Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

I am trying to give some credit to Boris he almost died of covid then had a kid he is not ready to abandon yet, but I do feel like his almost total absence during a global crisis and a pending major national change is more down to a combination of cowardice and lazyness.

Thats especially damning because he clearly wanted to be seen as some modern day Churchill, but Churchill, think of what you will of a 19th century aristocrat having the world view of a 19th century aristocrat, got energised by the mortal challenge of WW2 and rose to it, and by all accounts had the time of his life dealing with it.

And he was an old geezer, so Boris's possible ill health is little excuse to do thoroughly failing to live up to the picture he was keen to paint. Or to any standard of high office, really.

[The Brain]

Over many years he has carefully built a reputation as a lazy and incompetent embarrassment, of course he doesn't want to disappoint people.

[Sheilbh]

I mean Churchill was only 65 in 1939 which is a reasonable age for a Prime Minister (he was far too old and not fit for the job in his second term).

I think Johnson has all of his personal flaws which we know about - laziness, no attention to detail etc. But I think, when we get books about this, we will be astonished at how bad his health actually was and the effect that had not so much on what he was doing but just on government given his role and how central the PM is in British decision making. I think it'll be similar to Suez where a lot of that is down to Eden's own personality, but also he'd had several botched surgeries and was taking a lot of benzedrine - he said he was practically "living on benzedrine". And that had to have had an impact.

Or in the American context the extent of JFK's drug dependency. I could be wrong but I think it'll come out that Johnson was a lot more ill than we ever knew (the UK government tends to be very secretive about health issues - there's no equivalent to the White House doctor) and that it had a bigger impact than we knew. As I say, I could be wrong, but I suspect he isn't recovered and I'm not convinced he's really fit for office on a purely physical level.

[grumbler]

He still has close to five years. Maybe it will all work out after all...

Here is the complete text by the way:
https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

Did they at least lower the dosage on his meds after that was published?

[Duque de Bragança]

What's with you and railroads (and coal mines)?

Railways are the path to prosperity and equality.  There's a huge correlation between towns that kept their railways and towns that haven't gone to shit (and the connected far right fuck wittery).
I'm also a strong believer in the strain of thought that car focussed urban design was one of the great mistakes of the 20th century which was utterly destructive to social cohesion. 
Plus the environment is nice.

Tyr for HS2 to the North and Scotland!

Definitely. The most sensible North East rather than North West route please.

Somebody at the Grauniad disagrees. 

The vanity of HS2
Simon Jenkins

It seems there's cash only for the trophy projects that feed politicians' egos, no matter how wasteful they are
Fri 18 Sep 2020 10.00 BST Last modified on Fri 18 Sep 2020 17.12 BST

Poor Wylfa. The nuclear power station nestles in a landscape of bliss in north Wales, but it was never glamorous enough for Westminster. This week the Japanese firm Hitachi failed to get sufficient government subsidy for its rebuilding, and pulled out. Wylfa lacks the political magnetism of the only other spearhead into Britain's new nuclear age, Hinkley Point.

HS2: construction of £106bn high-speed rail line officially starts

Hinkley Point was different. It was blessed by France's then economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, and seen as talisman of the "golden era" of Anglo-Chinese relations under David Cameron and George Osborne. This was despite doubts over its security and a blistering national audit report on its £22bn cost and £50bn lifetime energy bill surcharge. The project was not about money or energy but about preening diplomacy. Wylfa could eat its heart out.

If I were starting a business school I would offer an honours course in vanity infrastructure. In April, Boris Johnson finally issued "notice to proceed" on the most lavish construction project in Europe, Britain's new railway, HS2. Its value for money was plummeting even before coronavirus, at just £1.20 for every £1 in cost, and possibly heading towards 70p.

Inquiries by the National Audit Office and Commons Accounts Committee were scathing not just at costs soaring from £34bn in 2010 to £106bn today, but at the morass of consultants, facilitators, conflicts of interests and dubious bonuses swilling round HS2 Ltd, its boss pocketing £660,000 a year. Supporters continued to weave and dodge between arguing the case for speedier journeys, more commuter capacity and a "boost for the north".

