Whilst watching Breakfast today I was caught totally unprepared for something called 'news'. This is where the wonderful team bring me some information that is totally new to me. This is a rare occurrence, as what they tend to do is regurgitate whatever has been the 'news' overnight (waking up and listening to the radio in the middle of the night is bound to keep you ahead of events - ed) and due to cost cutting at the BBC, i.e. the same newsroom is used to feed all of the news programmes, what appears on the radio overnight, generally become the talking points for the day ahead. Breakfast TV in general is not renowned for 'breaking' news.
Today's new 'news' for me was an organisation called, "The Association of Motor Offence Lawyers", (AMOL) who had a spokesperson on for a rebuttal of something that the Eric Pickles MP said (Eric is someone who appears to have some office in 'Da Governement' (tm) that allows him to spout off about various local government issues on a somewhat monotonously regular basis) .
What Mr. Pickles had said was, "I believe we need to give people the good grace to pop into a local corner shop for 10 minutes, to buy a newspaper or a loaf of bread without risking a £70 fine". Whilst I do realise that leaving the dog outside the shop could lead to a fine, I had not realised that the simple act of popping into the local corner shop (what if the shop is not on the corner, but two doors away from it - confused ed) would potentially be the cause of a fine?
Just to clarify, Mr. Tickles (? - ed) remark, he was talking about parking your car on the high street (with you now - ed), not you as a simple non car owning pedestrian popping into the shops and getting fined for doing so! (Phone rings. It is a call from the the vocal local government minister asking how much do I think they could raise for fining random citizens for walking about the high street. Answer: Fine all those who are drunk and disorderly £1,000 a pop, that would raise millions, and pay for the cleaning up of the cells afterwards - ed)
Now, AMOL's, (have they gone AWOL? - military ed), spokesperson came on and derided this, as, I am sure that you can imagine, Mr. Pickles had not said how this effectively free 10 minutes would be implemented.
Do the machines have to be altered to generate a 10 minutes free ticket that then needs to be displayed on the front windscreen?
Perhaps you need to buy a ticket and get it timestamped by the close at hand traffic warden to show that you were only using it for ten minutes. Once you have your timestamped ticket, you then fill in a form available from the local council and send the ticket and the completed form to the council with a request for a refund?
I mean, do Ministers actually think before they open their mouths? (Is that a real question or rhetorical - ed)
What you have to realise, is that Mr. Tickles (surely Pickles - ed), was speaking to an antique crowd of blue blooded, traffic warden hating, low tax, pro local businesses, anti big supermarkets (obviously excluding Waitrose, otherwise where would one shop - shopping ed), anti-Labour (well obviously that doesn't include the Reinemachefrau, or the gardener, or any of the other paid for home help, as they are all lovely - ed ) folk at the Conservative Spring Forum last weekend, so this kind of worthless prattle is bound to get a standing (presumably with aid due to age - ed) ovation,
Anyway, apart from the minor aside (and rantette - ed), the point of this post was to bring to your attention The Association of Motor Offence Lawyers, (AMOL), which is not as one might think a law organisation but is a wonderful limited company. Limited not only as in a private company, but limited in who can join. They have strict selection criterion (as they correctly put it - i.e. more than one - ed) that you (as a solicitor - ed) must pass before you can join.
The organisation's real purpose, read their Mission Statement for what say, I would imagine, is to ensure that if you hire a solicitor who belongs to this organisation, you can be sure they are experts in the area of motor offences, (Does that mean they can charge more than a solicitor that is not part of the AMOL - ed?), well not experts necessarily, but they are solicitors that have applied for and passed the criterion to join the organisation!
What I do find laughable, is that not all members (solicitors - ed) have to pass the, "stringent criterion", as the founding committee have decided, and I quote,
"The founding committee have unanimously short-listed a select number of solicitors with known expertise to be invited to join AMOL on this basis. They will be exempt from criteria 1, 2 and 4 below"
So, this presumably includes the founding committee themselves! I mean what would be the point of creating an organisation that you were then not allowed to be in?
"So what is criteria 3?", you may well ask, well I did:
"Any applicants must be confirmed as having no pending complaints or criminal prosecutions pending against them by the Law Society",
So this suggests to me (well in his contorted chopt-logic mind - ed) that there are a number of solicitors with known expertise that AMOL didn't want to invite in, because these potential invitees are in trouble with the Law Society, and they wouldn't want the wrong sort of people in their club!
What is also amusing, is that one of the founding members, or as the web site states, "Founding Chief Executive and President", (for life I wonder - ed), Miss Jeanette Miller, has been nicknamed, "Miss Justice", due to her fighting the goverment, "head on", to ensure that motorists who are found innocent at court have their legal costs paid for out of the Central Funds (our tax pounds - ed) and these funds are being slashed (and this was in 2009 - history ed)
I have to say, that in my humble opinion m'lud, this stand against the government is just a trifle (hmm, cold custard, strawberry jelly, with real strawberries in it, a home made sponge base doused in brandy, all topped off with 100s and 1000s and whipped double cream - hmmm food ed) self-serving, as one could well argue that a majority of the costs incurred at court are the fees generated by the solicitor's that the motorists hire to represent them, and who might you hire, solicitors with guaranteed expertise in motor offences, which takes us back to AMOL! Self-serving?
Interesting that AMOL's web site says this quite clearly in this quote,
"She (Miss Justice - ed) explains it would be impossible for her team to conduct the work with the meticulous level of preparation and care they do under the legal aid/new central funds regime"
It does make you wonder what they have been doing under the new regime, being less meticulous in their levels of preparation and care? Surely not as that would be in breach of their own mission statement!
Afterthought
It is interesting to note that AMOL are based in Manchester, and if you watch Breakfast TV, there are now a lot more talking heads, or experts from that region of the UK (for Ralph the Alaskan, up north in the UK is anywhere north of a place called The Watford Gap, which is not the Watford that you best mate Sir Elton John talks about, but a small town in Northamptonshire - ed) than there used to be when Breakfast TV was housed in London.
What has surpised me is that they even have Universities up North (shurely shome mishtake - ed) and generally I can even understand what the local people say when the reports go 'oot and aboot' in Manchester. Wonders will never cease.
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