You've NO messages

How I love it when I dial 1571 and the bimbo at the other end says "WELCOME to BT Answer. You've NO messages." Thank goodness for that, I say.

Labour is an utterly busted flush

The Independent on Sunday reports today that Alice Mahon, Labour MP for Halifax for 18 years until 2005, has left the party. She says Labour has broken many of its election manifesto commitments, and adds:

It is not a party I recognise. I have lost faith with it ..... I am very, very sad: the Labour Party has been my life. I have reached the conclusion that there is not any avenue left in the structure of the Labour Party for people like me. Any threat from anybody marginally from the left and... the party machine comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

This comes top of a little-noticed piece on the Guardian website (though for some odd reason not printed in the paper) by Bryan Gould (remember him?) titled I disown this government, in which he refers to "shameful episodes at home and abroad which cumulatively are a complete denial of what a Labour government (or any British government) should have been about".

There have been some achievements, Gould writes, but these have been "molehills, judged against the towering peaks scaled by New Labour in its rejection not only of Labour, but of any decent and civilised values". It is a piece well worth reading.

Of course, to the ruthless New Labour machine exemplified by thugs like Damian McBride, people such as Alice Mahon and Bryan Gould do not matter a toss.

For me, and I am sure many others, the latest appalling revelations merely underline what I was already thinking, which is that I don't want to have anything to do with this loathsome gang ever again. I have reached the point, for the first time in several decades of political involvement at one level or another, where I am not merely resigned to the prospect of the Tories taking over, but actually looking forward to it -- not because I want the Tories, of course, but because I now feel an overwhelming desire to be rid of New Labour whatever the cost.

Another election looms

How time flies! One will soon have to start thinking about how to vote in the European elections.

I am not contemplating voting Labour. In fact, as things stand at the moment, I find it difficult to imagine ever voting Labour again in any election. What a gang of sleazy, incompetent, immoral, self-serving ratbags New Labour have turned out to be. It seems the only minister doing any good at all at present is an unelected one, the railway minister Lord Adonis.

So for the European Parliament it is either the Lib Dems or the Greens. Here in London there are MEPs of both parties and both seem quite good on the issues (mainly transport) that I have contacted them about, e.g. opposition to airport expansion. And it's nice to have an election in which, for once, a Green Party vote is not a wasted vote, because of the party list system used in the European elections.

On the other hand, the Greens sometimes seem a bit Eurosceptic. I wish I could get a bit more of a handle on what they would be positively in favour of, because I might agree with it, but their website is quite vague on the issue. But there is no doubt that the overall Green group in the EP has done some very good and useful things.

The Lib Dems are excellent on Europe and relatively clear, I think, about how they would like to improve the present increasingly dysfunctional structure (not that there there is any prospect of a wider consensus on that issue). On the other hand, the wider Liberal group in the Parliament is not an outfit that one particularly wants to boost. Some of its other member parties, like the Belgian PRL, are a long way over to the right.

So at the moment I think I am leaning towards the Greens. But we shall see.

Train of the day

A look back to the era when London tube trains weren't painted red, but just trundled around in bare aluminium. I suppose it saved money on paint. This is, I think, 1962 stock, so it was pretty new when I took this picture at White City, on the Central Line, in August 1963.

These trains were fairly spartan inside, but they served us well for some 40 years.

South America take it away

visited 32 states (14.2%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Just back from Montevideo and Buenos Aires. My message to the world for today is this: If you can avoid travelling with Iberia, do so.

Train of the day

This is what we used to call (and I still do) a Thameslink train, until the idiotically and meaninglessly named First Capital Connect took over the franchise. I have rather a soft spot for these dual-voltage electric units, even though they have never been enormously reliable. They were produced by British Rail in the 1970s 1980s for the then new route through the Thameslink tunnel, crossing London from north to south for the first time. (They were needed because of the two different electrical systems north and south of the Thames -- yet another of those technical nuisances bequeathed to us by history.)

This one is setting off from Bedford for Brighton. This clip captures what I love about these sets -- the distinctive whining noise they make when picking up speed, which reminds me very much of the old Southern Region electric units with slam doors that I remember finding so exciting when I first came to London as a schoolboy in 1957 (when they were all painted green).

British jobs for Japanese workers

See this: Anger over new UK trains contract from the BBC.

Ha ha ha! The Supreme Leader must really be regretting making that silly promise at the Labour Party Conference about British workers.

Of course we must all unite against protectionism and nationalism. WTO rules, level playing field, and all that. But have the Japanese bought any European trains? Er, no. Have the Japanese bought any European anything? I think we should be told.

Putting ill-informed people right

It can get rather dispiriting sometimes, the frequency with which people write such ignorant tosh that one feels obliged to write in with a correction.

The Economist website has a new (rather superficial) piece comparing the commuting experience in four world cities. The London section of the report includes this:

(.....) "bendy buses", an incomprehensible waste of precious road real estate (.....)

