Cabbie

Good morning everyone, today we are going to talk about . . . mini cabs.

Please! Do wake up at the back this IS important.

There have been 104 sexual assaults last year according to Transport for London’s figures for September 2008 down 44 per cent since 2002, mostly by unlicensed mini cab drivers. The 80,000 private hire operators as we are supposed to call them now, are vetted but there are a growing number of bogus drivers. They buy second hand cars at auction, complete with Public Carriage Office certification affixed to the cars’  windscreens, these vehicles usually fetch a higher price at these auctions and because the PCO certificate has a theft proof device it’s easier just to buy the whole car.

By hanging around in the West End, apparently with immunity from prosecution for touting or parking violations, this low life inveigle young people into their cars, they often charge exorbitant rates, and some even carry weapons to enforce their high charges. While even legal mini cabs park for long periods on double yellow lines outside their offices, apparently with complete immunity from prosecution.

And did you know anyone can register  their vehicle as a “private hire vehicle”? There is even a new Rolls Royce with the appropriate documentation on its windows possibly registered just to avoid the congestion charge.

The criteria to become a mini cab driver is very flexible they only need a medical form signed by their doctor, a criminal record bureau disclosure check, photocopies of their DVLA/EU driving licence and documentation to show a right to work and live here while some documents can be provided as photostats, easily forged and they do not even have to show a command of Queen’s English.

And have you noticed the speed of the people carriers used as private hire? They are usually working for a large transport company, their pay is very low, and they have to work very long hours and every job counts.

The solution is very simple: enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.

More officers, at present there are plans to double the number of Enforcement Officers which at present amount to only 34 to cover the whole of London 24 hours a day.

Arresting touts and illegal “cabs”, there have been only 4,000 arrests since 2003.

If they are convicted, jail them. If they are illegal immigrants deport them.
 
I really do sound like your average cabbie now!

You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?

 

So said Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver brilliantly played by Robert De Niro (arguably the greatest movie actor of his generation). But maybe we should look at another genre of film.

 

Have you nothing to do on a wet Sunday afternoon? May I commend to you any Fred Astaire’s 1930 black and white movie? There on screen men are actually treating people with civility. Opening doors for women, allowing ladies to sit-down first and rising when a lady comes into the room. And wait for it - saying please and thank you.

 

As a sometime working cabbie I’m amazed at the number of people who can’t even stop talking on their mobile phone to give me their destination. They will then hold out their hand without even looking at you for their change, usually while still talking crap into their mobiles.

 

While on the roads the habitual use of the car horn makes London sound like downtown Cairo, and if you don’t pull away from the lights at amber some idiot behind will remind you that you are impeding his progress.

 

While some drivers think it is a badge of courage to block my cab from proceeding through a road junction when they are stuck in traffic at an  intersection.

 

When you go to that temple of consumerism, Lakeside, have you noticed families, dressed in the regulation strip of their football team, will walk four abreast forcing you to move out of the way of their fat arses?

 

It gets no better in garages, while waiting in a queue, some idiot who cannot wait in line with the rest of you, will walk to the front and drop his (and it’s always his) money on the counter very un-English.

 

If I have the temerity to take a route in my cab not to my passengers’ liking I will get a rude rant of how I am “trying to rip them off by going the long way round”.

 

This is the dictionary’s definition of rudeness (also called impudence or effrontery):

“The disrespect and failure to behave within the context of a society or a group of people’s social laws or etiquette. These laws have already unspokenly been established as the essential boundaries of normally accepted behaviour. To be unable or unwilling to align one’s behaviour with these laws known to the general population of what is socially acceptable would be considered being rude.”

 

No it’s not; it is just being an oaf!!

 

Well this cabbie is trying to raise the bar for politeness, when asked rudely by someone:

 

“Do you know where Trafalgar Square is?”

I will reply in my most mannered way

“Yes I do, thank you very much” and drive off.

Shaggy Dog Story

“Sorry Squire, I’m not going South of The River”.

I can now say that with impunity after a recent judgment by magistrates in Bolton. Last week they cleared taxi firm boss Mustak Bhuta, accused of discrimination against blind woman, Toni Forest. The court heard that Miss Forest accompanied by her guide dog, was told that the cab firm were not taking her because of hairs from her dog.
 
But the court accepted the taxi bosses’ version that two of his drivers on duty had problems in the past, one of which was the dog being unhygienic in licking the gear stick.  The remaining available driver was scared of dogs.

So now I have a whole plethora of excuses for refusal; you’ll drop hairs, licking my gear stick (is that a euphuism?), and a phobia of South London.
Magic!!

Lost and Found

You would lose your head if was not screwed on”, so I was told when young. The same could be said about cabbies’ passengers. A recent survey by Credant Technologies has found that over the last six months, 55,843 mobile phones and 6,193 other devices including laptops were forgotten by London black cab passengers. Thankfully, about 80 per cent of surveyed taxi drivers claimed that owners were reunited with their missing item once found, but having your hand-held device in someone else’s hands still poses a huge security threat for the owner. These devices are usually not owned by the people using them; either they are supplied on contract or owned by their employer, so maybe that’s their excuse for not being so careful.

