ANOTHER ONCE IN A BLUE MOON MOMENT HS2 Part two

_{Further to my previous comments about HS2 I have unearthed more pertinent facts about the debacle which continues to illustrate just how inept and corrupt are the present government and their pals. Whistleblowers concerns were ignored, and they were sacked. A personal assistant was asked to shred copies of reports showing that costs had risen to an unacceptable level putting the project and all those salaries and bonuses at risk. Following a lunch with one of the whistleblowers she was very aggressively interviewed several times, her mobile and laptop were confiscated, she was shaken and drained by these encounters which related to an innocent lunch with a friend and had to go on sick leave. She was later made “redundant”. HS2 claimed that she was interviewed as part of a whistleblower investigation and the redundancy was unrelated. 47 senior staff who objected to the way HS2 had been allowed to cover up cost overruns by the Treasury and the Department for Transport were subsequently sacked or paid off with non-disclosure agreements. Its correctly called gagging and I have been subjected to that myself.}

_{It seems likely that even with the cancellation of the Birmingham to Manchester leg of the project it will still cost well over £100 billion at a time when millions of people are struggling to pay for basic needs like housing, food and energy. The NHS and social care are grossly underfunded, transport is already inefficient, and most people would rather see normal trains running efficiently. So, what would £100 billion pounds buy if used properly? 200 new hospitals, 10,000 new schools, 1 million new council houses or it would pay for 270,000 nurses for ten years. Who in their right minds would choose to spend it on a railway that will get a few wealthy people from London to Birmingham 20 minutes quicker?}

_{Why does it cost us so much to build these projects when the rest of Europe can do it for a fraction of the cost? HS2 will cost £396 million per mile, it will make it the most expensive railway project in the world. It is 8 times the cost per mile of the new French high-speed line from Tours to Bordeaux. The only other country with similar costs to us is the US!! Obviously, part of the reason is corruption and backhanders to all concerned and overpaid management jobs for the boys, it is all part of the mire of corruption and patronage that we must wade through to get anything done. As a result, not only do we have to pay vastly more to get anything built but it means that we get less built than we otherwise could. Crossrail 2 in London has been put on hold, it would have cost at least £30 billion. If we were working at Scandinavian costs it would be possible to build 4 Crossrail equivalents for less than a quarter of that cost.}

_{Another factor here is planning permission and I have come up against that myself; the whole process is grossly inefficient, labyrinthine, and again involves jobs for the boys especially expensive lawyers. Infrastructure projects in Europe ensure that planning criteria have been set out in advance. Once the planning authorities have identified that a project meets the rules it is accepted with no possibility of later revisions. Our system does not consider adverse effects in advance, they are dealt with as the plan evolves by lawyers so it gets expensive very fast. The sheer number of legal points that have to be considered slow the whole planning process down especially as the rules are often not very clear or the government guidance is out of date. This leaves the whole process open to judicial challenge from disgruntled residents. Our electoral system doesn’t help, with local MP’s fearing a backlash from local residents in their consistency, the rest of Europe has proportional representation so does not have this problem.}

_{There is also a lack of people with the necessary skills to oversee a project. There has been a tendency to scrap the engineering capacity in the civil service and rely on outside consultants. Other European countries have civil servants with engineering backgrounds. Then there is the technical nature of the train itself, HS2 is 20mph faster than the HGV. Getting that extra 20mph raises the costs out of all proportion to the benefits of the extra speed which in our relatively short distances is negligible. One can’t help but wonder if it was all down to someone’s ego that our fast train had to be a bit faster than the French fast train?}

AT BAY: THE CORNERED WILD ANIMAL SYNDROME

_{We are warned that when in the wild and dealing with potentially dangerous wild animals not to corner them. If they don’t have an escape route they will probably attack. You will see from the above picture with the cheetah I was told by the game warden to approach from the rear. Like all cats even the big ones spend a lot of time sleeping and if suddenly woken up, which I did by scratching its neck, all cats like that, it wouldn’t feel trapped. This was not a fully wild animal and being partly domesticated could not have been returned to the wild. It was in a game park attached to a winery in South Africa that did a lot of conservation work. By having people pay to stroke it they said it was raising money to help its wild cousins in the bush. I mention all this because I hate it when animals are abused for the amusement of tourists, the donkeys forced to carry fat people up steep hills, swimming with dolphins in captivity, drugged monkeys to be photographed with, etc.}

_{Exactly the same applies to people, we are animals ourselves after all; if constantly badly treated people will quite rightly attack their oppressors, we could actually do with a bit more of that. While I don’t for one minute excuse the Hamas attacks on Israel, civilians should never be targeted, one can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if the Israelis had not treated the Palestinians so appallingly and for so long. I have experience myself of being up against a ruthless and powerful enemy aided and abetted by all the institutions who should be there to help individuals against them, see my post of 23rd. July 2022, so I know what it feels like. The actions of powerful utilities company caused stress that killed my wife and soul mate and gave me diabetes, I will never forgive them for that, they are the only ones on my list for retribution and should remember that revenge is a dish best taken cold. Taking me on has already cost them well over £100,000 and given their almost unlimited resources and the bias of the courts, they were always going to win. Despite bringing about a miscarriage of justice, it was a pyrrhic victory, the position on the ground is just the same as it was before they the action in the high court and I now have a formal agreement to access the back of my property which I didn’t have before. I have been gagged by the settlement so I am not allowed to comment on their competence, suffice to say that the old hippie anarchist has run rings around them, the courts and their expensive lawyers.}