I wrote in the comments section as follows:

Absolutely wrong. The bendy bus is very suitable for certain high-density routes, where it uses the road space very efficiently. Having three wide doors, it can empty and load large numbers of passengers quickly. With a low floor and no stairs to climb, it is also much more accessible than a double-decker, especially for anyone with impaired mobility or who has luggage, pushchairs, etc. They carry considerably more people than ordinary buses, saving on operating costs. London TravelWatch calculates that the number of ordinary buses needed to match the capacity of bendy buses would be so much greater that the road space taken up in total, if bendy buses were withdrawn from the routes they currently operate, would be more, not less. See London TravelWatch's response to Transport for London's consultation at http://www.londontravelwatch.org.uk/document/3530/get

On a different topic, someone else wrote in the comments:

"...the train was repeatedly delayed for days on end due to leaves on the tracks. And by delayed I mean it took three hours to make the journey. LEAVES on the track? What century are we living in?????..."

After all these years in which this silly canard has been repeated and rebutted, wouldn't you think people would have got the message by now? (I largely blame dim-witted hacks in the gutter press.) I wrote in as follows:

Leaf mulch, actually. Leaves fall; rain falls; the leaves get wet; the train wheels grind the wet leaves into a sticky mush, which makes the tracks very slippery. So the wheels slide and the train can get going only very slowly. Once it is going again, the driver has to make sure the train doesn't skid. So he/she goes slowly and the train is further delayed. Not at all peculiar to Britain, in fact. It happens every autumn wherever there are deciduous trees next to railway lines. This has been explained so many times, yet people still won't believe it.

I wish there was a law against writing nonsense.

Going up at the end of sentences

Heathrow: Is there still hope?

I have been depressed and outraged in equal measure by the announcement that the third runway at Heathrow is to go ahead. I'd earlier been resigned to this as the most likely outcome, given all governments' unerring instinct for taking the wrong decision about anything to do with transport.

But more recently Christian Wolmar, among others, revealed that the Cabinet was deeply split on this issue, with the Millibands and Hilary Benn thought to be strongly against. Indeed, Benn went further than Cabinet ministers are normally supposed to go in openly questioning whether the third runway was compatible with Britain's air pollution commitments. (And in my view he should now resign; but people don't seem to resign on principle any more.)

This news of splits at the top level of government gave short-lived hope that Brown and Hoon might just do the sensible thing after all. But it was not to be.

The environmental and social reasons why the third runway is such a catastrophically bad idea have been gone into at length by so many others that there is no point in rehearsing the arguments again here, except to note that the village of Sipson is an extremely minor aspect of the case and not, as some affect to believe, the main point. I don't mean to say that I have no sympathy with the people who live there, only that the many arguments of principle against expanding the airport would still be just as powerful even if it could be done without destroying homes and communities.

The political arguments are a whole other thing, and were well put by Polly Toynbee in This craven airport decision hands Cameron a green halo, in which she describes the decision as "a crass error" purely from Labour's own narrow party point of view, quite aside from any other consideration. In one fell swoop the government has thrown away what green credentials it had, when, as Ms Toynbee points out, there was absolutely no reason why this decision had to be made before the election:

By 2015, when the first sod is cut on the runway, Gordon Brown will be no more than a pub quiz question. Plunging towards depression with air travel slumping, what was the rush?

"In order to be seen to be decisive", is her answer, and that just sums up the whole superficial approach that has always characterised New Labour -- all short-term deviousness and tactical calculation, no long-term strategy or overarching vision, still less anything resembling principled leadership.

All this is depressing enough, but what made me feel ill was that Ms Toynbee also pours cold water on any idea that the incoming Tory government will cancel the thing, despite their present rhetoric against it:

But how green is Cameron really? Only this week he opposed the compulsory switchover to new light bulbs. Few think that once in power the Conservatives will cancel the runway ...

I just hope she is wrong about that. Would a Tory government really take refuge behind a claim that it was now too late to stop it, having been so vocal against the idea? I have been quite surprised by how vehement Theresa Villiers has been on this subject from the Opposition front bench, even while we keep being told that a lot of decidedly non-green Tory backbenchers are secretly appalled at their party's public stance. We should note also that in London itself, Conservative activists, councillors and MPs form a significant part of the almost universal local campaign of opposition, as suggested by the event reported in this post by the Tory Troll.

There are of course those who have all along said that the runway isn't going to get built in any case, whoever is in power in the future. One of them is Vince Cable, as I have noted before. The Plane Stupid campaign also takes this line.

And finally, so does Christian Wolmar:

Either the proposal will be thrown out by the Tories or, by concerted opposition or, when serious money finally needs to be invested in it, the rationale will have disappeared. As one of my correspondents put it, no runway decision has ever survived a general election. This one will be no exception.

The interesting question is why does Labour do this? Why is it so in hock to business? My theory from talking to ministers is that they have no understanding of the private sector, only a fear that it will turn against them. So they feel compelled to give into them at any turn.

I hope these commentators are right, I really do. This is just such a hugely totemic issue for the future shape of our society.

UPDATE: The Campaign for Better Transport says in its February newsletter, "A final decision about Heathrow expansion is many years away". This is very reassuring, if true.

Will the USA become more civilised?

