This is the other half of the Council Tax scam, which Booker now reports in his column (above). I can now reveal that it was he who approached West Yorkshire Police (WYP) and got from them the formal statement that the so-called "phantom visits" were fraud, contrary to Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006.

Despite this welcome development, however, the message has not got to the plod at street level. Their line – we now discover - is that, because no money changed hands, my particular case is a "civil matter". The logic of this is, to say the very least, bizarre. By their reckoning, an attempt to defraud is none of their business – I have to give the fraudsters some money before they will treat it as a crime.

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But would we expect the plod to bite the hand that feeds them? As part of the council tax precept refers directly to themselves, they have a self-interest in keeping the revenue flowing in.

Who plods the plods, one might ask.

plod the plod

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misc ... ic_office/

I think you might have something there ... it is another stick with which to beat them.

If Councils lose their revenue stream from inflated summonses ( ana-logous to the banks' inflated overdraft charges protected by our wonderful Supreme Court judges) won't they just cut more libraries, swimming pools and bin collections in order to preserve their senior staff bonuses and quotas of five a day sustainable youth diversity outreach workers?

Until all that is left of local government is the CEO and his staff, on hugely inflated salaries, doing nothing else but send each other memos. Then we rise up and kill them.

Who ever said "you can't fight city hall" was dead wrong...

Well done, sticking to your guns, Richard.

Your tossers in government are just as bad as our tossers :(

Why not keep it simple with the plod and refer them to Section 21 of the Theft Act 1968, Blackmail, which may be pertinent to your circumstances and certainly is in many vehicle clamping cases? The old laws are always the best?

Follow the money

Doesn't Norman Bettison receive a 'Brown Envelops' worth £55000 (off-book payments) Are these payments an incentive for him not to act?

It seems risible that no money having changed hands equates to no crime. It is sufficient that money has been demanded. The essence of the crime is intent to defraud. They have a more plausible defense in claiming ignorance or, alternatively, the mental incapacity to distinguish between enforcing laws and creating them.

Please forgive my impertinence Dr North but you meant 'rise up and have lots and lots of dialogue' lest anyone get the message that these e-coli-like life-forms should, in fact, be gruesomely and publicly exterminated and on prime-time T.V.

I'm certainly not stating publicly that this is the way forward.

Lots of dialogue I say...........................................................................

Suggesting anything else would be most indiscreet.

A more exquisite means of dealing with them would be to decree that no public employee can earn more than 3 X Nat. Avr. wage.

Why not make it 10x National Minimum Wage - there's an incentive as I would include all politicians as "public employees".

@ thejones

'indiscreet' is what we have stepped in

wiping it off the sole of our clogs is 'dialogue'

Now, we have to dispose of the stick, as we dont want to pick it up again, as we might get the wrong end.

'IN THE END YOU KNOW', this makes sense