The Great Robbery Train rumbles along in Yorkshire

Once again, all bets are off once ‘government’ decides you have given offence by not paying the Council Tax they demand.

While ordinary people who fail to pay are considered law breakers, those who seek to hoover up our money continue to act in an illegal fashion, demonstrating that they refuse to be bound by the rule of law themselves.

We learn from the Darlington & Stockton Times that Hambleton District Council secured liability orders for non payment of Council Tax against 505 households, each being slapped with costs of £123.  Richmondshire secured 216 liability orders, again with costs to each household of £123 and a further 15 orders secured for non payment of business rates with costs for each of those imposed at £176.  Meanwhile Northallerton secured no less than 721 liability orders against households in its district – although the costs sought and awarded were not reported, we can make an educated guess that the same court also awarded those at £123 each.

We have no way of knowing if these cases are flat out refusals to pay, or whether the residents are experiencing financial hardship that makes it difficult or even impossible for them to pay.  But we can be sure that in each case the residents are being asked to pay ever more for ever fewer services, the quality of which are steadily declining.   We can also be sure that in this so-called democracy of ours, these residents have never been asked how much they think the councils should demand, or asked to give a mandate for how the authorities spend the monies collected.

In each case, the cost to the councils of securing a liability order from the court is £3.  Add on administration, postal charges and reasonable overheads and the figure would not exceed costs of £10 in total per case.  So in these 1,457 cases, councils which by law are only allowed to charge ‘costs reasonably incurred’ for liability orders to enforce council tax demands, have gone beyond what the law permits them to charge by around £113 in each and every case.

And the court, in allowing this to happen by not limiting the costs awarded to the councils to those ‘reasonably incurred’, have facilitated the law being broken.  As a result, in just one court sitting, over £164,000 of residents’ money to which councils are not entitled is being taken from residents illegally by a branch of the state, sanctioned by a court that has exceeded its authority by awarding costs far beyond what has been reasonably incurred.

We have returned to the age of the Robber Baron, where the serfs are fair game to be preyed upon and treated as cash cows by those who set aside the rules on a whim and break the law without sanction whenever it suit their own ends.  This is today’s establishment in action.  It is little different to the establishment of past centuries.  The only change is that people who are supposed to be our servants have morphed themselves into our modern slavers.  This is 21st Century Britain.