Here is some very good news, if it is true: The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty, says TIME Magazine.

It seems DNA evidence is the main reason for a recent fall in US executions. Apparently, various cases in which suspects were able to prove their innocence beyond doubt by means of DNA have made people realise that there really is such a thing as the conviction of the innocent.

Some of us knew this 40 or more years ago. Still, better late than never.

Train of the day

It is a myth that there are no proper regular train services in America. Not many by European standards, but there are some. Here, the 13.45 from Santa Barbara to San Diego calls at Fullerton, California. This push-pull double-deck diesel train, the Pacific Surfliner, is hourly between Los Angeles and San Diego, and rather less frequent north of LA. A few per day go as far north as San Luis. Here is the timetable.

Boris "emperor with no clothes", say experts

"The direction of the mayor's transport policies is becoming depressingly clear", says the latest newsletter of the London group of the Campaign for Better Transport. It is a pdf document which you can download here.

Johnson has adopted a misguided notion of 'mode netrality', abandoning the progressive road user hierarchy, which puts the needs of pedestrians and cyclists first, public transport users in the middle and car traffic last. Now TfL is required to develop plans to pursue Boris's impossible dream of reducing congestion by smoothing traffic flow. Increasing capacity at traffic light and other junctions will increase traffic -- this is road building without building any roads. It can only make congestion worse. Will no-one tell the emperor that he's wearing no clothes?

The report goes on to note that, as well as the cancellation of various tram and DLR schemes, "even Boris the cyclist has started to disappoint", with the halving of funding for the (so far woefully inadequate) cycling network.

In conclusion,

Time after time increasing capacity has been shown not to work as a means of tackling congestion; now it is to be tried yet again. In the last few years London had shaken off its reputation as the laggard among major European cities and had become one of the pioneers. Now it's losing its status as a leader in progressive transport policies.

I feel increasingly vindicated in my decision to spend a lot of time campaigning for Ken Livingstone last spring.

Worth checking out

Some interesting stuff that has caught my eye recently:

Broadcasting guru Richard Rubin has a wise and thoughtful piece about dodgy BBC outsourcing, the Ross/Brand affair (expressing exactly my own thoughts about how this was just a particularly ghastly example of what has become a "nasty, cruel and very regrettable" aspect of British popular culture), and how TV stars can get radio wrong. Also fond memories of meeting Kenny Everett and Keith Skues.

In Ross's case, there can be little doubt that the negative coverage was partly prompted by his outrageous but seemingly sincere belief that his £6,000,000 a year contract with the Corporation was "worth a thousand journalists". It was that remark that prompted me to stop listening to him -- I rarely watched him, in any case -- because the BBC must have, as its irreducible core, robust, well funded and well staffed journalism, and the thought that, at a time when it was cutting journalist posts, such cuts were helping to pay this grossly overcompensated 'star' was offensive, to say the least.

There is a new edition of Joel Crawford's online mag Carfree Times. Among other things, he puts forward An Agenda for President Obama. Nothing less than the fate of the Earth is at stake, he says:

It has become apparent that we simply cannot continue growth in the manner prescribed by the World Bank and the IMF. Unfettered capitalism is the road to vast riches for a very few people, a better standard of living for many, but not all, people, and massive damage to the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

The only solution is a completely different approach. We must focus not on material standards of living but on quality of life. (.....) Rising material standards of living have led, in the main, to a falling quality of life. We must focus not on goods, the manufacture of which is nearly always accompanied by damage to the environment, but on services, which can provide a livelihood to enormous numbers of people while improving the quality of life and protecting the environment. One service in desperate need is indeed the repair of damage we have already done to the environment ..... 

He goes on to deal with the transport and energy implications in particular. With the aim of ending dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, he calls of course for a national system of renewable electricity generation, but also, in the short to medium term, for an urgent large-scale programme to reduce energy consumption in all buildings (labour-intensive work which will provide many jobs), an end to new housing in rural areas and distant suburbs, a new tax on air tickets, a ban on all airport expansion, and heavy public investment in the railway network. The article focuses on the USA but most of what he says applies everywhere, and it is well worth reading in detail.

Progressive London is a new website designed to keep alive the progressive policies of Ken Livingstone. It is cross-party, not a purely Labour affair. It is campaigning on various fronts, including a petition against the latest above-inflation fare increases.

Intriguing revelations from Christian Wolmar, who claims that the Cabinet is deeply split over transport policy:

On transport, it is clear that Geoff Hoon has little truck with the environmental agenda. He is a definite supporter of the third runway at Heathrow, the touchstone issue in this debate. A host of younger Cabinet members, such as the Millibands, more tuned into the Green agenda, are ranged against him. Gordon Brown's instincts are to side with the arguments in favour of economic development and I suspect that means the third runway will get the go ahead in the New Year. 

Bendy buses revisited: following my posts in March and September, London Travelwatch has given its attention to TfL's proposal to abandon bendy buses on, in the first instance, routes 38, 507 and 521. I am happy to say they wholly agree with me that this is a stupid idea:

London TravelWatch believes that there are overwhelming advantages in terms of accessibility, manoeuvrability in limited roadspace, loading and dwell times at stops, and economies of operation to the use of articulated buses on routes with high volumes of passengers. In particular these are very suitable for use on routes which serve main line railway termini where large volumes of passengers often arrive at stops in very short spaces of time from arriving rail services.

