The Boris Burrow delusion

The UK is most definitely in the post-truth era. In that we have a government whose goal is to do nothing useful, but control the narrative and, with the aid of their allies in the media, delude and distract the public… while they get on with the merry business of robbing from the poor to give to the hard up billionaires. And we see no greater example of this than the proposed tunnel between NI and Scotland. Or “the Boris Burrow” as the media are already calling it.

Firstly, it has to be acknowledged that Boris Johnson has a habit of vanity projects that don’t go anywhere, yet cost hundreds of millions of pounds. Examples being his garden bridge (which cost over £50 million, in consultancy fees for a bridge that wasn’t built) or Boris Island (his proposed £50 billion airport in the Thames estuary, that would be built next to a wrecked WW2 munitions ship and on the wrong side of London). So he has form here. But just to show how stupid an idea this is and how utterly divorced from reality it is, let look a bit deeper.

The problem is that right in the middle of the Irish sea, between NI and Scotland (assuming a connection via Galloway to Larne) is the Beaufort Dyke, a rift in the sea floor about 300m deep. That means your tunnel has to go below that, which would make it one of the deepest tunnels in the world, or go around it. Going around is probably a better idea, since its filled with WW2 munitions that occasionally explode.

Incidentally crossing from the Mull of Kintyre, would mean a much longer journey for traffic (it takes about 3-4hrs to drive from Glasgow to Campbeltown, about the time it takes the ferries to currently cross). And this would be directed down a peninsula with very poor road infrastructure, and no railway lines, with the situation not much better on the other side around Fair head. Furthermore, you’d have to drive any new road or railway line through mountainous terrain, with several obvious bottlenecks that are prone to land slips (the rest and be thankful being a good example).

So while the Galloway crossing is only about 55 km’s across, accounting for the detour around the Beaufort Dyke and approach tunnelling under land, you are probably looking at a distance of about 75 km’s, about 1.5 times longer than the channel tunnel. That cost about £16 billion in today’s money, so this project would cost a lot more, particularly when you consider that the rock under the channel was soft chalk, clay and Limestone, while the route of this tunnel will have to go through is much harder volcanic rock. This would cost a lot more to drill through (or more precisely to blast through) and take a lot longer. A shorter tunnel in Japan took 17 years to build and cost about $15 billion in today’s money. So a figure of at least double the channel tunnel’s cost (say £30 billion) is probably a more realistic cost. I don’t know, maybe Boris thinks he can find some cowboy builder to do if for him over a long weekend.

And given that it would be the 2040’s or 2050’s before the tunnel would be ready, there’s every chance Scotland will have left the UK by then and NI will be part of the south. So given the lack of enthusiasm and cross party support from Holyrood and Stormont, it would be a wasted exercise.

But okay, suppose it gets built anyway and in 2045 the first train arrives into Larne….and immediately derails. Why? Because Ireland used a form of Broad gauge for its railways, while the UK uses Standard gauge. For those not familiar with the history, there was a bit of a format war back in the 1840’s between those advocating standard gauge and broad gauge (and various other sizes in between). While in the UK the standard gauge advocates won (largely by default as their network was larger and thus it was easier to set everything to standard gauge) but the opposite happened in Ireland.

Given that Ireland has a shared rail network, with most of the NI train lines essentially being a branch line leading up from Dublin’s Connolly station, you’d have to either have a break of gauge at the tunnel exit (meaning you need to stop the train, get everyone off, off-load all cargo and then load them onto new trains), which would delay onwards travel and largely negate the benefits of a tunnel. Or you’d have to convert the entire rail network in Ireland, all 2700 km’s of track, to standard gauge.

To say this would be a huge job is to put it mildly. The Tories seem to think they can send some navies out to move one line of rails over and pay them with potatoes (after all they live in some sort of Victorian era fantasy). Think again, there is no such thing as a quick or cheap job when dealing with such an old railway network. You’d need to remove the rails and replace the sleepers, which means getting heavy equipment and cranes into the middle of a farmers field. You’d probably have to re-pack the track bed to account for the change in load distribution. And while you are at it, upgrade (or reinstall) signalling, points, etc.

