Much trailed in the press this morning, the formal announcement finally arrived in my RSS reader.

“End of the road for cowboy car clampers” screamed the headline.

Sounds good – clamping down (hur!) on the cowboys who do much to ruin the industry and let formally licensed companies carry on subject to sensible regulations. A win-win, as the motorist gets sensible regulations, while private land owners retain some protection from trespassers.

Oh, hang on – that isn’t what is planned.

The government plans to make it totally illegal to clamp cars on private land (public land will still use clamping) and also make it illegal to remove a car seemingly dumped on private land.

Now, if motorists were being unfairly clamped on property that is advertised as a car park for all to use, then yes, I would agree that there is a dire problem that needs urgent action.

But that isn’t what happens.

What actually happens is that motorists are trying to avoid paying parking fees by dumping their cars on other people’s private property without even bothering to ask permission.

That is a totally different situation – and I am slightly at a loss to understand why the person who owns the land should be banned from removing “rubbish” that is dumped on it.

Two stories:

I used to work in a retail store in Slough that happened to have a private car park at the back, onto which we had a back door. We had a Gentleman’s Agreement that customers could use the back door to collect heavy items they had purchased.

However, people would treat the space as a free car park, leave their cars there, go shopping then pop into our shop to buy something much later. This meant the legitimate users of the car park were either unable to use the spaces they had rented, or in too many cases, were blocked in by someone else dumping their car in the way.

As you can imagine, after a while the tenants got annoyed and the landlord brought in clampers who clamped every single car without a permit, even if only there for a few minutes. We scrapped the back-door collection and put up HUGE warning signs.

Still the motorists would presume that they could use the private property as a free car park – simply because they didn’t want to pay to use the official car parks that the council had built in the town centre.

The clampers were a huge pain in the neck as they were so aggressive – but there was a serious problem with illegal parking that needed fixing. A licensed clamper with a sensible attitude would have been better.

In another example, I used to live near a football stadium on a semi-private estate. When football matches were being played, the residents used to set up a rosta to guard the main road entering the estate and block anyone entering who wasn’t visiting residents. Why?

Because motorists saw empty private car parking spaces by the blocks of flats and would dump their cars in them. Obviously that then meant the person off out shopping in the morning could drive home and find their own personal car parking space was now occupied by persons unknown.

–

With the new proposals, we will have a situation where private property owners are having their land trespassed on – but will be unable to evict the miscreant.

If you throw rubbish onto someone’s drive, then they are allowed to pick it up and dispose of it. But if that piece of rubbish happens to be in the shape of a car – suddenly that right is removed from you.

Yes, the clampers had got out of control – but the solution is not to ban them, but to regulate them and set sensible limits on the fines and conditions they impose. Otherwise, we end up with a carte blanche for motorists to trespass on private property with impunity.

In conclusion – if you are a motorist, use an official car park – don’t presume that the car sized plot of empty land is de-facto a car park for your use. It could be and indeed, almost certainly is, someone’s private property.

</rant>

Ask most people to draw an outline picture of the Houses of Parliament, and often you will get long oblong with “Big Ben” at one end. Most will not include the huge tower that is at the other end of the Palace – as it is rarely featured in photos, or when it is, perspective makes it look quite insignificant. Despite being taller and much larger than the Clock Tower, it seems to have almost had a cloak of invisibility cast over it.

The tower – properly known as Victoria Tower – is however a vital part of the Palace complex, as it houses the Parliamentary Archives – the formal record of all the business of the Houses of Commons, Lords and Committees.

Although most of the archive is packed full of rather generic documents in boxes on shelves, there is one room which is the one most likely to feature on the news if they need generic footage of old legal documents – and that is the archive where all the Acts of Parliament are stored. What makes it so special is that each Act has been, and still is, hand written on calfskin – known as Vellum – and rolled up for storage.

Thanks to a day of special tours organised by the Parliament as part of the Cultural Olympiad, small groups were given a chance to go into this very special room.

Although the archive is actually open the public, like most depositories (Met Archive, National Archive), the public are only allowed into a reading room, and the staff fetch documents from the stores. So a chance to go into the actual archive store is very rare indeed.

After taking a small cramped lift up to the first floor and a short talk, we headed along a corridor decorated in the red of the House of Lords, through secure doors and then into another even smaller lift to go further up the tower.