Congratulations also to Dave Cole, who has been following this issue as well, and has managed to extract some information from TfL. One commenter on his blog points out that the proposed replacements for the Red Arrow routes (507 and 521) will lead to a net increase in the amount of road space required of 21% and an increase in the number of drivers required of 82%.

And finally, European socialism is back, according to Neil Clark in the Staggers and Naggers:

Across the continent, there is a definite trend in which long-established parties of the centre left that bought in to globalisation and neoliberalism are seeing their electoral dominance challenged by unequivocally socialist parties which have not.

Train of the day

Super art deco design: "The Rocket", streamlined diesel, on the Rock Island Line (USA), 1937.

Happy birthday to Edmundo Ros

I am delighted to learn from Russell Davies's excellent Radio 2 programme that Edmundo Ros is still with us, and celebrating his 98th birthday this week.

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s remember when he and his Orchestra, with its very good band arrangements, seemed to be hardly ever off the wireless (BBC Light Programme), except when it was Victor Silvester or Sandy McPherson.

Edmundo Ros surely did more than anyone else to bring Latin American popular music to Britain. I honour him by presenting here his signature tune, Cuban Love Song:

Grim news on transport in London

A couple of months ago I attempted to draw up a quick balance sheet of Boris Johnson's record on transport issues over his first few months in office.

At the time there was (a bit of) good news and (rather a lot of) bad news.

Since then, all the news out of City Hall has been dismal in the extreme:

(1) The Cross-River Tram scheme has been scrapped. This is a serious blow to hopes that Britain could resume its earlier progress towards catching up with our continental neighbours in the matter of sensible use of light rail in cities. The undoubted success of the tram schemes in Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Croydon has made it clear that there is nothing peculiar about the UK and that here, just as in France, Germany, Holland, Spain and elsewhere, trams are easily the best transport solution for high-density routes in cities.

In addition, the only opposition to the Cross-River scheme was coming from one or two loony maverick petrolhead Tories. Everybody actually involved, in particular all the boroughs along the route of all political hues, was very much in favour of it. All sorts of consultations had already been held by TfL, even down to the precise line of route (I declare an interest: I live near the route and took part in that consultation). There was none of the groundswell of local feeling against it that characterised the West London tram that Ken Livingstone wanted to introduce along the Uxbridge Road and which was scrapped earlier.

Boris Johnson says he is not against Cross-River in principle, and that the plan might come back on to the agenda if funding can be secured. But that is no good. Even if the go-ahead had been given now, it was going to take ten years to build it, which I find incomprehensible (the Victorians managed to build tram routes in months, not years). In effect he has junked the plan and all the work that has already gone into it. Funding could certainly have been organised if the political will had been there at City Hall and national level.

The consequence of this is that we have bequeathed to future generations more congestion on the roads and on the Tube, and a less livable London. We have also extinguished the hopes of deprived areas like Peckham that they will ever get properly connected to an efficient transport network, or benefit from the wider regeneration that that would bring.

(2) A lot of the initial coverage of Johnson's long-term idea of a new airport in the Thames Estuary assumed that this would be INSTEAD OF Heathrow. As he himself has often said, Heathrow is in the wrong place. But he made clear during Mayor's Question Time the other day that there was absolutely no question of shutting Heathrow. Any new airport would be AS WELL AS existing capacity at Heathrow. It is merely supposed to be an alternative to an extra runway at Heathrow. So the final effect of it would be a huge net increase in total airport capacity, which is exactly what we do not need at this point and which the citizenry, I suspect, simply will not put up with.

The only cheering note in all this came from Vince Cable, who as MP for Twickenham represents a lot of constituents angry about aircraft noise. He said last week that whatever Geoff Hoon finally announces (mysteriously and intriguingly, the announcement has just been postponed until the end of January), he is confident that the third runway is never actually going to get built, for a variety of practical, financial and political reasons. I am inclined to trust Vince Cable to know what he is talking about.

(3) The western extension of the congestion charge will be abolished. This makes no sense from an environmental, transport or urban-planning point of view, and seems to be a straightforward caving-in to the Jeremy Clarkson petrolhead tendency. It suggests that Kulveer Ranger has won the argument about "modal agnosticism" and that we are now supposed to go back to regarding the private car as equally entitled to take up scarce urban road space (a finite public resource), despite the fact that its use of this resource is enormously inefficient compared with other road users (bus passengers, cyclists, pedestrians).

(4) Once the DLR extensions that are already well under way (to Stratford International and Woolwich) are finished, no further extension to the DLR will be planned. So the longer-term ideas of pushing it eastwards to Dagenham Dock, and westwards from Bank to Fleet Street, Charing X and Victoria (part of which would have exploited some existing disused infrastructure), are dumped.

(5) Thoughts of extending the tram network in Croydon seem to have fallen off the table.

