The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)

[Grant]

It's funny that Andy Burnham thinks that Manchester will only prosper if they get a faster train service to London. If that's the case it demonstrates that any extra money for transport should be spent down south

[Mick Harper]

So what have we learned about Britain and Big? If we conclude that we do it badly, should we do it at all? Sometimes we have to. My own local big project is the Tideway, the London supersewer, due to come on stream (as it were) in 2025 and coming in on time and on budget at 4.5 billion. Why? Probably because it was paid for by its users, me via increased bills to Thames Water (reportedly going bankrupt but I don't know if the two are linked, I pay my bills on time and on budget). Also nobody cares about sewers so they are left to to themselves. This is presumably why Thames Water, an otherwise crap organisation, can build tunnels efficiently, and Crossrail can't. The Elizabeth Line being something of an add-on might have something to do with it too.

But there is the alternative of going small...

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Nonsense. The Oxford/Cambridge line goes via Bletchley Park and is clearly a strategic railway in case Herr Hitler comes calling again.

[Wile E. Coyote]

If you give dosh to Scotland you get the North Coast 500. Not much economic development, as the Scotch are now all retiring and acquiring a campervan, but you have to weigh in the positive of keeping the Union.

[Mick Harper]

As you will recall, high speed trains started with the Bullet Trains of Japan. They were a great success but, surprisingly, nobody else took them up. The reason being that (a) they required completely new, vastly expensive and exclusive track and (b) trains were held to be old technology anyway. Who wanted motorised hansom cabs? They were admired but dismissed as a Japanese prestige project.

The Brits though figured they might try to get some of the speed gains by using existing track and, since they had Brunel's GWR which was originally laid out on quasi-Bullet lines because of the broad gauge, they introduced the 125 mph HST's in the 1970s. They were a revelation and promised to lift British Rail from the doldrums to the cutting edge. It was found that with a bit of judicious local speed restrictions where curvature of the track was too great, equally fast versions could be operated on all the British mainlines.

Finally the tilting train was experimented with to eliminate the curvature problems and take the whole of British mainlines into, if not Bullet territory, certainly good enough for British needs. Alas, British nerve failed and the tilting trains were abandoned, even though now with the Pendolinos it has been shown they would likely have been a practical proposition if stuck with. However...

[Mick Harper]

For reasons I have never fathomed, Bullet trains were belatedly taken up by France with the TGV and then by Italy, Germany and Spain. Although they were waxed lyrical about by France, Italy, German and Spain it was difficult to see what all the fuss was about. They never paid their way, they were only used by the chic, they never went quite where you wanted to go and they made nary a dent in clogged up motorways and ungreen airplane hops. But Britain decided it must have some Bullets to call its own. (HS1 was really French.) Now we have decided we're not going to have them and the penitent government has promised every penny they would have spent on them will go to doing what we should have been doing all along:

* ironing out the remaining kinks and capacity bottlenecks on the existing mainlines
* putting in connector links to make new mainlines eg the infamous east-west powerhouse line
* upgrading the northern commuter lines
* taking on the unions to make sure they couldn't cause mayhem every step of the way.

We are about to find out whether we can handle the small stuff now we know we can't handle the big stuff. My prediction: no, we won't, out problems are much more fundamental than that. Even the money will disappear down Treasury rabbit holes.

[Mick Harper]

I have posted up a story about HS2 on Medium here https://medium.com/@mickxharper/high-speed-britain-b3ed36ccf61c and it received this response from the sublime John Welford

[Mick Harper]

Not according to the official handout, issued when the Man from the Ministry was anxious to propitiate the locals

[Mick Harper]

The EU is a club with rules that twenty-eight countries have signed up to voluntarily. One of those countries is Poland. The Poles broke two of the rules when their government (1) took control of the major media outlets and (2) sacked their judges and replaced them with government stooges. The EU in turn (1) brought these infractions to Poland's attention (2) protested vigorously when the the Polish government took no notice (3) got rulings against the Polish actions from the eurocourts, and finally (4) withheld several billions of EU money earmarked for Poland (for, as it happens, post-Covid relief).

I can't help thinking that if the EU had adopted this policy when Mrs Thatcher started swinging her battle-axe, things would have been very different. We would either have left in high dudgeon in the 1980's or not left at all. (Although since we always owed them rather than them owing us, maybe not.)

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Poles are not accepting the "principle of supremacy of European Law".

In actual fact this princple is not in any EU treaty that the Poles signed. And the United Kingdom took a similar position that even after joining the EU, parliamentary law was ultimately supreme, and that fundamental aspects of domestic law took precedence.

[Mick Harper]

This is interesting. I had bought the version spun to us by the anti-populist meedja. I still do to some extent even though my heart tends to be with the locals. I suppose it's basically a case of 'you knew the score when you signed up even if we didn't spell out what you were signing up to'.

We did get a bit by fudging, the question is: did we get more by handbagging them? The answer of course is yes but only at the cost of losing out in myriad ways over the next twenty years because we were so unpopular. But overall, the villain of the piece was the EU ideologues with their manic one-way ever-tighter union policy when they should have been fudging it. If only they had once said, "OK, guys, you weren't ready for that, we'll backtrack a smidgeon."

PS I get the impression that our leaving has left little impression.

[Mick Harper]

I realised one reason for why all new construction projects cost such a lot, when idly listening to an account of the redevelopment of a college. (This is a paraphrase from memory.)

[Mick Harper]

The Australian wet left turned out in force yesterday for a referendum but Okkers turned out in even greater numbers (61% to 39%) so it's raw prawn time again for the Abbos.

First Nation Australians agreed with the verdict pointing out that the proposed constitutional changes would have changed nothing. "What did they expect?" said a spokesperson for the well-beaten Yes campaign. "Don't they know how important gestures are?"

[Wile E. Coyote]

It will be interesting to see if Anthony Albanese resigns having lost a referedum on a proposed "historic" change to the constitution.

My feeling is he won't as.....

"We will of course contnue to seek better outcomes for First Austraiians", um, err, "well, hang on, I might have said "historic" but I really meant it was more symbolic than anything else."