Express & Star

Mark Andrews on Saturday: Throw the book at graffiti low-life

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

Published
Graffiti in Walsall

WALSALL Council leader Mike Bird has warned some idiot who has gone around spraying graffiti around the town centre that their next tag will be worn around the ankle.

Frankly, I think he is going a bit soft. If it were up to me I would stick them in the stocks and invite the public to spray their own tags on them. Or make them sit in a bath filled with lice for six months, while watching back-to-back episodes of Howard’s Way.

The rail route from Wolverhampton to Birmingham has never been pretty – Queen Victoria is reputed to have drawn the curtains when her train passed through the area – but look at it now, disfigured with all the senseless daubing of 21st century low life.

And it’s not just rundown inner cities and post industrial areas. Even on holiday the seafronts of Cannes and Biarritz are tainted with this rubbish. The waterways of the Black Country have such huge potential, but everywhere you look there is a wall defaced by some idiot with a spray can. A pub in Shifnal has just had a £3,000 mural damaged.

Enough is enough.

Graffiti is a crime as pointless as it is pernicious, with very little in the way of mitigation. It is not something that can be blamed on deprivation, because it costs money to do. It is not committed in the heat of the moment, but is invariably premeditated. Enforcement needs to be much more rigorous, and the penalties much more severe.

Park for a few minutes longer than you are permitted, and a would-be General Galtieri comes along to slap a ticket on your windscreen. Drive a few mph over the speed limit and you get a fine and points on your licence.

Yet people still seem free to maliciously spoil the environment with impunity.

It doesn't help, of course, that the chattering classes have venerated street-vandal Banksy to the role of some kind of inner-city Van Gogh, when in reality he is just another self-indulgent nuisance.

Graffiti is one of the great scourges of our age. We really need to throw the book at the people responsible.

DEPENDENCY culture 2019. A man in Birmingham has unsuccessfully tried to sue the city council after it paid housing benefit into his bank account without informing him in advance. He says he did not know what the money was, and spent it on 'other things.’

Surely anybody who is not extremely wealthy would notice several hundred pounds being added to their bank account every month, and made some inquiries about where it had come from? Or, at the very least, you would set it aside for a few months in case it turned out to be a mistake and you might have to pay it back.

Still, if my good friends at Birmingham City Council want to deposit large amounts of money in my bank account without informing me, I promise I won’t complain.

SPARE me the pompous bluster from MPs banging on that proroguing parliament to force through Brexit would be a denial of parliamentary sovereignty.

These MPs have spent the past three years trying to thwart the will of the people, as expressed in a poll which attracted far more voters than any of them have been able to attract. If MPs resort to desperate measures to frustrate the democratic process, they can hardly complain if similarly desperate measures are taken to bypass them.