Freesteel Blog

I just had a petition to the UK Parliament rejected on 20 June that I submitted on the 23 of May.

Now you could say that it was delayed because they were busy, but I went back through the list of rejected petitions, and found that they had turned down 320 other petitions in the meantime.

This tells you that they had a hard time finding a problem with it, and in the end just made something up.

Here is the text of the petition:

Legalise party political placards on street furniture during an election

The laws in the UK against fly-posting are so restrictive that, unlike in most other countries, elections are totally invisible to people on the street. Yet during the Christmas season the councils find time to put up decorations on every lamp-post to remind us that we need to keep shopping.
More details

In most countries (throughout Europe and especially Ireland) you can really tell when an election is on because the lamp-posts, bridges and traffic railings are festooned with coloured placards and banners, often with photos of the smiling candidates.

I used to be against it, but now I can really see the point in letting people feel there is something is happening. We have gone way too far in banning these notices. Trials should be run in selected parts of the country at the next election.

And the rejection notice:

Why was this petition rejected?

It’s about something that the UK Government or Parliament is not responsible for.

We can’t accept your petition because this would be a decision for local councils and not the UK Government or Parliament.

The law doesn’t explicitly prevent political advertising in this way. It does allow local authorities to remove any “picture, letter, sign or other mark painted, ascribed or affixed on the surface of the highway, or any structure or works on or in the highway.” It is up to local authorities how they use that power.

Obviously they are wrong, because Parliament makes the laws that tell local authorities what they can and can’t do, or indeed what the heck these institutions are.

If they’re claims were right, I would not be able to find in Section 5 of The Planning (Control of Advertisements) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2015:

The Deemed consent for the display of advertisements

… deemed consent is hereby granted for the display of an advertisement falling within any class specified in Part 1 of Schedule 3, subject… to the standard conditions, except that paragraph 4 of Schedule 1 does not apply in the case of any Class 13 advertisement.

What’s that mean?

The way to read UK legislation is to know it for the tangled mess that it is. There ought to be an inquiry into why it gets so bad.

Schedule 3, Part 1, Classes of advertisements which may be displayed with deemed consent says:

CLASS 13 – Advertisements relating to an election

Description: An advertisement relating specifically to a pending Parliamentary, European Parliamentary, Northern Ireland Assembly or district council election.
Conditions: The advertisement is removed within 14 days after the close of the poll in the election to which it relates.

And then Schedule 1, Standard contions says:

Paragraph 4 No advertisement may be displayed without the permission of the owner of the site or any other person with an interest in the site entitled to grant permission.

To me, that looks like election posters can be put up without the persmission of the property owner. For “property owner”, you should think of local government property (eg lamp posts), not someone’s leafy garden lawn.

Sometimes posters do get cut down, but according to the reporting it’s seen as wrong because election posters are an important part of the democratic process.

The same is true in southern Ireland, where everyone knows election posters are important and simply considers them a necessary evil.

The law passed by the Irish Parliament is in Section 19 of the the Litter Pollution Act 1997:

A prosecution shall not be brought in a case in which an offence under this section is alleged to have been committed in relation to an advertisement if… [it] relates to a presidential election, a general election or a bye-election, a referendum, or an election of representatives to the Assembly of the European Communities, unless the advertisement has been in position for 7 days or longer after the day specified in the advertisement for the meeting or the latest day upon which the poll was taken for the election, bye-election or referendum concerned.

There’s also an Election Posters FAQ.

I’ve not looked up the Statute Law on the Isle of Man, but the Department of Infrastructure does “recognise that the campaign process for elect/on candidates may include the siting of posters and banners, and will allow for these providing they do not adversely affect the safety of the Island’s residents and visitors and those putting up the election material.[link]

Oh, but it’s different in the United Kingdom, you say — even though the first regulation I quoted there was laid before the UK Parliament and applied to Northern Ireland (which is still part of the UK at the moment).

Let’s look at that Regulation in more detail. According to its explanatory memorandum:

Parity or Replicatory Measure

Equivalent Regulations have been made in England [Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007], Wales [Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) Regulations 1992] and Scotland [Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (Scotland) Regulations 1992]

So, Regulation 6 of Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007 says:

Deemed consent for the display of advertisements

… consent is granted for the display of an advertisement of any class specified in Part 1 of Schedule 3, subject to

(a) the standard conditions; and
(b) in the case of any class other than Class 12, the conditions and limitations specified in that Part in relation to that class.

So far so good.

Hit me with Class 12 from Schedule 3, Classes of advertisement for which deemed consent is granted:

Class 12 Advertisements inside buildings

Description:

12. An advertisement displayed inside a building, other than an advertisement falling within Class I in Schedule 1.

Humph.

There are no special cases for election posters listed anywhere here, or in any of the other versions of this legislation in the rest of the UK.

So, what are the consequences?

Posters on the street are the best thing for telling people of an event. Individual fliers delivered to houses take to much time, get thrown away and do not work. Online engagement is expensive and difficult and can only be undertaken successfully by experts.