What are we left with? Well, there is Crossrail, and contrary to some recent whispers it does now look as if this is going ahead. That is very good, but some are worried that part of the financial justification for it is based on the assumption of a third runway at Heathrow. Although nobody has, as far as I know, suggested anything so crude as a straight quid pro quo, one might wonder whether the BAA share of the funding, for instance, would melt away if they see that they are not going to get their wretched Heathrow extension. Are we going to be told that we can only have Crossrail if we also get the third runway?

Crossrail is a very long-term scheme, the benefits of which will not appear before ten years from now, at the earliest. Much more urgent, indeed a lot more important than anything else, is getting on with upgrading the existing Tube services. Some work is pottering along, but there are big delays because of the funding crisis. One tube station near me has now been boarded up for nearly three years, with no sign whatsoever of any work starting behind the hoardings. TfL has a jolly website called "We are transforming your Tube" which attempts to put everything in the best possible light, but if we look at the details we see that the Bakerloo Line, for example, is not going to be finished until 2020, even if all goes to plan from now on. And the trains on that line are already 36 years old.

Here, the mess we are in is NOT BoJo's fault, and not Ken Livingstone's either. The blame lies with Gordon Brown, and his crazed sidekick, former investment banker Shriti (now Baroness) Vadera, who concocted the Public Private Partnership scheme on which squillions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in a now completely discredited attempt to part-privatise the modernisation work. As Chris Randall writes in Rail Professional magazine:

Despite fierce opposition from London's then Mayor, Ken Livingstone, and his transport commissioner Bob Kiley, who, with great prescience, described the public private partnership as 'fatally flawed', it was steamrollered through by Gordon Brown. Four years later, one of the contractors, Metronet, folded owing £2bn, causing prime minister Brown political embarrassment. And now the remaining contractor, Tube Lines, is demanding at least an extra £1.4bn of public money to plug a widening funding gap.

And yet New Labour seems never to have uttered a word of contrition about this. They continue to behave as if the PPP is a wonderful idea. And Baroness Vadera is rewarded with a ministerial job (not at Transport, thank goodness).

Baby P and local vs. national

Here is an important philosophical issue that keeps arising in politics, but never seems to get any nearer to being resolved: the tension between local decision-making and central government control.

I am among those who have argued in the past for a large dose of decentralisation from Whitehall and Westminster on those issues that can better be decided locally. This used to be long-standing Liberal Party policy. In more recent times, the Tories have also used the rhetoric of decentralisation (although in reality Mrs Thatcher was a great centraliser, the abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan authorities being only the most egregious example).

The Labour Party, by contrast, has tended (with some exceptions) towards a centralist view, both on the old left and among social democrats. I remember this being eloquently expressed by Neil Kinnock when he was fiercely opposing Welsh devolution in the 1970s.

The public (led by the gutter press) seems to be completely at sixes and sevens on this question. On the one hand, they seem to like the idea that "the man in Whitehall" does NOT know best. A good example of where I agree with them is the recent grotesque micro-management by the Department of Transport of local railway services all over England (though not Scotland and Wales), even down to how many carriages a particular train should have. Some of the railway franchises have been absurdly tightly specified.

On the other hand, when some local autonomy is granted, leading inevitably to different outcomes in different places, a huge clamour goes up against the "postcode lottery". That very phrase implies an expectation that everything ought to be identical everywhere -- the complete opposite of the local accountability that people say they want.

In theory, the trick is supposed to be to locate each sphere of decision-making at the most appropriate level for the function in question. This is what the EU calls "subsidiarity". The trouble is, when it comes down to it, how do you reach any consensus about what that level is?

Steve Richards ponders this question in relation to the dreadful events in Haringey:

In the abstract, the political fashion is for localism, especially in the Conservative Party. It is a common theme of the Tories: let a thousand flowers bloom! Central government should keep out of local matters even if things go wrong!

I have heard shadow cabinet members argue that, when in government, if things go wrong locally, they must declare that the crisis is not their responsibility. Yet look what happens when a single local story makes the national front pages. Cameron leapt in and demanded that the government acted. Within hours the government did act. The only issue was whether it should have done so earlier. No one was arguing that this was a matter for Haringey council and that it was up to the voters to kick out the ruling administration at the next local election.

As Steve Richards points out, giving the London Borough of Haringey the local autonomy to decide its own affairs has also meant that that same council was free to make calamitous mistakes. Most mistakes by local authorities do not get as much publicity as this one, but any reader of Private Eye's  "Rotten Boroughs" column knows that there is no shortage of examples of gross mismanagement, even -- or perhaps especially -- by big councils with their hugely overpaid, self-important chief executives.

And yet we do not, I think, want to abolish local government: on the contrary. One step forward might be to improve local accountability by electing local authorities by STV, so that there would not be such a tendency for some of them to be a permanent one-party state, as Haringey is for Labour.

Then again, can it seriously be claimed that the quality of decision-making at national government level is all that much better, when we consider all the monumental cocks-up that have been made in recent times?

Let them eat cake

I popped into Waitrose yesterday to get a few odds and sods, not including booze as we had enough of that for now.

