Like many other universities, York has strict rules limiting students’ use of posters on campus. This rule is ostensibly to stop litter, but actually is about a generalised hostility of university management towards spontaneous activities on campus. Poster-bans inhibit student societies, since (especially on campuses) posters are one of the main way of getting your event out there. York students have a petition against the ban; we should support them. Sign the petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/university-of-york-repeal-the-ban-on-campus-postering See the Manifesto Club campaign against leafleting bans: http://www.manifestoclub.com/leafletingban

Brick Lane is defined by its touts, who stand outside every restaurant enticing passersby to try ‘the best curry in London’. Yet now this extravagant self-promotion is to be banned. I’ve just received an email from a Manifesto Club supporter, reporting that ‘Tower Hamlets council’s latest initiative is to ban restaurant owners from using touts outside their establishments to entice customers in. An anti-tout pledge will now be added to their licensing conditions. Are touts, with their old world manners and quaint turn of phrases, really a threat to anyone seeking a good curry?’ I don’t imagine anyone has complained about the…

British Legion collectors will be prevented from collecting in two of Birmingham’s main shopping streets, in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday. Birmingham – like many other towns and cities – has restrictions on the numbers of charities that can be collecting in a particular street at a particular time. And in this case Shelter and Oxfam have already ‘booked’ the street for key days, which means the British Legion can’t go there too. These rules are connected with controls on leafleting and other forms of public petitioning or appeal. Councils are starting to issue licenses – to charge fees, set certain terms,…

A Hull shop owner was fined £75, after a sticker advertising her shop was found on a lamppost. She denies putting it there. But still – it’s a sticker. The po-faced council announced gravely that she had ‘committed an offence of displaying an unlawful advertisement’. What this shows is: first, the increasingly free and easy use of on-the-spot-fines by councils, in a way that lacks all consistency and proportion. Cases that wouldn’t even see a judge – let alone result in a guilty verdict – are being dealt with in this casual and arbitrary manner, delivered in the same way as the…