Cowboy clampers are just the tip of the iceberg

It looks like the wheel-clampers are in retreat after Haroon Zafaryab’s heroics the other day and Lynne Featherstone’s subsequent “ban on clamping and towing on private land“. And as they leave the field, it’s worth returning to a piece that Ross Clark wrote for The Spectator last year in which he tied the cowboy clampers in with a wider malaise: the last government’s “blind spot” for business, such that “it simply cannot distinguish between where business ends and racketeering begins”. Here’s the full article for the benefit of CoffeeHousers:

We have become a nation of shysters, Ross Clark, The Spectator, 17 October 2009

Power cuts and uncollected rubbish form most people’s memories of the economic debacle that was the 1970s. But for me, a quite different story sums up the lack of business sense that distinguished the British at the time. My mother had gone into a village shop in Kent to buy some bacon, which the affable shoplady found some pretext to give to her for free.