Looking at my half-full trolley, I guessed I had probably spent about 40 quid, or 50 at the outside.

Here is the bill: £92.95. I thought the lady at the checkout must have made a mistake, but no, it all adds up.

Happily, the boyf and I are on reasonably good pensions. How the poor are supposed to manage, I have no idea.

Railway poster of the day

This is from the pre-1948 LNER (London and North Eastern Railway). I remember my mother, who grew up in east London between the wars, saying it used to be known as the Late and Never Early Railway -- a reminder that public moaning about the railways did not begin with nationalisation.

An amazing night; a wonderful day

I hadn't originally intended to stay up all night for the US election results. But I'm glad I did. 

It was a marvellous result. Obama's acceptance speech was inspiring and, I think, an historic moment. Today we can dare to feel a little bit more hopeful and optimistic about the world.

The trouble is that, despite all the understandable rhetoric, the extreme right has not actually gone away. If we needed any reminder, it came this morning on The Daily Politics with the appearance on Andrew Neil's sofa of the appallingly nasty Anne Coulter. 

47% of the electorate, which is still after all nearly half, voted against Obama. Some of them are the people who were energised by the ludicrous Sarah Palin. 

These people could be incredibly dangerous. It is a measure of how deluded they are that some of them believe in all seriousness that Obama is a communist. (Actually, watching one or two of his policy speeches, I am tempted to see him in European terms as more or less a Christian Democrat.)

I fear that these lunatics will now be so angry that at least one of them will try to kill Obama. I just hope his security people will be up to the mark and not let him take any rash decisions, as Kennedy did when he rejected advice to ride with the bullet-proof lid on his car in Dallas in November 1963.

Plus ca change ...

Nice little snippet in Richard Rudin's blog:

What a change from when we were last all together and today. I mean, in 1973, there was an unpopular Republican President in the USA, trying to extricate himself from a very unpopular war, there was a major economic crisis looming at home, Bruce Forsyth and Doctor Who dominated Saturday night television, Terry Wogan was doing the breakfast show on Radio 2…oh, hang on!

My fantasy Cabinet

A very sharp piece today by Andrew Rawnsley points out that neither of the current front benches has any credibility at all in the present crisis situation:

Gordon Brown in June 2005 giving the Chancellor's annual speech to the City at the Mansion House (.....) paid lavish homage to 'your unique innovative skills, your courage and steadfastness'. They had his personal thanks 'for the outstanding, the invaluable contribution you make to the prosperity of Britain'.  (.....)

Gordon Brown surpassed himself when he returned in 2007 to deliver his final Mansion House speech (.....) 'A new world order has been created,' he proclaimed. Britain was 'a new world leader' thanks to 'your efforts, ingenuity and creativity'. He congratulated himself for 'resisting pressure' to toughen up regulation of their activities. Everyone needed to follow the City's 'great example', emulate this 'high value-added, talent-driven industry'. 'Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate.' Thanks to their 'remarkable achievements', we had the huge privilege to live in 'an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age'.

(.....) What he then hailed as a 'Golden Age', the Prime Minister now deplores as an 'Age of Irresponsibility'.

David Cameron comes out of all this no better. In June 2006, Rawnsley reminds us,

he trumpeted 'the victory of capitalism, privatisation and liberalisation'. (.....) It proved that 'light regulation' and 'low regulation' were 'keys to success'.

(.....) In September 2007, Mr Cameron (.....) chose to amplify his thesis about the ascendancy of unconstrained capitalism. In a section entitled 'The End Of Economic History?', he answered the question by declaring that: 'The debate is now settled.' 'Liberalism' had prevailed. The left's silly idea that markets required tight regulation had been thoroughly discredited. 'The result? The world economy more stable than for a generation.' 

All this being so, perhaps it is time for a Government of National Unity. We have coalitions in wartime and now we are at war against the danger of economic meltdown. Here are some suggestions for a Lib/Lab/Con coalition cabinet that brings in sensible people of talent irrespective of party, and that removes from office those most tainted with blame for getting us into the current mess:

Prime Minister: Kenneth Clarke

Chancellor: Vince Cable

Housing: Jon Cruddas

Transport: Norman Baker

Leader of the House:  Tony Wright

Energy and Climate Change: Michael Meacher

Culture: Gerald Kaufman

Chief Whip: Charles Kennedy

Europe: David Curry

Leader of the Lords: Chris Patten

Foreign Secretary: Ming Campbell

Business: Chris Huhne

Communities: Diane Abbott

Education: David Willetts

Social Services: Frank Field

Health: Evan Harris

Security: Dame Pauline Neville-Jones

Immigration: Damian Green

Defence: Sir George Young

Environment: John Gummer

Justice: Bob Marshall-Andrews

Home Secretary: David Davis

Scotland: Malcolm Bruce

Wales: Lembit Opik

Whither the railways?

Gordon Brown's partial nationalisation of some big banks has prompted new interest in the question: what else might be about to go bust and could usefully be nationalised?