Fascinatingly, the centre of the tower was originally hollow with a “chimney” running right from the base to the roof as a ventilation shaft. An iron staircase ran round the central shaft – but this was swiftly blocked off at the fifth floor as the draft coming up the chimney was far too boisterous for a delicate archive.

However, the base of the chimney is still open to the air, and is directly above the Sovereign’s Entrance (you can see the hole in the roof). When The Queen arrives, a messenger watches from above, and as soon as she steps foot onto the red carpet, the messenger sends a signal to the roof to replace the Union Jack with the Royal Standard.

This “first floor” of the Tower is also the floor where the Acts of Parliament are kept – in a specially air-conditioned and air filtered room.

Inside, it is actually made up of metal shelving from the 1960s, but the rows up upon rows of rolled up scrolls is still an extraordinary sight.

Each roll has a small paper tag attached – marked with a code for the Monarch and the year of their reign. So an Act passed this year would be 58, E2 for the 58th year of the reign of Elizabeth II.

The smallest laws tend to be private acts and similar, and probably unsurprisingly, the longest Acts deal with taxes. The largest scroll in their possession if laid out flat is longer than the Palace of Westminster!

We were shown a collection of Acts signed by King Henry 7th, which are unusual for being stored flat rather than in rolls, and a copy of a modern Act as printed for distribution.

What I wasn’t aware of is that the Monarch no longer signs the Acts into law herself, but now nominates someone to act on her behalf instead. Although Warrants for the Dissolution of Parliament or Summons to the House of Peers are still (probably) still signed by The Queen.

As an act is signed, a short sentence is added to the top of the Act, La Reyne le veult – which is Anglo-Norman for The Queen Wills It. You may hear that uttered in the House of Lords during ceremonial events, such as the Prorogation of Parliament when four Lords are nominated to act in the Queen’s absence.

The phrase to use if The Queen DOESN’T will it, is La Reyne s’avisera, but the last time a Monarch refused to sign a bill into law was during the reign of William and Mary.

Although paper copies of the Acts are printed on normal paper for distribution, and can also be read online at the Parliament website, the scrolls are still printed on calfskin, produced in a single factory near Milton Keynes. An attempt by a Labour MP to “modernise” and scrap the use of Vellum was wisely rejected by the Commons in 1999.

The Tower itself holds documents dating back as far as 1497 – although sadly, most of the archive for the House of Commons was lost during the fire that destroyed Parliament in 1834. The House of Lords archive at the time was stored in a separate building across the road and so escaped the conflagration.

As the Commons produces a lot more paperwork than the Lords, it has since caught up with the Lords in terms of documents stored in the archive, and in 2006, it was renamed from the House of Lords Record Office to The Parliamentary Archive to reflect the change.

Incidentally, the Government archives, being separate from the workings of Parliament are stored down at the National Archives in Kew.

There is an online video tour available so you can see what we saw – and quite a bit more as it happens, including the roof, from which you could have seen my flat, if the resolution had been high enough.

Thanks to the Archive staff for offering our small group a glimpse of the building, and I shall not glare too enviously at two of the group who had managed an extra visit to the Crypt Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, which I really wanted to go as well.

Had a reminder that the Pakistani opposition politician, Imran Khan was going to be giving a talk in one of the Committee Rooms in our Parliament, and as the complexity of the political situation there quite fascinates me, I took the chance to hear his views on the matter.

I gather that he is also some sort of cricketing personality as well – which possibly explained why the room was packed, and rather more people than usual were taking photos of the person giving the talk.

I wont go too deeply into what he said, as he really just reiterated what anyone who follows the situation there would already be aware of. Of course, people who get all their international news from the likes of The Sun would have probably been astonished to learn that there really isn’t a Taliban insurgency going on in the North-West tribal areas, and that it is more a Pashtun nationalism that rather objects to foreigners interfering in their homelands.

The endemic corruption is probably quite well known about, and Mr Khan rather cunningly switched between small dollar numbers and much larger rupee numbers which make the financial situation sound worse than it is (which is pretty dire anyway).

I tend to disagree with his view that getting a clean government elected will start the process of sorting out the country’s mess, as the army is just too powerful and has vast economic interests that it wont give up at the say so of “mere” politicians.

