In yesterday’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins has his knife in HS2 – again!
That’s no surprise, but then neither is the ability of the government to pull the plug on this vanity project.
Lord (Tony) Berkeley writes a regular column in the Railway Magazine. In the July issue he once again takes a very scathing look at HS2. The article isn’t online but here are a few key extracts:
Head in sand over escalating HS2 costs
New Civil Engineer reports design elements for one of the main design and construct contracts let for the civil works were coming in at 18% over the target price, up from £6.6billion to £7.8bn.
… some bids were as much as 30% to 40% higher than their individual target price.
… the project is probably running three to four years late, even before any serious work on the ground has started. Other estimates from along the route indicate the project is held up because the purchases of the necessary land and additional areas needed for accommodation works are late.
Has HS2 allowed for the cost of diverting a 12in-diameter fuel pipe a dozen times along the route? Have they applied to the National Grid for the necessary power supply for the trains and for the required capital cost contribution to build the necessary power station capacity? Have they allowed for the cost of driving piles to support 20km of double slab track in the mushy ground of the Trent Valley?
I have asked many questions in the Lords since that time and have always been told the funding
envelope of £23.73bn at 2015 prices is still valid.Given what we are now discovering there seems to be every reason to suppose the out-turn cost of Phase 1 will be a lot closer to £50bn than the DfT’s £25bn.
Surely it is time to reflect on why ministers continue to allow HS2 to have a blank cheque to spend what they like – a figure likely to reach more than £100bn if Phases 2A and 2B are included – while at the same time starving Network Rail of any investment …
It is all investment in the railway and there are many who believe £100bn could make a massive
difference to improving the present network in a greater number of beneficial ways.
Now we know that Tony Berkeley is a powerful voice in the rail freight side of the industry (so he’s not totally unbiased), but he is also a respected civil engineer. Even if half of what he says were to stand up to scrutiny (and from what I’ve read I’m unsure about the cost figures quoted) then it is yet another damning condemnation of this benighted government.
HS2 is a vanity project, pure and simple. It is government “willy waving” on a massive scale. See, for instance, this in the Spectator, this and this in the Daily Mail.
And all of that is without the environmental damage HS2 will do – as the Woodland Trust and the National Trust highlight.
Isn’t it time for everyone to come clean and admit that we just cannot afford HS2? Environmentally or financially. If nothing else, wherever the money is supposed to be coming from, it just isn’t there. Not when we have such a huge public debt. Not now, and certainly not after Brexit.
So, yesterday the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that allowing only same-sex couples to have a civil partnership was discriminatory. See, for example, the BBC News report.
Well what a surprise! Surely this was so easily foreseeable by even the most intellectually challenged politician.
So on top of everything else they have to worry about, the government now have to do something – although they will naturally drag their heels as long as they can, and probably until someone takes then to court again because they’ve done nothing. They have a track record, after all.
But really, where is the problem? Isn’t the answer so very simple?
Just what were the politicians thinking of in making the current mess in the first place?
Gawdelpus!
David Banister, Emeritus Professor of Transport at University of Oxford, has landed another scathing assessment of the proposed Heathrow Runway Three:
And here’s another …
Two articles on environmental concerns in the Guardian during the week caught my attention.
First George Monbiot slices into agriculture and our habit of eating meat in The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy. While he may be technically correct, I don’t see this being very practical – although of course most of us could happily eat much less meat than we do.
Secondly Simon Jenkins inserts quite a few daggers between the ribs of Heathrow’s proposed Third Runway in Heathrow airport’s polluting new runway is a macho folly. Jenkins doesn’t say it in as many words, but it is essentially just a vanity project and willy-waving by the erstwhile BAA. To be sure, the alternatives aren’t too wonderful either, but then as I’ve been saying for a long time we have to get to grips with our fetish for flying everywhere – two, three, four long-haul holidays a year are just not sustainable.
Two amusements for this holiday weekend …
So, a couple of Aussies have been banned for tampering with the match ball.
This should not be a surprise, except that they were using an artificial aid to do so – which, however tempting, is frankly stupid as well as cheating. And they got caught.
Ball doctoring goes on in cricket at all levels, it is very easy and it isn’t new.
Some dust on the hand can easily rough up one side of the ball, as can boot studs or a fingernail, while shining the other side with hair gel to help the ball swing. Shining the ball on the trousers/shirt/handkerchief is legal. Using hair gel, dust, fingernails or studs isn’t.