And you have to do all this on an active railway line that you can’t just shutdown for a few years. So you’ll have one train on standard gauge going one way, another on broad gauge going the other and a large network of replacement buses in between. You’d be talking of the mother or all train disruptions going on for several years. And of course the trains themselves would need to be refurbished, with the bogies set to standard gauge. But of course with some of the rolling stock it won’t be cost effective to refurbish (I know a lot of Ireland’s rolling stock is sourced from other countries with non-standard gauge networks, such as Spain or Japan) so some this rolling stock will have to be scraped and replaced.

Even if we were to assume an absurdly low figure of £5-10 million per km (which might seem high but its low compared to the £300 million per mile being charged for HS2), plus a couple of billion more for new trains and to cover the economic costs of disruption, that’s £15-30 billion, almost as big a job as the tunnel itself. And it would only be fair (as its a UK idea) that some significant portion of those costs would be met by the UK rather than Ireland.

And while we are at it, the transport infrastructure on the Scottish side in Galloway isn’t the best (better than Kintyre, but still not great). To get the maximum benefit from the tunnel you’d want to put in a high speed rail line and a dual carriage way connection to the central belt. Plus a dual carriage way across from the M74/M6 near Carlisle would also be a good idea, as that would avoid the need for travellers from England to follow a bunch of B roads (or take a 100 km detour up to Glasgow and back down again). Again, you’d be spend figures in the order of £10’s of billions on all of this.

So add it all up, tunnel and support infrastructure you are looking at total costs in the order of £50 to £100 billion and several decades worth of construction work. That’s £7700 to £15000 for every man, woman and child on the island of Ireland or £28000 to £55000 per person in NI. Do you honestly think the Tories are going to spend that sort of money on a part of the country where they have no seats and very few supporters (and what few they have were fishermen, who aren’t likely to vote Tory again any time soon). Nevermind the fact that as the UK lacks the expertise to build a tunnel like this you’d have to bring in outside contractors (or to put that in Daily Mail terms, give tens of billions of taxpayers money to foreign multinationals and allow tens of thousands of migrant tunnel workers into the country).

And why are we doing this? Because the Tories awful brexit deal has screwed over the country, most notably NI. There will still be border checks and controls at the end of the tunnel. It changes nothing. Hell at those sorts of prices it would literally be cheaper to just cut the Unionists a £100k cheque each and pay them to move to England and still have change left to afford a gold plated statue of Boris that rotates so that it always faces the sun.

But of course you aren’t going to get such analysis from any pro-Tory newspaper. War is peace and all that. They will put a positive spin on it, much as they’ve been doing with brexit. Some Tory donors will be given generous contracts to consult on and plan for this enterprise, which will simply become yet another Tory money burning party funnelling public money into the offshore accounts of the rich and non-tax payers. And we have the nerve to call other countries corrupt.

So this bridge is just another brexit fantasy project. Another step in the Tories attempt to Americanise UK politics with false controversies. Its a dark illusion intended to distract the public from covid, brexit and their dismantling of the NHS.

Brexit Britain: “worldbeating” for all the wrong reasons

One phrase you keep on hearing from brexiters is worldbeating. They want their Empire 2.0 to reflect the warped vision of British exceptionalism beaten into them back in public school. And at least in some respects they are succeeding. The UK is now “worldbeating” for all of the wrong reasons.

Firstly its now official, the UK is one of the worst effected by Covid. While we can argue a bit about the figures (its likely some less developed countries are showing artificially lower figures due to less effective testing, or in some cases government manipulation of figures, something Trump is attempting in the US). But certainly in terms of countries where some level of testing is ongoing, England has the highest death rate in Europe and the UK is the 2nd worst in the world for per capita excess deaths. And its worth noting there is still some disparity within the UK as to the death rate from Covid in care homes (oddly enough while other countries are trying to get an accurate measure of these figures, the UK government seems to be trying to actively avoid such awkward questions).

Interestingly, while Scotland’s death rate is high by European standards (then again its part of the UK and subject to the same policies from Westminster), it is still lower than in England, vindicating the SNP’s decision to adopt their own approach independent of London in how they dealt with Covid.