Almost every essential service, seems to be the answer. As far as transport is concerned, airlines are already going bust all over the place, but most of their services are anything but essential. Railways are a different matter, and historically it has always been the case that passenger numbers fall sharply in times of economic slowdown. If we are really going into a severe recession, several of the companies operating the existing railway franchises could easily go down the pan. When their premium/sudsidy agreements with the DfT were drawn up, steeply rising ridership into the distant future was the forecast.

I noted the other day that New Zealand, having privatised its railways, has decided that the experiment was a failure, and has re-nationalised them.

Now comes news that Germany, which has been gradually moving towards rail privatisation for some time, is abandoning the project. It will keep its major railway network, Deutsche Bahn, in public ownership after all. (Some smaller branch lines there are already operated by private companies on a franchise basis.)

True, the form that the German privatisation was going to take was not nearly as stupid as the British one. Railwaymen on the continent have for years been citing the British model as a classic lesson in how not to do it. But even their more sensible version will not now go ahead.

Meanwhile, Christian Wolmar observes that re-nationalising our railways need not in fact cost anything, contrary to what ignorant politicians like Peter Hain keep saying. CW writes:

What New Labour refuses to let on is that the railways are effectively largely publicly-owned anyway. Network Rail, which owns the infrastructure, is a company without shareholders that is dependent on government backed debt (to the tune of £20bn), for its survival. It receives billions in annual grants direct from government and is, to all intents and purposes, a state-run enterprise.

So all that needs to happen is for the operating companies to hand back their franchises either when their terms expire or when they get into difficulties.

Nobody should worry that public ownership need involve excessive interference by civil servants. On the contrary, one of the great paradoxes of the railway privatisation saga is that we have ended up with far greater micro-management by Whitehall of services, rolling stock deployment and timetables now than was ever the case under British Rail, which in fact was an arms-length operation rather like the BBC. 

The present structure is also phenomenally more expensive than the old one, both for the taxpayer in subsidies (BR in its latter days was actually rather efficient in its use of resources) and for the passenger in fares, some of which are astronomically higher than in any comparable country. Truly we now have the worst of all worlds.

Neil Clark, founder of the Campaign for Public Ownership, is naturally cock-a-hoop at recent developments. 

Cripes! Boris goes all Keynesian

Well, I never. Until a couple of days ago or so, all Tories and the people they represent were scornfully dismissive of J.M. Keynes and everything he stood for.

How the worm turns! BoJo in today's Torygraph extols the virtues of Roosevelt's 1930s efforts to spend America's way out of depression by such projects as building the Hoover dam: 

It is no wonder, frankly, that the average tourist to America still spends a lot of time looking at 1930s infrastructure, because Roosevelt's New Deal created 122,000 public buildings, 77,000 bridges, 664,000 miles of road and 285 airports, as well as jobs for 8.5 million people. Like the German autobahns - built at roughly the same time - these investments were indispensable to the country's future growth and economic might.

The lesson to be drawn, says the Mayor, is that in our present economic mess we must press on with big projects in London: Crossrail for starters, various other rail schemes, the Thames Tideway tunnel, and maybe, in the long run, his favourite fantasy, a new airport in the Thames estuary:

We will beat this recession more speedily, and emerge in far better shape, if we make sure we put people to work in projects that boost the long-term competitiveness of the country. That means investing in the things that can radically improve the transport, attractiveness and general liveability of the capital city, the motor of the British economy. We may be in a hole, but the lesson of history is that tunnels and bridges and dams can bring jobs and growth.

Boris Johnson's attempt to pose as the new FDR is a bit rich: Crossrail and the other rail schemes, notably the transformation of the North London Line into the London Overground and the inclusion in the latter of the extended East London Line, due to open in a matter of months, were planned and got started under his predecessor, Ken Livingstone. BoJo has merely inherited them all. Ditto the various DLR extensions that are well under way.

Still, his confidence that Crossrail is definitely happening is reassuring. Presumably he knows something we don't, because all the rumours recently have been to the effect that the project is being drastically scaled down, as first noted back in August by The Railway Eye and later picked up by Private Eye.

Eight bits of good news

Not everything is gloom and panic. Here are eight pieces of good news on the transport front.

1. The US government is suddenly spending money on 15 projects to boost intercity rail passenger capacity. Amtrak carried more passengers in July than in any month since it was set up in 1971.

2.  Road travel in the USA fell by 9.6 billion vehicle-miles in July.

3. The European Parliament has rejected enormous pressure by the motor industry to water down new EU regulations on fuel efficiency and lower CO2 emissions for motorcars.

4. New UK car registrations fell by 21% in September. The BBC report implies that this is assumed to be a "Bad Thing". They are essentially regurgitating a press release by that gang of shameless crooks, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Obviously, for the rest of us it is a Good Thing.

5. Aviation worldwide will lose more than £5bn over 2008 and 2009, with scores of airlines expected to go bankrupt, according to the IATA. This is excellent news. (But do not travel on airlines you've never heard of, and do not buy shares in any airline.) The unsustainable nonsense of "cheap flights" must surely now be almost at an end.

