Copy of an email to Greenwich Council Tax Department

Dear council tax department,

I am writing to you whilst beside myself with rage at the council's complete ineptitude and malevolent collection practices for wrongly taking me to court in my absence and wrongly issuing a county court judgment against me for money that I don't actually owe.

I refer to summons number 1*****4 which you had informed me was cancelled. I will outline here the history of this case and the steps that the council is going to take to rectify it.

Case history

1. I had a summons from you because when I swapped bank accounts you didn't transfer over my direct debit when my bank sent you the details
   
2. As soon as I received it, I called you. I paid the overdue amount and updated the direct debit details. The payment reference for this is CEP0******4 - I paid it on 5th November at 10:39am
3. I was informed that the £95 costs would not be charged and that the remaining payments would go out on my amended direct debit with the first payment happening at the start of November
4. I was also told that the court summons would be cancelled with immediate effect and that I needed to take no further action
5. I requested written confirmation that the council had cancelled the summons, but was told that the council doesn't do that (and that it was unnecessary in any case)
6. I have just received a Council Tax Liability Order Notification and Bailiff Warning Notice instructing me that on 19th November the court sat anyway and decided that the balance of £404 (i.e. the remaining payments and the non-refunded £95) must be paid within 14 days or Bailiffs would call to recover the debt.

This is absolutely disgusting - due to the council's processes not working I now have a County Court Judgment against me and the threat of Bailiffs. The council has also demanded details of my employer so that it can deduct my 'debt' at source. I will give it no such information.

Here is the action that I demand that the council takes to sort this ridiculous mess out:

1. Remove the county court judgment straight away.
2. Cancel the order for Bailiffs with immediate effect.
3. Refund the £95 'court costs' to my council tax account
   
4. Write to me confirming that steps 1-3 have been taken.
5. Collect the outstanding funds from the direct debit that I have set up. That really is a much more straightforward way of collecting council tax for the council and for me. By using this method, the council get its money quickly and cheaply and I do not get my credit record wrecked by unnecessary and invalid CCJs.

I will be calling the department at 10am tomorrow morning to confirm that someone has received this email. I will call again at 4pm for an update on progress against my case. If there has not been satisfactory resolution then you can expect a personal visit on Thursday.

Yours disgustedly,

Major Gripe

cc:

• Kate Myronidis, PA to Nick Raynsford MP
  
• Greenwich Watch: http://greenwichwatch.blogspot.com
  
• Bee In His Bonnet: http://beeinhisbonnet.blogspot.com
  
• Little Man, What Now?: http://littlemanwhatnow.com
  

A plague on Gripe Hall

Well, a terrible curse has befallen the Gripe household. Dear readers, you will be dismayed to learn that your Major has been officially diagnosed with...

...man flu.

It may well be terminal, because all I can do is lie about and groan and whine and snivel.

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

Put up your crutches

Hello again everybody. Did you miss me?

I was going to write about so many things this week: first, our government manages to lose all of that data and Alastair Darling still somehow keeps his job. Then I got a letter from Tower Hamlets council rejecting my appeal against a parking ticket and have decided to take the lousy shits to tribunal. Then, Steve McClaren refuses to resign after making his job untenable.

To top it all off, there was going to be something today to follow on from a news item on TV this morning about some people who bought houses on a cliff-top. The cliff is subsiding and their houses are falling into the sea 30 years early, so they want the government to pay to rehouse them. No, no, no, no, no. They had plenty of warnings about this, the first of which came two thousand years ago when Jesus warned of the dangers of building your house on anything but rock. Why can't people pay more attention to the clever things that Jesus said about construction, catering or taxation?

Then, everything changed. Another topic presented itself for your amusement this morning. I got started on, again, in London Bridge station this time. By a disabled man.

