, it’s bigger than parking. Much bigger. But parking, I’d say, is a good place to start.