I also laughed slightly at his talk of the country having a free press – which is correct so long as you consider periodically blocking YouTube/Facebook etc to be acceptable behaviour.

That said, his idealism is a refreshing change and it was interesting to hear him speak. However, one questioner was less impressed and said that another talk by the former Pakistani President, General Musharraf was much more interesting.

The biggest laugh of the talk though came from an old stereotypically ex-army sort who explained the difficulty he had in choosing which cricketing tie to wear – but then asked if Pakistan and India would ever be reunited again. Mr Khan skilfully dealt with that by pointing out that the popularity of cricket matches between the two countries rules that out as abolishing them would cause an uproar.

An uproar only slightly louder than the laughs in the room.

Thanks to the Henry Jackson Society for arranging the talk.

As politicians traipse into 10 Downing Street to learn what second jobs they will get in addition to being an MP, I decided to brag dig out this photo of the time I once also passed through those hallowed doors.

I was fortunate to have a guided tour of the main state rooms of the building on the first floor, although I didn’t get to see the ground floor Cabinet Room as it was in use at the time. Well, it is a working building after all!

The tour was quite facinating, and unlike most old houses (or Buckingham Palace), we were not held back from anything by ropes or stern admonitions not to touch things – it was a very hands (and bums) on tour, including sitting on some very expensive chairs in the pillared room as our genial guide regaled us with anecdotes about the building, and gossip about politicians who have worked there.

At the top of the famous staircase is a small waiting room with various notable exhibits, including a very small Union Flag that had been taken up to the moon on that first landing – and a bust of Winston Churchill with a rather polished head. There is a superstition that touching Winston’s head brings good luck, so, errm, why not. You never know!

Of course, now every time a TV show features the inside of 10 Downing Street, I can shout at the screen about the bits they get wrong!

In fact, I am not sure why a TV studio hasn’t built an accurate mock-up of the interior of the building, considering how often it features on Dr Who nowadays. Must be cheaper than hiring a posh house each time.

Although tours are not really available to the general public, if you represent a “suitable organisation”, take a punt and  write to 10 Downing Street asking to be considered for a tour. If your letter gets to the right person and manages to tick the necessary requirements – I took several attempts, and still don’t know what tipped the balance – then a formal application has to be filled in. That in turn is considered by a Committee. After all that, if approved, there is a long waiting list and the group I represented waited about a year before we were allowed inside.

But it was worth the wait.

You may recall that just a few weeks ago I attended the formal reading of the Proclamation for the Dissolution of Parliament as it was read on the steps of the Royal Exchange in the City of London. Such a proclamation is not the only one read on that location though, as the announcement of a new Monarch (and by inference, the death of the previous) is also carried out here.

There is also another more sombre proclamation that can be read out on the steps of the Exchange – and that is declaring War on another country.

As far as I can tell, the last time such a proclamation was duly proclaimed from this location was on December 8th, 1941, when the UK declared War on Japan. Thanks to increasing multilateralism in international affairs, with most countries now tending to resort to UN sanctions or so-called peace keeping measures, the chances that another such proclamation of war will be issued by the UK is now, slight.

Legally, the UK didn’t declare war on Argentina during the Falklands War – and military actions in other countries were under the authority of the United Nations, or were dubious – such as Suez.

Although obviously it is good that the UK doesn’t declare war any more, I think it would be sort of exciting to attend a formal Proclamation of War being read out.

Can we invade someone? Please?

Below is a short excerpt from the Illustrated London News of April 1854, when war was declared between the British Empire and Russia – marking the formal beginnings of The Crimean War.

ROYAL EXCHANGE

The ceremony of Proclaiming War – of which, as enacted in olden times, we gave some account in our Journal of last week – was performed in the City on Friday last; although it must be acknowledged that the scene was unattended by any of those heraldic or other official accompaniments which invest the form with attraction.

About noon, Mr. Beddome, the mace-bearer, accompanied only by Mr. Hill, the gate-porter at the Mansion-house, proceeded from thence to the Royal Exchange, wearing their black robes of office, but without the mace or any other insignia. These officers were soon recognised, and followed to the steps in front of the Exchange, and were speedily surrounded by between 200 and 300 persons. The news spread in all directions, and a rush was made to the point of interest; but before many reached the spot, the brief ceremony was finished amidst loud cheers.