I was travelling with Mrs Gripe who he walked behind and trod on. He then shouted at Mrs Gripe that she might like to look where she was going, except he used more floral language than that. I stared at him, and he started to protest. I told him to watch his mouth and he reminded me that he was disabled (he was walking with a crutch). "That doesn't give you the right to shout insults at my wife", I replied. To which he suggested that he would fetch the police. As usual, I suggested that he was welcome to do so, and turned away to say goodbye to Mrs Gripe (for our onward journeys lay apart from then). It was at that point that he issued his coup de grace. "Come back here and fight me, you coward", he shouted - in a scene somewhat reminiscent of the anonymous knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

So there you have it - another anecdote for the Gripe Annual. You can rest assured that whatever is happening in world events, your Major will continue almost getting into ill-advised fights and reporting back to you about it. Have a happy and passive weekend everyone.

A right dilemma

Something of a teaser presents itself tonight for the racist thugs among England football fans. England's qualification for Euro 2008 is out of our hands: not only do we have to beat Croatia on Wednesday, we also have to hope that Israel beats Russia tonight.

The question is this: will those fans who are also members of the far right and would normally rail against Israel stick to their guns tonight, or will they swallow their convictions and cheer them on? And if so, I wonder how they will feel about it in the morning. The sight of all those skinhead thugs sobbing into their Union Jack pillows is almost too delicious...

Gripe and away

While Mrs Gripe and I share a few days away I thought I would share with you a little theory I have held for a time about how that nice Mr Cameron became leader of the Conservative party and in particular the role of Michael Howard’s leadership of the party in this process. I warn you, we have an essay on our hands.

Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane to reminisce over recent Tory leaders. When it became clear that Iain Duncan Smith was in the penultimate week of his leadership, there was a lot of speculation about who would take over. Oliver Letwin was considered to be the most promising candidate by many, Ken Clarke could never be ruled out, and there were a number of others. One person who was definitely not talking about running was Michael Howard.

At this time, the party was still in turmoil. William Hague as leader had done ok with a job that wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Iain “quiet man” Duncan “quiet man” Smith (sorry, I don’t know where to put that in his silly sequence of names) had managed to plummet it down from a party that no-one liked into being a laughing stock. It still had to sort itself out to have a chance of returning to power at all (let alone making good on its claim to be the ‘natural party of government’). That meant leading with a vision that could unite the party (instead of being divided around key questions such as Europe) and present the public with an alternative.

All the while, Tony Blair was getting off lightly. As Andrew Marvell, the great poet and politician of the 17th century, said: the same arts that did gain a power must it maintain. Getting into power through spin and through fudging compromise with the old left meant continuing those bad habits while in office. No-one in the Tory party was lampooning his fabled ‘third way’ for being Tory-style market-centric policies implemented through old socialist methods. No-one pointed out the flaws in the approach of centralising, controlling, setting targets, taxing, spending, pandering to unions and taking people away from what they do best to put them on paperwork duty. No-one was pointing out that in order to negotiate with business over financing schools and hospitals it was crucial first to have business experience – something that many Tory ministers and few Labour ministers actually have. In other words, the great cracks in the foundations of Tony Blair’s approach were being left to grow rather than the whole edifice being condemned. The Tory party was navel-gazing while Tony Blair was left to find an opposition from within his own party.

The Conservative party needed a leader who was capable of the crucial three things: creating a vision that would inspire the public, leading the party with that vision and proactively destabilising Tony Blair rather than reactively chipping away at him. The trouble was that the grass-roots party was not going to give it such a leader: the best that they could hope to be given by the blue-rinse brigade was a leader who could lead with a vision and destabilize Tony Blair but whose vision would be offensive to the majority of the public who were neither xenophobic enough nor Europhobic enough to be inspired by it.

With this in mind, let’s return to the times in question. Once it was clear that IDS would be getting more time to spend in quiet reflection, the speculation started to mount about who would come forward (as discussed above). When he was finally ousted, not a word came from the parliamentary party. Then, within a short period, all of the expected candidates (apart from Ken Clarke) came out and backed Michael Howard. Howard appeared shocked and humbly declared that he’d better lead the party after all then. Then he set about (mildly) duffing Blair up in parliament before fighting (and losing) the 2005 election on old Tory values. After the defeat, he announced that he would step down but only after he had succeeded in changing the way in which the party elected its leaders. Once he did this, the party had an open leadership election and returned the freshest-seeming candidate – that nice Mr Cameron.