_{Why can’t people see that we all have to rub along together? and life would be much more pleasant for all of us if we treated everyone decently and ethically. Race, religion and money all separate people, in Gaza all three apply. If we are to get along with each other we have to be pragmatic and prepared to compromise. The rich and or powerful have a responsibility to those less well off, apart from any moral considerations surely it would be of benefit to them if there weren’t a lot of people wanting to rob them kidnap them or rise up against them. On the whole most people will tolerate those better off if they can see that they themselves are being treated at least fairly and equitably.}

_{The problem at the moment is that we have a society where many people are grindingly poor yet still having to pay to make a small minority incredibly rich and a lot of others very well off. It’s called Toryism; they blatantly enrich themselves and their pals while blaming those less well off for their own poverty. There is some truth in that, the people have voted them into power time and again and despite all their other faults they are also incompetent. Hopefully people are finally coming to their senses and it will be reflected in the ballot box come the next election.}

_{Just saying.}

ANOTHER ONCE IN A BLUE MOON MOMENT HS2

Once in a blue moon the Tories get it right. Cancelling stage two of HS2 is one of those moments. Now they are making a virtue of quite rightly saying that the money could be better used. It’s just a pity that they didn’t think of that before they wasted £billions, dug up precious countryside and blighted hundreds if not thousands of people’s lives with stage one. I and many others said that at the time.
It is basically a vanity project but I can understand that as one of the richest countries in the world our infrastructure compares so badly with other countries, many of them develoiping countries. This is mostly down to privatisation. Vanity projects are all very well but first we have a lot of less glamourous problems to see to. Social care, the underfunded NHS, government borrowing and pollution to name but a few.
I will be at home, indoors for a while now recuperating from my hernia repair operation yesterday. Must take it easy for a week or two, no logging or moving stones so I will have more time for blogging and starting the Alternative Party.

Toodle pip.

TOO MUCH MONKEY BUSINESS

_{Is life getting better? As with most things yes and no.}

_{Undoubtedly, in terms of standard of living things have improved, I can just about remember my mother washing clothes and bedding in the wash house in a big, galvanised tub and agitating it with a wooden three-pronged plunger. Bear in mind that we were quite well off, we had a bathroom and an inside loo; at that time there were still many houses that didn’t have a bathroom, whole families would have a bath in a tin bath and using the same water which had to be heated on the stove and poured in manually then you had to go outside and freeze your arse off to use the loo. God help you if you were constipated. I can remember when my mother got her first washing machine it had a big electric mangle on top which she was terrified of getting her arm caught in, there would be no such thing as safety cut out in those days, there was no such thing as safety full stop, how ever did we survive? For the few who had a television they had a ten-inch screen black and white of course. Most houses didn’t have a phone but there were lots of red telephone boxes in those days, mostly smelling of urine because they were handy if you needed a piss on the way home from the pub.}

_{We would never in our wildest dreams have imagined then that most people now would have a 65-inch-high definition tv, a mobile phone and would fly abroad for their holiday every year. Cars also have improved out of all proportion and more people have them now. The downside of course is that there is now more pollution from all this and the incredible increase in the population. Also, we must listen to everyone’s banal conversations in public and fight our way through all the people taking selfies at world heritage sites.}

_{Medicine has improved out of all recognition but access to it, unless you can afford to go private often has not. Being able to afford to buy your own house or have a good standard of reasonably priced rental accommodation has got much worse and back the old days everyone who had a proper job, nearly everyone then, could get a mortgage and buy their own house. Undoubtedly, the staggering increase in property prices is what has made my generation rich and incidentally funds the bank of mum and dad for those lucky enough to have a mum and dad who have profited from it. Please don’t blame the Boomers we were just lucky enough to have been born at the right time and would you have done any different. Many more go university now but most of them come out with a huge debt and a Micky Mouse degree so no improvement there.}

_{We are a more tolerant society now, diverse and ethnically mixed; homosexuality is no longer illegal, and we have single parent families where there used to be unmarried mothers and their children were called bastards and likely to be taken from them.}

_{Then we come to governments and society, of which Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing. Starting with the introduction of state pensions, the NHS and the welfare state all of which are more or less the same age as me, things got steadily better for decades. Then they began to get steadily worse, I don’t think it would be unfair to lay the blame at Thatcher’s door. The rot began with privatisation and the right to buy when Tories became rabidly right wing and gave up all pretence of having a fair and just society. Why can’t the voters see that? Subsequently, they became more and more polarised in that position. Now we are in an incredible mess and the government owe so much that it will have to be paid off by your grandchildren. The present government have been in power for 13 years so they can’t blame it on anyone else. They are completely shambolic and incompetent, probably the opposition are not much better, but they can’t be any worse. Please, please do not vote the Tories in again, you got it wrong with Brexit and we are in steep decline now if they get in next time, it will be terminal.}

_{I have had a good life and still have and I am trying to do my bit to help others to have the same by starting the Alternative Party, I am old and have never been very dynamic I don’t want to run it, I am an ideas man not an action man, but I would like to start it and then leave it to others younger and stronger than I to take over. I doubt I will ever see any benefit from it. As I have said before, watch this space. In the First World War the soldiers were described as “lions led by donkeys”, now we are no longer lions and led by monkeys.}