Sunday, December 04, 2011
Roads & tunnels
From time to time I moan about the vast amount of public money poured into something called the Hindhead Tunnel.
I am now prompted to moan about the £30bn or so the DT says that we are to pour into an enhanced rail link between London and Birmingham, £30bn, of which £0.5bn is going into another tunnel, a couple of miles long, to avoid disturbing the tranquil views of some bunch of city-working weekend-villagers.
As a person of the left I am a great believer in the public provision of all sorts of things. But, as a country we have been living beyond our means for years. Government, in particular, has been spending a lot more money than they have been able to collect in tax, to the point when the people with money to lend to our government - aka the bankers - might start to think that we are a bad bet and do an Ireland on us. And for my money it is even more important that our government stays solvent than that is should go in for fancy public works. So why are we spending this huge amount of money - which I compute to be £1,000 each for everyone in work - on a rail link which will cut the journey time to Brum from 90 to 60 minutes or something. Is it really worth it? Are we allowed to see the sums? Would it not be better to knock a chunk off the national debt? To show the Germans that we mean business when we say that we are going to start practising Northern Europe thrift and endeavour?
Water under the bridge, but there is also that fancy public work called the Olympics. 20bn on a whole lot of big sheds which will be scratching around for occupiers after the big day. I compute again, and allowing £250,000 per affordable flat, I get the result that for the price of the Olympics - a good part of the wage bill for which has probably been remitted to Eastern Europe - we could have built 80,000 flats - which one might have thought would have made a useful dent in the London - if not the national - housing shortage and which would certainly have had a longer useful life than the aforesaid sheds.
My wheeze would be to turn the whole operation, on a permanent basis, over to the starving Greeks. They started the whole thing, they need the work, so let them carry the torch into the third millennium. A permanent site, dressed up with all the razzmatazz that Disney could bring to the operation: dancing girls, hot air balloons, baby sperm whale fritters, the works. And the Greeks, if they wanted, could subcontract the rebuilding of the sheds from time to time. So, for example, they could charge the Dubaise £1bn for the privilege of building the velocodrome. For an extra consideration, they would be allowed to fly their flag from the top of it. They, the Greeks that is, would get their national debt under control in no time: they could stop worrying about work or the lack of it and just sip ouzo under the trees in their town squares while their ladies got up the dinner.
I suppose the reason that this will never happen is that it would mean that the whole travelling circus of Olympian civil servants would crash to the ground. All those perks, not to say, bribes, would go up in smoke.
I am now prompted to moan about the £30bn or so the DT says that we are to pour into an enhanced rail link between London and Birmingham, £30bn, of which £0.5bn is going into another tunnel, a couple of miles long, to avoid disturbing the tranquil views of some bunch of city-working weekend-villagers.
As a person of the left I am a great believer in the public provision of all sorts of things. But, as a country we have been living beyond our means for years. Government, in particular, has been spending a lot more money than they have been able to collect in tax, to the point when the people with money to lend to our government - aka the bankers - might start to think that we are a bad bet and do an Ireland on us. And for my money it is even more important that our government stays solvent than that is should go in for fancy public works. So why are we spending this huge amount of money - which I compute to be £1,000 each for everyone in work - on a rail link which will cut the journey time to Brum from 90 to 60 minutes or something. Is it really worth it? Are we allowed to see the sums? Would it not be better to knock a chunk off the national debt? To show the Germans that we mean business when we say that we are going to start practising Northern Europe thrift and endeavour?
Water under the bridge, but there is also that fancy public work called the Olympics. 20bn on a whole lot of big sheds which will be scratching around for occupiers after the big day. I compute again, and allowing £250,000 per affordable flat, I get the result that for the price of the Olympics - a good part of the wage bill for which has probably been remitted to Eastern Europe - we could have built 80,000 flats - which one might have thought would have made a useful dent in the London - if not the national - housing shortage and which would certainly have had a longer useful life than the aforesaid sheds.
My wheeze would be to turn the whole operation, on a permanent basis, over to the starving Greeks. They started the whole thing, they need the work, so let them carry the torch into the third millennium. A permanent site, dressed up with all the razzmatazz that Disney could bring to the operation: dancing girls, hot air balloons, baby sperm whale fritters, the works. And the Greeks, if they wanted, could subcontract the rebuilding of the sheds from time to time. So, for example, they could charge the Dubaise £1bn for the privilege of building the velocodrome. For an extra consideration, they would be allowed to fly their flag from the top of it. They, the Greeks that is, would get their national debt under control in no time: they could stop worrying about work or the lack of it and just sip ouzo under the trees in their town squares while their ladies got up the dinner.
I suppose the reason that this will never happen is that it would mean that the whole travelling circus of Olympian civil servants would crash to the ground. All those perks, not to say, bribes, would go up in smoke.
# posted by Jim @ 6:20 AM 
