Is loud music an environmental toxin?

No

7 of 8

by Malcolm Toogood

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A story that caught my attention recently was that of Markus Aitkin who stopped his car in Manchester (UK) to ask a policewoman for directions, and as a result was given a ticket for causing excessive noise by playing River Dance too loudly on his car stereo. He went to court, fought the ticket, and won.

Nothing too remarkable in that, you may say, and I suspect that you will fit into one of two polarised camps on this one; either the one that says that's one back for the common man against the system, or the opposite camp that thinks that judges have gone soft. After all, why should these young hooligans drive around disturbing our peace in the cause of turning their brains to jelly with their sub-woofers? Alternatively, you may just say that he should have been arrested in any case, for having poor taste in music.

Well, the remarkable aspect of this story was that it took four years between the ticket being issued, and the court appearance finally taking place. In between that, Mr Aitkin received numerous letters from the local authority concerned, each one increasing the size of the initial thirty-pound fine, until it amounted to two hundred and seventy pounds when the requested court appearance finally took place. In addition, the council sent the bailiffs around to seize his vehicle, in lieu of non-payment of the fine, a total of six times, including once when they woke the whole family at 7.30am by banging on their front door and shouting through the letter box.

Markus resisted each of these visits, including the ones where the bailiffs turned up without a warrant to back-up their attendance, and when the local authority finally relented, and a judge was finally given the opportunity to rule on the matter, he took just over four minutes to throw the case out and apologise to Mr Aitkin for the experience he had received at the hands of that authority.

The point in this story is not that the policewoman was exceeding her remit, as some have suggested, because she made an on-the-spot judgement, and issued a fixed-price penalty based upon that judgement. The ticket clearly stated that if Mr Aitkin disagreed with that, then he could elect to go to court, which he did. The problem was that the local authority chose to refuse to officially accept his choice of allowing the courts to rule on the matter.

The next point is that 33-year-old Markus is not a "boom-boy" as they are called here in the UK. His car stereo was absolutely standard, and had not been modified in any way. As such, it could not exceed the guidelines that currently exist to regulate the use of such modifications, as all car manufacturers ensure that the standard equipment fitted to their cars cannot exceed the limits, even on full volume. So the defence, and the result, was a foregone conclusion, and the local authority should have quickly-recognised that they could not win, and torn up the ticket instead of wasting taxpayers money on pursuing a lost cause.

But no, the whole point of why this story made the national news was that the authority somehow decided instead to bully Markus Aitkin into paying the fine by continually sending letters and bailiffs to his house. That he did not cave-in to these tactics, as thousands must do every year, is to his credit, because it is yet another example of how local authorities have become a law unto themselves, by seeking to raise additional funding through the over-implementation of petty regulations, and then enforcing them like cheap thugs.

Overall, it is a salutary warning of the Pandors'a Box that is opened when do-gooders seek to hijack the ignorance of a small selfish minority as the grounds for universal environmental control.

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