It is also very easy to lift the seam with just a thumbnail and some sleight of hand while (allegedly) removing dirt from the seam. Removing the dirt is legal but lifting the seam isn’t.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
I was never more than a jobbing club third XI cricketer, and yet I was shown some of the techniques on more than one occasion. I never doctored a ball during a match – I wasn’t good enough that it would have made any useful difference anyway – nor did I ever spot it happening when I was umpiring, but I did use it to prolong the useful life of practice balls.
There was a sneakily released Home Office press release in the early hours of last Saturday:
Police trial new Home Office mobile fingerprint technology
New mobile fingerprinting technology will allow frontline officers across the country to use their smartphones to identify people in less than a minute …
Needless to say Liberty are up in arms as there is no parliamentary oversight nor any proper public consultation.
Anyone who is stopped and fingerprinted on the street (and anyone could be at the whim of PC Plod) will have no opportunity to seek legal advice beforehand, there does not seem to be any discussion of consent, nor is there any indication of whether the information obtained will be retained and if so for how long or for what.
PC Plod is all too good at being ham-fisted and over-zealous with such initiatives, which is why it is important there should be oversight and consultation.
I find this especially disturbing as there is no scientific basis for the certainty with which fingerprints are used for identification. See, for example, this October 2017 article from Science Daily which reports this scientific examination.
As Liberty’s blog post says:
If you have been affected by these new measures, please tell Liberty about it and get legal advice quickly.
I’ve been thinking about all the recent #metoo posts. While in one way I’m not surprised, in another it is frighteningly disturbing to realise the level of abuse that we men inflict and remain totally unaware of. But from what I’ve seen (and I may be misinterpreting) I don’t think most women are saying that every man harasses them or is a sex offender.
(On the other hand, in some senses maybe we all are offenders, if only in our heads. Be honest, which of us doesn’t look at a pretty girl and think some variant of “I wonder what she’d fuck like?”. But then there is a line between thinking it and grabbing it.)
However if even 50% of women have experienced men being inappropriate (and 50% seems to be a very low estimate) then it isn’t just a tiny minority of men doing it.
We are all thoughtless and stupid towards others at times, whatever our gender and whatever the gender of the other person. (This isn’t just men on women, although that is almost certainly the vast majority or the “action”.) That’s not an excuse – there are no excuses – but a fact of life. We will never totally eradicate it, just as we can never be completely certain that our actions can ensure “X never happens again”. There will always be outliers. But we can all work hard to ensure our thoughtlessness and stupidity is reduced to an absolutely minimal level and those few outliers are all that remain.
I’m not conscious of ever having done anything wrong physically – though I will concede I probably have unknowingly. But I know that at times I have said, either verbally or in writing, and mostly without meaning to, something stupid, thoughtless or just plain badly worded. At times I’ve been called for it; at times I’ve realised myself I’ve overstepped the mark. I hope that on all such occasions I’ve apologised, learnt something, improved; and hopefully we have all been able to move on with some level of dignity restored. Even so there are a few of these occasions which still haunt me.
And for those occasions where I still don’t realise I’ve overstepped the mark, I apologise now!
Obviously as, I hope, a considerate being I would never deliberately set out to harass or abuse anyone; something I outlined in my post earlier in the year on my personal ethics and morals.
I feel sure that very often men don’t realise they’re behaving inappropriately; but I don’t buy the “that’s just because it’s the way men are” non-excuse. I suggest it’s because we’ve never been taught to be aware of such things – how can we have been when previous generations of men haven’t been aware of the problem and women have been too frightened to speak up, so no-one could teach us – and we’ve been too lazy to think about it for ourselves?
Hopefully the new, heightened, awareness can help change this, but realistically it isn’t going to happen overnight. Hopefully men can start to trust and believe what women say; they can start thinking about how they behave; and they can learn about being generally more sensitive, considerate and thoughtful human beings. Many – the more thoughtful men – will. But I do worry that the majority, who go through life relying only on their animal cave-man instincts, are just going to say “fuck off” and carry on regardless. They are going to need a lot of work by the rest of us – men and women. We all have to be brave and stand up to them, and that in itself isn’t always going to be easy – but if we’re being considerate human beings we have to try, pro bono pubico.