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Shortly afterwards, Alvin sent the video to Harrow Council as part of an official complaint. But in a response which speaks volumes for the local authority’s real attitude towards the ‘wellbeing of the people’, he heard absolutely nothing back.

So last weekend he decided to upload a one-minute clip to both X and TikTok.

The clip went viral (on X alone, it has been viewed three million times). And this time, Harrow Council’s reaction was instant.

Within hours, the authority had put out a statement claiming that both men’s behaviour had been ‘wholly unacceptable’, adding that their employment had therefore been ‘terminated in May, immediately following the complaint’.

By Thursday, the Tory-run authority had announced the ‘suspension’ of its lucrative contract with Kingdom Services, an outsourcing company from Merseyside which ran Harrow’s team of environmental enforcement officers (EEOs).

In a statement, council leader Paul Osborn added that both men had been reported to the police.

That is unlikely to silence critics, however. For the menacing behaviour of these uniformed thugs – who the Daily Mail has identified as Umar Siddiq, 30, and Joseph Fernandes, 38 – lays bare a wider scandal unfolding not just in Harrow, but across the land.

At its centre is an important fact: this London borough is one of scores of local authorities which have, in recent years, hired companies such as Kingdom to run teams of EEOs.

Such workers, who have no formal qualifications, are then sent out on daily foot patrols to catch people carrying out low-level offences such as littering and spitting. In some cases, they also seek out drivers committing parking offences.

Culprits are then hit with on-the-spot fines of up to £500 under the Environmental Protection Act of 1990.

On paper, these workers (who are widely nicknamed the ‘Fake Fuzz’) are supposed to protect high streets from the blight of litter and anti-social behaviour. In other words, to serve the public.

In practice, many go about their business with a zeal and sense of entitlement that resembles the former East German Stasi secret police. They slap draconian fines on citizens who have committed very minor indiscretions or, in some cases, done nothing wrong at all.

On Thursday, to cite one of several high-profile recent examples, a jobsworth employed by Gedling Borough Council in Nottinghamshire gave a £150 ticket to a 42-year-old woman who’d left a single kale leaf in a trolley while loading groceries into her vehicle outside Sainsbury’s.

Last week, a woman in the London borough of Ealing was fined £150 for tossing a small piece of bread to a pigeon, while a man in Poole, Dorset, was issued with a £200 fine when a biodegradable teabag from a McDonald’s cup accidentally dropped out of the pocket in his car door.

To understand these incidents, and the thuggery which passed for public service in Harrow, we simply have to follow the money.