Corbyn’s come up with a popular policy. Nurse!

H ALLeLuJAH! At last, Labour’s come up with a winning policy. Jeremy Corbyn is promising to abolish car parking charges at hospitals.

Not before time, either. The exploitation of patients and those visiting sick relatives by greedy NHS bureaucrats and their scum- of-theearth, private sector, partners- inextortion is a national scandal.

For instance, one woman attending Lichfield hospital, in Staffordshire, for an X-ray was given a £70 ticket for staying just 13 seconds over her allotted time.

Then it was revealed that visitors to London’s Royal Free Hospital were being charged even before they reached the car park.

Their number plates were clocked on camera as they queued to get in.

As I wrote at the time, this sinister CCTV system is reminiscent of a maximum- security prison, not a hospital. often, once inside, there were no spaces available. Despite this, drivers were still charged for the time they spent looking for somewhere to park before leaving.

This was merely one of the more disgraceful practices employed in hospital car parks all over Britain.

NHS Trusts raked in a record £120 million in parking fees in the year ending 2016. But, on top of that, the private ‘enforcement’ firms they employ get to keep all the fines they impose — which gives them a clear incentive to resort to entrapment, exorbitant penalties and sleight of hand.

Sky- high charges and bank account- draining fines are designed cynically to take advantage of people when they are at their most vulnerable.

FUNNYhow all of those who scream loudest about why the NHS should remain ‘free at the point of use’ have never included parking. until now.

So one cheer for Corbyn’s latest initiative. The problem is that, in the unlikely event of Labour actually getting elected, there’ll soon be no need for any parking charges — because we’ll all have been forced to give up driving.

official policy, right across the political spectrum, is to cause as much aggravation as possible to motorists. Most traffic jams are manufactured deliberately.

Labour councils are by far the worst, narrowing main roads, installing a vast network of deserted cycle lanes, putting in extra traffic lights every 50 yards — which only change long enough to let a couple of cars through at a time — and giving priority to armadas of empty buses, which nobody actually uses because it’s quicker to walk these days.

The Tories are just as bad, in most cases, with their enthusiasm for ludicrous one-way systems, traffic humps and blanket 20mph zones — even on major arteries.

Take Conservative- controlled Kingston Council, in South-West London, which has collected a staggering £2.6 million in fines from motorists using a quiet suburban crescent.

In a revenue- raising scam, disguised as a ‘safety’ measure, the council designated part of the street as only open to cyclists, taxis and buses.

It then came up with a byzantine registration system for local residents, granting limited access based on where they lived. How bonkers is that? No wonder people are baffled.

Whether by accident or design (what do you think?) they failed to put up adequate signs to warn drivers of the new arrangements.

As a result, more than 40,000 tickets — at up to £130 a pop — have been issued in the past six months alone. Ker-ching!

It’s worth remembering that the past two Conservative manifestos promised to end the ‘ war on motorists’. When Spreadsheet Phil was Transport Secretary, he floated raising the motorway speed limit to 80mph.

NoW,one of his Cabinet colleagues, Andrea Wossname, says she is considering lowering it to 60mph. She has caved in to the polar-bear huggers, who claim lower limits will cut pollution — despite the obvious contradiction that car journeys would take much longer, thereby pumping out even more emissions. These are the same imbeciles who were urging us all to buy diesels a few years ago.

What chance have we got when even Tory ministers are in thrall to the single-issue, car-hating lunatics from the green lobby and the selfrighteous Lycra louts demanding that our city centres are turned into velodromes? So don’t expect the new Conservative manifesto to promise any let-up in the war on motorists. The politicians won’t be happy until we’re all forced out of our cars and pedalling round on pushbikes like the Communist Chinese before they embraced economic progress.

If they really wanted a votewinner, they would not only nick Labour’s promise to scrap hospital parking charges, they should go a step further.

Why not introduce valet parking at all NHS hospitals? They could train up thousands of youngsters and charge, say, a couple of quid a time, gratuity not included.

Patients and visitors alike would be saved the hassle of crawling round looking for a parking space and the proceeds could be split between the valets and the NHS Trusts.

There would be no time limit and your car would be brought back to the front door when you were ready to leave. As an added bonus, the rapacious private enforcement spivs would be put out of business. What’s not to like?

I’d vote for that.