When a pensioner gets fined £150 for mislaying his walking stick, we might as well just give up

Alan Davies, aged 85, from Aldridge, who has received a £150 littering fine from Walsall Council for accidently leaving his walking stick on Longwood Lane
Alan Davies, aged 85, from Aldridge, who has received a £150 littering fine from Walsall Council for accidently leaving his walking stick on Longwood Lane - Express & Star / SWNS

Those of us who object to the long tentacles of the surveillance state always face this retort: if you’re doing nothing wrong, why do you care? Well, now we have yet another good answer. It comes in the form of 85-year-old Alan Davies of Walsall, penalised by his council for accidentally leaving his walking stick by the side of the road after, get this, one of his voluntary litter-picking expeditions.

If we have to put up with cameras seemingly on every street corner, and in every nook and cranny of the public realm, you might at least hope that they could be used to reunite the public-spirited Mr Davies with his stick. But of course, that’s too much to ask. Instead, the officious Walsall council bods slapped Davies with a £150 fine, sent him creepy images of himself from CCTV, like he was some kind of villain on the run, and threatened him with a whopping further £2,500 fine if he didn’t pay pronto.

Well, if ever there was an illustration of the dangers of the rigidly inflexible, no-empathy automation of modern life, this is it. And the irony is that the council’s cameras haven’t just picked on any old innocent victim but have actually fined someone who was trying his darndest to clean the place up.

As you’d expect, Davies and his friends tried desperately to speak to someone at the council to explain what had happened and get them to see sense. But they found it impossible and kept being told “to email”. For God’s sake, all the poor chap wanted was to get his stick back, not to have a limb replaced. We need more like Mr Davies, but who’s going to volunteer to pick litter if this is how they get thanked?

I keep being told how machines and artificial intelligence can be so much more efficient than human beings, and that just about everyone’s job will be performed by a robot in the next few decades. That’s all fine and dandy until something like this happens. Clearly, your average fly-tipping surveillance camera, however “intelligent”, cannot distinguish between genuine littering (which, by the way, is a disgusting habit) and a pure mistake that any of us could make. Not surprisingly, Davies says he was shocked and upset. Frankly, he did well to keep it at that. I’d have been apoplectic.

The council has now apologised and rescinded the fine. Well, I guess they had to. It has also explained, by way of justification, that fly-tipping is a big challenge in the area where Mr Davies was filmed, and that CCTV is a key way of fighting back. I’m not so sure about that. I’ve heard the same argument about speed cameras. The worst offenders simply move to a different area, meaning we need yet more cameras covering yet more of the country to keep up with them. It’s the whack-a-mole strategy.

That’s the issue with big government and big surveillance. Once it starts, it never knows where to stop. And the likes of Mr Davies get clobbered.