I am not a conspiracy theorist and do not, as a rule, like coming up with theories such as this. But it is not an outlandish leap of logic to conclude from all of this that the parliamentary party got together and decided that if it was ever to regain power it would need to put someone in to prove to the party that it had to change, and then change how leaders were elected so that the most credible candidate, rather than the most right wing one, got returned. Only one of the old guard of Tories could possibly convince the party faithful that change was necessary. In this theory, Michael Howard would have done a rather noble thing in deliberately losing an election with a campaign based on old Tory values in order to give the party a fresher leader who could renew its voice.

If my theory is correct then that is what he did – if so then that nice Mr Cameron owes him a great debt of gratitude because he could never have been elected (and now inflicting Grievous Political Harm on Brown’s government) without him.

Clarifications

Following the recent posts, I have had a lot of questions. Many of them have focused on the same subject area, suggesting that a few clarifications are in order:

1. I don't always get into fights
2. I don't actually like fights
3. The fact that I have been posting less frequently recently is a function of how busy I have been rather than a sign that all I have been doing is fighting
4. If I had been fighting, I would have told you all about it
5. Yes, the people who pay me to be in an office during the day from Monday to Friday have been putting more demands on me so I have had less time to write
6. No, I am not bored of doing this - I hope that you are not bored of me doing this either
7. No, the reduced frequency of posts has not been because I am reluctant to follow readers' advice and inhale more live insects for your amusement.
8. Yes, I am reluctant to do that but no it is not the root cause.

I hope that helps. If you too have a bee in your bonnet and would like the opportunity to rant about things occasionally then please let me know by emailing majorgripeNO@SPAMgooglemail.com (removing the capital letters obviously) and we can chat about making you an author.

On the game

I promised a match report and here it is. I also need to give you an incident report - you will see from recent posts that I clearly have one of those faces that enrages people and makes them want to attack it and the person that it belongs to. Just such a thing came close to happening (again) at the match.

What a game for the neutral - cup tie, 7 goals, the lead changing 4 times, almost a giant-killing. Proof again from Leicester that if you get right in the face of big teams like Chelsea and then score the first goal then the sky's the limit. The only disappointment was that Leicester put 10 men behind the ball to try to defend their 1-0 lead, which was a massive waste of the opportunity. At a time when their plan started working and they could have sent an even bigger statement to Chelsea, what they did instead was say to them we've scored, we've probably been lucky and we're going to try to hold on to that. It just handed Chelsea back the psychological advantage that Leicester had worked so hard to win. It was great that they came out so positively in the second half though.

I was in a box at the game, and as always in a cup match (and as a neutral) I was rooting for the little guys. When they scored, I and a number of others in our box stood up and cheered. The man behind me grabbed my jumper and tried to pull me back into my seat. I turned around and he was trying to stare me out, so I obliged and then when he threatened to have me chucked out I suggested to him that he might like to have a laugh and enjoy the game. There were a number of other people cheering for Leicester and the guy got really upset at them all. The stewards started to get involved to try to calm him down, and then some other Chelsea fans from behind him tried to get him to calm down. My neighbour and I did our best not to laugh out loud when he turned to the man next to him and said in a wounded voice "what really hurts is I've got me own fans turning on me now". Yeah, nice one. Don't let that be a signal to you that maybe you're being a total twat or anything.

Anyway, at the end of the game he wanted to shake my hand so I obliged. He grabbed my hand and pulled me close and started to lecture me that it was 'culturally unacceptable' to cheer for the opposing team in the Chelsea end. He wasn't convinced by (or made happy by) my risposte that it was fairly culturally unacceptable to grab people's jumpers and pull them down - so dissatisfied was he, in fact, that he started to suggest that we make something of it. That was the point at which the stewards got involved in trying to calm him down and I made my way out.

So, 7 goals and one home fan made angry. All in all, a successful night at Stamford Bridge