What has been intriguing about HS2, like Hinkley Point, is its political invulnerability. From now on it will be charging British taxpayers over £100m a week for the scheduled 20 years of the project. The sums are so stupefying as to have an inverse effect. They are taken as a sign of political machismo, of "build, build, build". Opponents have included even Johnson and his svengali, Dominic Cummings. Other ministers are only too aware that £100m a week cannot avoid impacting on their projects.

Over last winter, HS2's still uncertain Whitehall champions were desperate to get it across the threshold where cancellation would appear more politically damaging than proceeding. Despite increasing evidence that the line would largely benefit rail capacity into London and may never go beyond the Midlands, they spliced it on to Johnson's "levelling up" agenda and demanded a decision in April, in the midst of the Covid crisis. They won what is currently Whitehall's most coveted prize, Johnson's U-turn of the week.

The absurdities of vanity politics were no less evident at the other end of the spectrum in this week's total closure of Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge's owners, Hammersmith and Fulham council, had been screaming for years to London's mayor about its deterioration, which they could not possibly afford to repair. The bridge was closed to traffic 18 months ago and the public is now banned from walking over it and even boats from passing under it. That scuppers next year's boat race.

The chief target of the screaming was London's previous mayor, Johnson. At the time he was splurging money on vanity projects, including a cable car, a giant helter skelter, rear-entry buses, police water cannon and a £175m "garden bridge". By the time the garden bridge was halted by Johnson's successor, Sadiq Khan, £43m of taxpayers' money had vanished into the project. That is almost exactly the sum needed to stabilise Hammersmith Bridge.

Since closure coincided with that of London Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, the story was a gift to last week's New York Times: "London's bridges really are falling down". The headline instantly had the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, racing to Hammersmith to declare himself "fed up" with Khan and promising urgent action to save the bridge. He seemed unaware that his boss was chiefly to blame. Now the cost of full restoration of the bridge has risen to £141m, or 10 days' spend on HS2.

Business students will note the role the media plays in these projects. Whitehall has a formal audit monitoring of infrastructure projects, meticulously charting their value for money. This appears to have no bearing on what gets cabinet approval. Meanwhile, the Treasury's traditional scepticism towards public extravagance, savagely austere towards local government spending, vanishes in a puff of glory when the rate of return is measured in headlines rather than public benefit. .

The assumption that all public infrastructure must be good is now holy writ. Every political speech, every party manifesto, bows before it. The Trades Union Congress and Confederation of British Industry cry in unison. Infrastructure is "investment" – in power stations, railways, prisons, schools. Anything built, its mere creation, implies a positive rate of return. No one questions priorities or asks who will pay for what goes on inside. As for Wylfa, it is clearly the Hammersmith Bridge of power stations. Perhaps it should call the New York Times.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/hitachi-nuclear-test-hs2-huge-projects-politicians-wasteful

[Sheilbh]

God I hate Simon Jenkins

He is a very strong NIMBY - no new housing anywhere, no new infrastructure anywhere just move the young into more and more crowded flats and public transport. I literally can't think of an attitude I disagree with more

[Josquius]

Ugh. I can't stand this dishonesty in the anti HS2 folks. Claiming its just a vanity project or its a lot of money just for rich people to get to London a bif faster (because tickets are going to cost far more than on a train today for some reason) and not a vitally needed piece of infrastructure which is decades overdue.

[Sheilbh]

Ugh. I can't stand this dishonesty in the anti HS2 folks. Claiming its just a vanity project or its a lot of money just for rich people to get to London a bif faster (because tickets are fling to cost far more than on a train today for some reason) and not a vitally needed piece of infrastructure which is decades overdue.

Also it totally ignores the biggest reason for HS2 (or other HS lines): capacity. The ORR did a report this year saying that basically there is no spare capacity on the West Coast Main Line. It's already overcrowded (can confirm from every time I get the Pendolino to Liverpool ) and they can't run more trains without basically making the timetable incredible risky (ie one delayed train knocks out the entire timetable). If we want more people to use trains (and we should from an environmental perspective) and the current railways lines don't have capacity to run more trains, then we need to build new lines

And the vanity points about Boris Johnson are ridiculous - HS2 has been under discussion/consultation/planning for over a decade. It's not like the fucking garden bridge

[celedhring]

The cost does seem way OTT though. I've just made the comparison to our high speed rail and it's like 15 times more expensive per mile. Are you using golden spikes?