The same can’t be said for the high profile security breaches by losing data devices left in public areas, to be conveniently reported by the media. Am I being just a touch cynical when I think some of these lapses are helping to destroy the Government’s reassurance that they are safe with our personal data for ID cards?

Apart from the mountain of iPods, drivers have also found a sawn-off shotgun, 12 dead pheasants, two dogs, toilet seats, a casket of funeral ashes and £2,700 in cash in the back of their cabs. If all these were found on the same cab run, I wouldn’t be going south of the River again.

Leaving the Monopoly Board

Having shut Grosvenor Square to vehicular traffic for the best part of four months, while installing the most elaborate anti-terrorist devices this side of Iraq, the United States Embassy have now announced it’s moving to Wandsworth.

Did we pay for these elaborate rising bollards, traffic lights, anti car bomb devices, and if so will we get any compensation?

But at least the local residents won’t mourn the passing of the Americans; they cannot get anti terrorist insurance cover for their valuable art collections.

But it won’t look so romantic for the great unwashed to demonstrate in Wandsworth, home of the Arndale Shopping Centre.

All together now:
What Do We Want? America Out!
When Do We Want It? Now!

Just thought might like to look at this crappy logo again, it really sums up the London Games.

In case you haven’t noticed there is a little bit of building work going on in East London, apparently it’s the biggest project in Europe.

The London Olympics are going to cost £9.3 billion, that’s £9,300,000,000 to you and me, and we are going to pay for it, God knows how with Government borrowing nudging up to nearly 50 per cent of GDP.

It now seems that almost 2,000 chauffeured cars will be available for the 450 people in the top tiers of the “Olympic Family” none of them athletes. These people are staying in top hotels in the West End (all 5-star hotels are now fully booked for the Games). They are staying at these hotels apparently because their spouses like to shop while their husbands are pouncing around in East London, and they don’t want to travel far to get to Harrods.

So while wifee shops her husband is chauffeured across the whole of London holding us up as we try to work.

On busy stretches of the “Olympic Route Network” special traffic lanes will be reserved for their cars, while everybody will be jammed in what’s left of the carriageway.

But wait, those political geniuses who are planning this event have forecast traffic volumes will be substantially down as people will all take their annual holidays at this time.

They don’t live in the real world do they? Are they really saying all business will close in London for three weeks? Everybody will go on holiday or watch the games at home. Can you imagine telling owners of companies that they must close up shop for 3 weeks?

As for these 4 yearly demonstrations of jingoistic vanity, cannot we always hold them in Greece where they were born?

Each competing country could contribute a small sum so the venues were kept world class. Greece could certainly benefit from the income. And maybe, just maybe the 9.3bn could actually be spent on improving areas of severe deprivation, such as East London or the North West of England and not spent on massaging the egos of these vain men and women.

If these mendacious politicians really want to advertise London, they could start by keeping it as the tourists expect; Routemasters, black taxis without adverts, lack of skyscrapers ruining London’s skyline, curbing the illegal vendors on Westminster Bridge.

God I could go on and on . . . .

Did I get Gold for my rant?

For the last decade we have been regaled by the eco warriors that we are causing “Global Warming”, if we don’t change our ways man alone will change our planet forever . . . what arrogance, as if Man will change this planet forever!

Have you noticed after having a succession of average summers it is now being called Climate Change and not Global Warming?

July and August, are on average the warmest months of the year in most parts of the England, and these months do from time to time comprise a succession of days of Mediterranean-blue skies, blazing sunshine, and soaring temperatures, but these months are rare enough to become imprinted on the community memory - 1911, 1933, 1959, 1976, and 1995, for instance. Surely if we were experiencing global warming these events would occur almost every other year.

But it suits this mendacious Government, to prevent climate change they say, to get us to recycle everything, with the appropriate revenue raising penalties if we have the temerity to put an article in the wrong container or, shock horror, leave the wheelie bin lid ajar. The reality of course is that all they are doing is following Europe’s dictates on the amount of land fill allowed to be dumped.

Large volumes of what people meticulously sort ends up in the Third World where the poor are paid a pittance to sort out again. Or as shown in a recent documentary, some of ends up as land fill near an elephant conservation area in India.

Our parents who went through a war did not have to be told to sort out their rubbish, by habitually kept everything that was of use, composted organics and just threw away the remainder.

Balmy (sorry for the temperature pun) researchers John Latham of the University of Manchester and Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh have proposed a radical idea that could, they claim counter the warming effect caused by increased CO2 emissions and induce cooling.

The idea is to develop a fleet of wind powered cloud seeding yachts.  These yachts would pump salty sea water particles into the air, thus increasing the reflectivity of clouds covering 25 per cent of the world’s water mass.  By increasing the amount of solar energy reflected back into space, this form of cloud seeding would have a cooling effect on the earth’s atmosphere. The 1,000 yachts needed would be unmanned and operated via GPS positioning and operate in the southern oceans, their cost is estimated at £2 million each.

Cab drivers have less ambitious plans, but we are also trying to do our bit; we are recycling our anecdotes for anyone who is trapped in the back of our cabs. You’ll never guess what I said to David Beckham last week . . .