taxi talk 2010 election special
By The Reiver
y the time you read this magazine you will have voted in the General Election for one of the political parties whose leaders are pictured above, if you didn’t vote, then I personally hold you responsible for the mess we’re in now.
B
Shockingly enough, it would appear the three main leaders do impressions, Gordon Brown being the Fonz......heyyyyy, Dave Cameron doing Selwyn Froggitt....’magic’ Dave, and that
to be advising of the size of his penis. The bloke from UKIP appears to be giving the ‘V’’s before the plane he was in crashed, presumably to
a better Fonz impression than Gordon Brown, one’s Welsh, one has sat on something painful,
ordering pork pies. The Green lady appears to be a bit of a
fox.........grrrrr.
We offered all the above leaders and their political parties a platform to air their views on ‘all things’ taxi. The response was......how can I put this? Absolutely shocking, they all (almost all) deserve to be garrotted by whoever was foolish enough to elect them; it only leads me to believe we are all going to hell on a handcart.
We have approaching 250,000 licensed taxi folks in the UK, if you work out from that probably 25 million people are directly affected by our day jobs, family and friends etc, not forgetting those
etc. You would believe the political parties would be literally falling over themselves to tell us what they think we want to hear.
Instead, this lot choose to ignore the taxi trade and go around the country doing what politicians tend to do at election time, kissing babies (who cannot legally vote anyway), wearing stupid rosettes and sending stupid people to our front doors asking us if they can rely on our vote.
before the election, apparently did quite well in
All he had to do was turn up and make sure he didn’t inadvertently start shooting puppies.
He was up against a person who has singlehandedly ruined the economy whilst claiming to have singlehandedly saved the world and another person who’s called
‘Dave’.......’Dave’ for Christ’s sake, ’Dave’ isn’t a person who leads a country, he’s a person who
steady now!).
As for the other oddballs, errm we have a person from UKIP whose only policy appears to be to get us out of Europe, which unless we face some 2012 type disaster is geographically impossible. A mad Welshman, an even madder Scotchman, a mad man who ain’t funny anymore because he’s not on Talksport and of
taxi vote in Bradford as the Klu Klux Klan.
This leaves us with the decent looking bird from the Green Party who could be a Readers wife. I was going to carry on this article slagging off with wanton disbandon every political party in the UK, but one political party did actually redeem itself at the last minute, and I tell you what, it would appear the Monster Raving Loony Party in at least as far as their response goes, have more idea about taxis than all of the other political parties put together. The nominal Monster Raving Looney Transport Minister (and also minister for saving the dodo) responded to our questions.
The Questions
Question 1
Many areas have increased the size of
quadrupled from the original number, yet the amount of ranking space for taxis to ply for hire from has remained the same as that prior to the increase (in taxi numbers), certain areas are now suspending drivers for ‘over- ranking’ offences, thus leaving drivers with little alternative but to drive round and round town centres seeking ranking space or street hailings, what is the view of your party on this issue?
MRLP Answer
Firstly we would insist that only taxis from ‘Hackney’ be called ‘Hackney carriages’, what’s wrong with calling a taxi a taxi? It is complete lunacy to create more taxis without providing them room to pick up fares, even we would not have thought up something that stupid.
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Queston 2
How would your party encourage taxi proprietors towards purchasing wheelchair accessible vehicles, by this I mean views towards the possible return of the Hackney taxation class (road tax) for wheelchair accessible taxis and VAT zero rating on vehicle purchases?
Question 3
The running costs of Hackney Carriages are quite substantial, as a way of encouraging the purchase of Wheelchair accessible taxis it has been mooted in trade circles that the government should allow wheelchair accessible taxis to use ‘red’ diesel, what is the view of your party on this?
MRLP Answer to Questions 2 & 3
Being (slightly) disabled myself and having a mother who is severely disabled, disabled access is important. Having said that why should taxi drivers have to spend thousands adapting their vehicles for what may well be a very small percentage of customers. By all means make access compulsory on all new vehicles, (if this is not already law) which should hopefully reduce the cost considerably, but do not force costly retrospective laws/conditions on Taxi licensees. Red diesel no, we don’t want any free publicity for the labour lot black/yellow diesel perhaps -- although the lib/dems seem to have nicked our party colours so perhaps not. All fuel for transport services should be sold at a reduced tax rate though.
Question 4
There has recently been a large increase in physical attacks and violence aimed at taxi drivers throughout the country, what measures would your party take to help protect taxi drivers?
MRLP Answer;
Violence is unacceptable and must be stopped. Since we no longer seem to have any policeman on the beat perhaps tazers could be built into the taxi seats?
Question 5
Some local authorities have employed the services of survey companies to assess taxi demand within their areas, when equipped with
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