Nanny's Dose of The Clamps

Nanny, as we all know, loves to regulate all manner of activities; ranging from our eating and drinking habits to pancake tossing.

This site is dedicated to making people aware of the increased level of state interference in our daily lives.

Yet, on some rare occasions, a regulation and a slap on the wrist from Nanny is a good thing.

Nanny has, for sometime now, been promising to regulate the activities of the cowboy wheel clampers; rouge organisations who make a fat living out of extorting money from people who have parked illegally.

One such "naughty little boy", who needs a sound spanking, is Costas Constantinou.
He is the boss of a London based wheel clamping firm, that has been named as the UK's worst clamper for the second time running by the RAC.

Costas, whose company Vehicle Clamping Securities (VCS) operates across London, won the RAC Foundation's "Dick Turpin" award for charging a stonking £423 for clamping and towing away and £35 a day for storage.

Costs claims that the charges were necessary to ensure "the job was done properly".

Seemingly, in order to ensure that the job is "done properly", one of Costas's employees allegedly threatened to break the windows of a motorist's car when he protested about the £423 fee for the return of his car.

As Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation, said about cowboy clampers:

"they have been getting away with legalised mugging for too long."

Now dear old Nanny was meant to make the clamping vehicles on private land, without a Security Industry Authority (SIA) licence, a criminal offence on Monday.

Unfortunately owing to her incompetence, too few have completed a training course, this legislation has been postponed indefinitely.

Nanny is happy to pass countless ill thought out regulations at the drop of a hat, and at break neck speed, yet something as useful and as simple as this is beyond her.

It's a funny old world!