A short section of car-sick, footway-cluttered, cycling-hostile Forest Road E17. An area in need of regeneration (which is what happens to corpses in horror films). Yesterday.
I notice that as part of its characteristic New Labour authoritarian control freakery, the Council is now restricting campaigners' stalls in the Town Square to two. That’s new. And that’s one in the eye for the Socialist Party, who normally have three or four stalls. This is all part of a crude attempt to suppress local campaign groups from making their pitch on a Saturday. It’s typical of the modern Labour Party that it wants to control political and religious campaigning, bureaucratise it and make people pay to do it. Why should Waltham Forest Cycling Campaign have to pay £60 for the privilege of giving away free copies of TfL cycle maps and displaying a few copies of London Cyclist magazine on a small table?
The Council claims to be motivated by a passionate concern for public safety, which is a sick joke coming from the likes of Councillor Chris Robbins and his cronies, who have never shown the slightest desire to protect the lawful rights of people with a mobility handicap by using the Council's powers to clear local pavements of the literally hundreds of illegal displays by local shopkeepers.
(a) The Council has the power "to require the removal of anything deposited on a highway so as to constitute a nuisance" (Highways Act, 1980, Section 149).
(b) The Council has the power "to require that free passage along the highway is not wilfully obstructed in any way (Highways Act, 1980, Section 137).