6. October's Modern Railways reports (text not on line) that building work has started on Edinburgh's new tram system. The first line will link the airport to Leith via Haymarket station and Princes Street. No thanks to the SNP minority government in Scotland, who tried to junk the scheme when they came into office.

7.  As a by-product of the Thameslink programme, Catford Loop trains from Sevenoaks that currently terminate at Blackfriars will, from next March, be extended through to Kentish Town, Monday-Friday. This appears to mean a 50% increase in frequency, from four trains an hour to six, between Elephant and St Pancras. Unlike Crossrail, the Thameslink scheme is now, at last, visibly going ahead and will cost far less while bringing improvements of a similar order, once it is all finished in 2015.

8. The new Rail Minister is Lord Adonis, who is a railway enthusiast. Christian Wolmar has the background.

"Casino capitalism and sheer greed"

Will Hutton is one of the few people who appears to have a clear idea about what has gone wrong with the financial system and what must be done to put it right. His long piece in yesterday's Observer, This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world, is an absolute must-read.

Hutton writes that the crisis has been 30 years in the making, caused by "libertarian free-market fundamentalism, unregulated globalisation, the collapse of social and political forces committed to fairness, the explosive impact of financial innovations ... and sheer greed".

He notes that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union (though I'm not too clear what that really has do with it), there emerged in the USA "an ideological commitment to the view that government regulation had no place whatever in the economy".

(My own take on this has always been that the emergence around that time of new technology that facilitated further globalisation made it easy for these far-right economic notions to take over the world in what is essentially yet another form of American imperialism. Trotsky told us long ago that you can't have socialism in one country; but now we cannot even have European social democracy in several countries, though it worked perfectly well in most of Western Europe for several decades and remains, I am sure, the preferred model for most Europeans. Because American fundamentalist capitalism wanted untrammelled free-market forces to let rip, all based purely on individual greed, the whole of the rest of the world was somehow obliged to follow suit.)

Anyway, Will Hutton forensically sets out the stages that were gone through to reach the present mess, with ever more obscure financial instruments to disguise what was going on, ever more grotesque opulence for the wealthy few who benefited, and an ever-growing gap between rich and poor. "There was no effective opposition", he says: the left everywhere simply collapsed as an intellectual and political force:

There was no conviction that any alternative to this shareholder value-driven financial, 'securitised' capitalism existed, or any political muscle to support it even if there were. Mainstream culture moved away from public purpose and fairness; the new priorities were individual self-fulfilment, personal experience and loyalty to self.

This kind of ruthless, selfish, short-termist, fundamentalist capitalism, which now seems to be self-destructing, is contrasted with the "stakeholder capitalism" that he espoused in his 1995 bestseller The State We're In. He puts forward, in some technical detail, his plan for what now needs to be done, involving the creation of a new system, "built around different principles -- a long-term commitment to building businesses, support for investment and innovation, and fairness". To achieve this, the government must become the biggest shareholder in the financial system, so that banks are forced to behave differently -- "to move from financing casino capitalism to productive enterprise". He concludes:

The world of go-getting investment banks has gone forever (.....) What we are witnessing is a system failure that requires a systemic response – the creation of a new system that sponsors a fairer, more productive capitalism in its place, while maintaining high flows of credit and debt.

This is a terrifying moment; but it is also our generation's once-in-a-lifetime chance to change British capitalism. Brown has an awesome responsibility to his party and his country. I hope he rises to the challenge.

In the following 13-minute extract from last Thursday's This Week, Hutton outlines some of his ideas and discusses them with Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott (the soundtrack is slightly out of sync, apologies).

End Of Part One

My mention in passing this morning of Brian Walden reminded me to look out this very funny clip from a now completely forgotten TV comedy show of around 1980 called End Of Part One.

To get the most out of this, you have to be old enough to remember (1) Brian Walden presenting Weekend World -- living embodiment of the "Birt-Jay thesis" -- every Sunday morning, and (2) an extremely irritating Welsh trade union leader called Clive Jenkins.

Reshuffle (2): Tom Harris

Who knows what was in Gordon Brown's mind when he sacked Tom Harris from the government over the weekend: these things often seem unfathomable, with pretty useless people being promoted while manifest talent is left to rot on the back benches.  It was ever thus: I remember Harold Wilson's inexplicable failure to give jobs to Brian Walden, John Mackintosh and Tom Ellis.

In the case of Tom Harris as Rail Minister, though, one can only say "good riddance". What was the point of giving that particular job to a man who doesn't like railways? He it was who put forward the preposterous idea that the government should be "modally agnostic", i.e. he could not bring himself to say that it is better for us all if more people go by train and fewer by car.

Of course he could just have been parroting what his civil servants told him to say. The head of rail at the DfT, Dr Mike Mitchell, has been fingered many times in the railway technical press as the source of a great deal of nonsense, notably the department's rabid opposition to further electrification until it was forced recently into a U-turn.

UPDATE:  Christian Wolmar now reveals that Tom Harris admitted to him that he (Harris) had got it wrong about modal agnosticism.

Railway poster of the day

This is from New Zealand - where, incidentally, the privatised railways have recently been renationalised.