Whose skate park is it anyway?

AS ProMISED, here is another of those crazy stories that didn’t make the cut on Tuesday. There wasn’t enough room on this page to do them all justice.

This one in particular deserves not just a wider audience but closer examination.

retired bank worker craig Hunt, from Studley, in Warwickshire, answered his front door to find a police officer standing there. He assumed it was in connection with a break-in at his 94-year-old mother’s home. She’s blind and this was the second time her house had been burgled.

He assumed wrong. The copper was on a far more pressing mission — handing craig a £277.50 bill from the local parish council for damage he was alleged to have caused to public property.

Mr Hunt’s ‘crime’ was to paint over some obscene graffiti at a nearby skate park, without the council’s permission. The graffiti, complete with some rather revolting drawings, had been there for three weeks.

The council hadn’t bothered to remove it, so Mr Hunt decided to do it himself.

only then did the powers-that-be decide to swing into action, not against the vandals who had put it there in the first place but against the Good Samaritan who had taken it upon himself to remove it.

Mr Hunt, 57, said: ‘I was gobsmacked. It’s totally illogical. The graffiti was disgusting, certainly not something you’d want children to see. I’ve done the parish council a favour and they’ve sent me a bill for it.’

Apparently, their main objection was that he’d used the ‘wrong’ kind of paint, bog-standard black emulsion. ‘They said I didn’t use anti-slip paint. But the surface of the skate park is smooth.’

CouncIllor Paul Beaman said: ‘The parish clerk is under strict instructions that if we have any damage to council property then it goes straight to the police and it’s up to the police how they deal with it.

‘If craig had telephoned the clerk, told her what he wanted to do, we would have said fine, go ahead, and made sure he had the correct paint. But no call was made. All decisions have to be approved by the full council.’

rules is rules: the self-important bleat of the Great British Jobsworth down the ages.

This might, on the face of it, Here’s some real ‘fake news’. According to a widely-reported new survey, 360,000 cats in Britain were stolen last year. No, they weren’t. You won’t be surprised to learn this drivel came from a company trying to sell pet insurance. You couldn’t make it up. seem a fairly petty incident. But it goes to the heart of the relationship between the authorities and the people they are supposed to serve. If the parish council had been doing their job properly, the offensive graffiti would have been covered up the moment it was spotted. All it would have taken was a bloke in a pair of overalls and a pot of paint.

Instead, they chose to let it stay on display for three whole weeks, an affront to public decency.

Goodness knows how long it would have remained there if craig Hunt — a civic-minded chap, who volunteers for Studley In Bloom and the local nature reserve — hadn’t decided to take the matter into his own hands.

He sounds like Studley’s answer to the ever-vigilant Martin Bryce, the pillar of the neighbourhood Watch and every society going, played by richard Briers in that wonderful British suburban comedy, Ever Decreasing circles.

Yet instead of thanking craig for performing a valuable service to the community, the council chose instead to punish him. They accused of damaging public property and called the police.

Here’s where the whole saga moves up a gear. Why didn’t the police tell the parish clerk to stop being so stupid? Why was a police officer sent to deliver a bill on behalf of the council?

And what was the copper supposed to do if Mr Hunt refused to accept it — charge him with criminal damage and take him away in handcuffs? It’s not as if the cops haven’t got anything better to do — for instance, catch whoever has burgled the home of Mr Hunt’s blind, 94-year-old mum, not once but twice.

of course, this isn’t about nonslip paint, or whether or not craig had permission to cover up the graffiti. It’s about showing us who’s boss — yet another illustration of one of this column’s constant themes: if you give anyone any modicum of authority, they will always, always abuse it.

Anyway, why should craig Hunt have needed permission? Whose skate park is it anyway?

THE parish council consider it ‘council property’. But surely it belongs to the local community, the people who pay their council tax. councillors are elected to look after the interests of those who put them into office.

They are merely custodians, there on trust with the public’s permission to act on our behalf — not the other way round.

When the council neglected to perform their public duty, then craig Hunt was entirely within his rights to do it himself.

Sadly, the moment anyone gets appointed or elected to any position of power — even as low down the food chain as a parish councillor — they immediately consider themselves to be our masters, not our servants, and eventually disappear up their own fundaments.

Which is how a minor incident like this escalates out of all proportion and ends up with a decent citizen getting a knock on the door from the police and being handed a large bill for his trouble.

Ever decreasing circles, indeed.