I SEE the local Gestapo has been in action again, this time to inflict a £70 fine on the pensioner whose vile crime was to place her husband’s disabled parking pass upside down on the dashboard.

Have these people who patrol our streets not the sense or the humanity to realise that people having to deal with many invalids and disabled people and looking after them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, leaves little time to deal with the absurdities of whether a ticket is placed the right or wrong way up?

Perhaps in this crazy documented world of ours, if the valid information was printed on both sides of the ticket this would not matter, but perhaps that’s too simple a suggestion for our ever-growing officialdom.

After all, it only appears to be a date of issue and a six or seven digit number that is required.

I wonder what Mr Fred Duggan when he was sat in a stinking freezing cold slit trench in North Korea in the 1950s would make of the petty officials parading our streets in their smart uniforms handing out penalties like confetti.

But of course he wouldn’t know, now he doesn’t even recognise his wife of 50 years, the lady who cares for him every hour of every day, but that’s what Alzheimer’s does to you, but who cares as long as we get our quota of fines to hand in at the Town Hall.

After all, it is revenue, whoever pays.

MR JAMES SAUL, Kemp Court, Whalley New Road, Blackburn.