Ordinary policemen
Sir: As a serving police officer, may I comment on your editorial `Tickety Boo' (13 September)? The new fixed penalty procedure is hardly an 'increased power' in the sense in which the reader is likely to take it — it is merely a new way of exercising numerous old powers to do with motoring offences. When a motorist is disposed to dispute the matter, all he need do is say so, and whatever it is will go before the magistrates in the old way.
The contrast drawn between parking fines and other motoring offences is false — in the past a motorist would be reported for summons 'in the heat of the moment', in person, for one of these offences, which is hardly different from being given a fixed penalty ticket, as he will be in future.
These details of the new scheme are perhaps a little dry and petty, but the national daily newspapers seem to have found out about them without difficulty.
I hope the editor will forgive me if I detect in this editorial comment something of the Spectator's patrician disregard for the jobs and lives of ordinary people, like policemen, which cannot fail to faintly irritate me at least. Surely most of the Spectator's large new readership must be ordinary plebeians like me?
David Nicholson
134 South Farm Road, Worthing, Sussex
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