Wednesday 13 June 2012

U Turn on a Railway Track



Hurrah! It was idle wot won it! The blog, the letter in the Torygraph, the cunning slogan: H2O, Not HS2, the opinion-forming at every drinks and dinner party (you know you've got them when their eyes glaze over and they start muttering about getting home, I think).

Effectively dead. Effectively bereft of life and lying in peace. Effectively a dead parrot. Hurrah again! That's about three hundred square miles of prime hunting country back in play, and £30 billion of our children's and grandchildren's taxes saved for other, slightly less brazenly stupid projects.

In other news.......

After their brilliant banking bailout, here is what they now call a Spanish Revolver:
"The way the system should work is when you fail, you fail, and competent people are required to come in and reorganise the assets. What we are doing in the West now is taking assets from the competent people, giving them to incompetent people, and saying 'now you compete with the competent people with their money'. It is absurd economics and it is absurd morality” 
Jim Rogers, co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, the grand daddy proto-hedge fund

7 comments:

Sen. C.R.O'Blene said...

"The way the system should work is when you fail, you fail, and competent people are required to come in reorganise the assets. What we are doing in the West now is taking assets from the competent people, giving them to incompetent people, and saying 'now you compete with the competent people with their money'. It is absurd economics and it is absurd morality”

Amen to that!

What really irks me is that there have been millions spent already to get to this stage. 'Guvmint' consultants have billed for thousands of hours for an outcome which will never see a return - at least in our generation, and probably longer.

It was another Chunnel experiment, and there will be several consultants retiring soon, knowing that they've done a grad job in producing bugger all, rather like most politicians today.

Thud said...

I always felt a bit of an economic and business laggard during the boom years and now I thank my lucky and solvent stars I was.

Nomad said...

Ghost Train Hits Buffers?

Sebastian Weetabix said...

@Thud - I know exactly what you mean. From about 2003 or thereabouts I found myself thinking apropos our credit fuelled expansion "this is mad, this is a bubble, it's all going to end in tears"... and things just kept going up & up. In a funny way I was glad when Northern Rock keeled over; it made me think I was sane after all.

Sen. C.R.O'Blene said...

Ed Balls wants all the money to go to local authorities to piss up the wall - again. And all they'd do would be to shore up their pension pots and employ more staff for some stupid reason or other.

I'd give it to housebuilders, retail and leisure developers. They seem to be the only ones capable of planning ahead at the moment.

This isn't a finite list though....

;0)

Electro-Kevin said...

If they want to spend on railways it should be on:

- passing loops (so different services can mix)

- longer trains on peak services (to deal with overcrowding)

- open up dead branch and stations to service newly enlarged towns

- create park and ride shuttle services outside major cities

Do it nationally. It will relieve congestion on roads. HS2 will only work in one region and that is not guaranteed.

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