[Sheilbh]

The cost does seem way OTT though. I've just made the comparison to our high speed rail and it's like 15 times more expensive per mile. Are you using golden spikes?

This is true of all UK infrastructure projects. I understand there are specific issues with HS2 - so it involves quite a lot of tunneling and is intended to be used by 18 trains per hour which is more regular than common European HS lines.

But there's been a government report on this and flagged some issues that we have. Basically it says there are quite systemic issues/policy decisions, issues around funding and issues with the supply chain that are the main drivers for this. So some of it is really basic and difficult to fix - we're a high density country with high land value, so the countries we should probably learn from on this are places like the Netherlands and Belgium not Germany, Spain or France. We also have a heavily decentralised planning system which adds a lot of cost - I don't think government can force through planning decisions, so I think 18 councils were involved in the planning process for HS2 so it involves more time and effort and takes a lot longer than in most of Europe.

Plus insurance is more expensive in the UK (as are building regulations compliance - flipside is I understand that we have the safest construction industry in Europe, I think there's a debate about that that could be worth having but my instinct is for stricter regulations even if it does make things more expensive). But then there's stuff like we have a construction industry that sub-contracts heavily and doesn't have a great record of governance and project management which is the worst combination

This has been an issue for ages though - it appears that report was from 2010 (because cost over-runs always happened under New Labour too) and it's still, I think, the same issues:
https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/why-civil-engineering-costs-so-much-in-the-uk

[Sheilbh]

The issue with the British (hard) left in one tiny incident. Keir Starmer's delivering his speech to the virtual Labour Party Conference (mandatory joke about the Lib Dem conferrence still able to go ahead after the rule of six was introduced) and he tweeted, I think fairly benignly, this:

My vision for Britain is simple:

I want this to be the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in.

And there's a tonne of responses underneath complaining that it's infantile point scoring with our neighbours to say "best" and that it's just Johnson-style boosterism/elitism and people accusing him of adoptin the Tories' language and people asking "well if you want us to best, which country do you want to be worst?" etc.

It feels to me lik a really benign, basic political aspiration for a centre left party and yet....

Edit: Oh I see Lisa Nandy Shadow Foreign Secretary has said in her speech "we stand up for Britain, we stand up for British people, we stand up for British interests and we will always put that first" - which seems to me a clear attempt to draw a line under Corbyn's foreign policy legacy. Apparently I'm reading that wrong and Labour are basically fascists now

[Josquius]

Starmer sounds fine. Idiotic to find fault there.
Nandy on the other hand.... Yeah. Britain First... Way too trumpian.

Hs2- needs noting the major point of pushing up the price.... The anti HS2 people forcing bits into unnecessary tunnels, causing delays, etc... I really suspect they're deliberately making it more expensive to help their case.

[Tamas]

[Sheilbh]

Starmer sounds fine. Idiotic to find fault there.
Nandy on the other hand.... Yeah. Britain First... Way too trumpian

I think it's fine as a foreign secretary to say you'll put Britain first - that's literally your job to advance British interests. As opposed to, for example, taking Assad's word over chemical weapons usage or asking the Russians if they poisoned someone in Salisbury.

Edit: I also feel like it's just an issue for the centre-left if they can't even pretend to like the country they're trying to govern

[Tamas]

Yeah there's a lot of nauseating mandatory self-hate on the far left. There are steps between fascism and despising your own nation by default.

I am seeing that BTW also with the way people are trying to copy the US left's attitude to slavery and its local history. As big and terrible part it played in building the empire's wealth as it did, Britain DID lead a global effort to end it, and an approach referencing that and demanding that we continue that tradition by facing the shadier parts of history and its racism still living with us would IMHO work better than "SHAME! SHAME SHAME! REPENT FOR THE 1600s WHITE PEOPLE!"