There is nothing better for telling people that there is an event on or an election ballot within walking distance of their house than a sign on a lamp-post that they will walk past twenty times in a week.

I think people have to start putting up simple plain posters that there is an election on a particular date coming up at crossings and road junctions that do not state a party or candidate, but just reminds people of the date. As I said in the petition, it’s an important event, like Christmas. And just as the Council puts up gross plastic Santas that remind us to buy crap, but don’t say from which shop, they ought to have an equivalent set of decoration on every lamp-post to remind us to go vote, if they’re not going to let parties put up their own.

Update

Anti-politician posters seen in Belfast this March:

Probably quite illegal as they didn’t say what [real] party they were from.

Someone who works on the railways told me that his Union, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) was one of the big unions in the UK that supported Brexit.

I wanted the check why, having recalled doing some research about railway policy and the EU (reported in a blog entry from May 2016) following some crappy speech from Boris Johnson about the nasty EU using an ECJ ruling to run their freight trains on our national tracks in preference to our patriotic privatized passenger trains.

The problem is that if a factory in Hungary wants to send 5000 tonnes of cheap sausage meat to the UK, they can put this into 200 lorries and drive them all the way to their destination on our roads, causing lots of pollution, and traffic jams getting in the way, and Boris doesn’t complain. But lord help us that they might possibly put this load onto a more efficient train and expect it to get through to its destination unspoilt.

You’d think that railway unions would be in favour of legally binding international agreements to increase the guarenteed capacity of the railway. But it turns out that Brexit stupidity is not all on the Conservative Party side.

In a Press release on 21 April 2016 the RMT wrote:

The European Parliament’s decision this week to back the opening up of all rail routes across the EU to more competition for private operators was just one more reason to vote Leave on June 23, transport union RMT said today.

Under the proposals in the EU’s so-called Fourth Railway Package, train operators would have complete access to the networks of member states to operate domestic passenger services.

The European Council had already agreed that mandatory competitive tendering should be the main way of awarding public service contracts.

RMT general secretary Mick Cash said that the failed Tory privatisation of rail over twenty years ago using EU directive 91/440 was now being imposed on 500 million people by EU diktat without a mandate.

“This rail package is designed to privatise railways across Europe and its proposals are remarkably similar to the McNulty report on the future of GB railways, imposing further fragmentation and attacks on workers.

“McNulty, the Tory government and the EU share the business-led mania for privatisation and agree on the need to jack up fares and attack jobs, pay and pensions to pay for it, no-one has voted for that.

“It is impossible to make changes to this privatisation juggernaut inside the undemocratic EU so the only solution is to get out by voting Leave on June 23,” he said.

None of this makes sense.

How can we believe that the EU — every other country of which runs a nationalized rail service — is going to impose privatization on the UK whose railways are already privatized?

Also, I do recall that we had a Labour Government for thirteen years post-privatization, who carried on with the private railways policy at vast expense of money and political capital, only nationalizing the trackways themselves after a series of lethal accidents and a bankruptcy when it had no alternative. Now there were serious issues as to the democracy within the Labour Party during that time, which resulted in the RMT breaking from the party in 2004. This history needs to be remembered, because it indicates that the EU is not the source of our problems.

Later that year, after the referendum, the RMT wrote in November 2016:

MEPs have a critical vote on the future of our railways taking place on 12-15 December 2016. Privatisation of rail passenger services could be imposed on all member states if new EU regulations are passed into legislation. Even though the UK is leaving the EU, regulations in the Fourth Railway Package could still apply to the UK for years to come…

The Fourth Railway Package must be stopped. Please email your MEP before 12 December to let them know that you want them to vote against the Fourth Railway Package.

Oh yeah, what was that bit about the undemocratic EU?

It’s so bad and incoherent.

A fact checking organization looked at the case in June 2016, three days before the referendum, and concluded:

The pending changes to EU rail regulation, known as the fourth railway package, don’t require member states to privatise any aspect of their rail networks. Neither do they require any member to break up its national operator.

There was an initial proposal for rail infrastructure and services to be split into separate organisations, which would have meant breaking up national operators, but the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, directly intervened and it was dropped…

The new EU regulations promote competition for the market between rail operators irrespective of ownership structure, but not privatisation. As far as renationalisation is concerned the reality is that, unless the rules are interpreted in an extreme way, they do not make it any easier or more difficult than the structure in place at the moment.

The RMT did support a No2EU party that ran in the 2009 and 2014 EU elections garnering about 0.3% of the vote in the second poll, so was quite a waste of time.

What we’re seeing is an unreasoned, illogical, incoherent, counterproductive hatred of the EU from a large union who has a lot of sway with the current Labour Party. I can’t see where it comes from, because from the point of view of railways and transport, the EU and its structures are beneficial. They bring in a semblance of order, integration, interoperability, purpose and reliability that is essential for any transport infrastructure to serve society’s needs.