How miraculous. Britain is full of people with devastating afflictions, with millions apparently unable to walk a few yards from the nearest car park. And yet these mysterious disabling conditions rarely seem to affect people’s ability to drive a car. Put them behind the wheel and they are transformed as if the Messiah had just waved His hand and raised them from the ground. They can manage just like the rest of us.
The alternative interpretation to the news that 3.07 million Britons are now in possession of a blue badge – around 5.2 per cent of the population and an increase of 8 per cent over the past year alone – is that this is yet one more facility which has become a symbol for Britain’s booming shyster culture. Could it possibly be that a good number of these badges have been obtained by people who are suffering from little more than laziness or an aversion to paying the shocking parking fees which apply in many town centres?
Before I get mobbed by disability charities, obviously there are many people who are genuinely disabled and have a legitimate need for these badges. Moreover, not all holders of blue badges do actually drive: they are available for people who will be driven around by carers or other family members. But three million adults requiring the ability to park just about anywhere? A near doubling in the number of Blue Badges held over the past three decades? Sorry, that doesn’t wash. Rather it reeks of fraud, conducted on an industrial scale by people with little in the way of scruples.
Why, by the way, are Blue Badges handed out in the north-east at nearly twice the rate as in London: to 6.1 per cent of the population compared with 3.5 per cent? Are there really more disabled people up there, or just a more developed culture of claiming whatever you can get away with?
Like the Motability scheme and Personal Independence Payment, the Blue Badge scheme has become a part of a scam. Badges are doled out with impunity – 42 per cent of them are handed out simply on the strength of the application form, without further assessment. The shysters get away with it because the system is overseen by politicians and officials who simply cannot bring themselves ever to question anything where disability is concerned. They see no political gain, only risk, in challenging the numbers of people claiming disability benefits. Speak out and they fear being accused of kicking away the crutches of the poor and weak, so instead they meekly turn a blind eye to anyone who is playing the system – while trying to score political points against anyone who does try to point out what is going on.
But of course, the fraudulent claiming of a Blue Badge is not a victimless crime. Those who lose are people who are genuinely in need of a disabled parking bay but who can’t find one because they have filled up with cars parked there by the able-bodied. Take the explosion in Blue Badges to its natural conclusion and eventually we will all have one, at which point parking will return to being the free-for-all it was before we had parking meters and parking wardens. In one sense maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing: give everyone a Blue Badge and cowboy parking firms would be out of business. But of course then the genuinely disabled would have no advantage over anyone else. Best that the Blue Badge scam is contained before we get to that point.
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