So while the bungling incompetence of Boris Johnson & the PM…sorry “special adviser” Cummings has to be part of the problem, clearly the massive Tory cuts to healthcare is the main reason behind this “worldbeating” death rate. And no, before anyone says it, oh every government has failed to invest properly in healthcare (that’s just a coping mechanism for Tory voters trying to allay their guilty conscience). Every year that labour had control of the NHS budget it went up in excess of inflation. Every year the Tories were in charge it has gone down. Its that simple, they didn’t invest in healthcare and people died. When you voted for them, you voted to kill people.

The Tories response of course, rather than learning the error of their ways and reversing past policies, has been to double down, they’ve handed out contracts for testing or the prevision of PPE or ventilators to their chums and cronies, often without any proper tendering process and to companies who have no experience in that field (e.g. they handed medical testing contracts to an accountancy firm and the manufacture of ventilators to a manufacturer of diggers). And just in case you hadn’t guessed it, yes the key thing uniting all of these companies wasn’t their suitability to do the job, it was their donations to the Tory party (or that senior Tories sit on the board or work for them).

We were also promised a “worldbeating” contact and trace app…which didn’t work and drained people’s phone batteries thanks to all the spyware Cummings minions had installed on them. So while most EU states now have a working app and a contact tracing service to go with it, the UK has no app and a tracing service (predictably run by a Tory donor awarded under a no bid contract) that is in chaos. Of course the one benefit of using private firms linked to Tory donors, is that they will keep information private, allowing the government to cover up the extend of the crisis to the detriment of being able to deal effectively with it (hence why we’ve seen new local lockdowns spring up with no advance warning).

And we were told last election that you can’t vote for Corbyn, why he’ll nationalise everything and destroy the country. Well a recent report from the ONS has said that the UK’s railways have now been effectively nationalised by the Tories, to the point where things such as the debts held by the private firms running the railway’s should technically count as part of the UK government debt (and rail employees counted as civil servants in all but name).

The only difference is, that labour’s policy would have given the government more control over the service. Hence they could look at making improvements to the service or lowering ticket prices (which are completely out of control, seriously I had to buy a train ticket recently and it was only barely cheaper than renting a car). All in all the UK’s rail service offers some of the poorest value for money in the world (as a someone who has travelled in trains around the world, UK trains are the most expensive and offer a very poor quality of service). So another “worldbeating” success then.

British Trains are not only the most expensive in Europe, but some of the least reliable

And speaking of Corbyn, the tabloids were quick to drum up fear of his chums among the hard left “old guard” of the labour party during the election. And who do we see being nominated for the house of lords by Johnson? But hard left labour leavers such as Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart, Frank Field and many others, such as Claire Fox (a member of the Revolutionary Communist party). They are allies of Corbyn, and while they were critical of him, that was because he didn’t back brexit more firmly (in a party that overwhelmingly supports remain) and they felt he took the whole Antisemitism thing too seriously (yes really!)….and these are the sort of people who Johnson, a Tory PM, who ran on an anti-Corbyn platform, wants as members of the house of lords. Go figure.

I’d further note that this more or less confirms what I’d long thought, that many of these labour MP’s were such hard core brexiters that they effectively sold out and betrayed their left wing principles, for which they are now being rewarded. There were efforts within labour to forge a middle ground (respect the referendum, campaign on the promise to negotiate a deal with Brussels, then put it to the people with remain or no deal as alternative options). However, these MP’s fought this process every step of the way. Even when Corbyn (who is also a brexiter of course) was cornered at conference and forced to adopt this compromise policy, this cabal of leavers persuaded him to not fully commit to it, which was one of the factors why labour lost the election (as neither remainers or leavers trusted labour on brexit anymore).

They also used their votes in parliament strategically to ensure labour lost several key votes (which of course Corbyn didn’t punish them for), even going against their own constituents (several represent strongly remain voting areas). Like I said, this can’t have been a coincidence. They were clearly working with the Tories and now they are collecting their twenty pieces of sliver. The only reason why Len McCluskey or Corbyn himself aren’t becoming lords as well is because even Daily Mail readers would smell a rat.

And speaking of which, Len McClusterfu*k is busy trying to undermine the labour party, by threatening to cut of funding (because settling out of court an anti-Semitism case might hurt Corbyn’s feelings…so better to destroy the party in order to save it).

And these labour Judases were not alone, a whole bunch of other people got peerages, including a Russian Oligarch linked to Putin (the son of a KGB agent no less). And this is on the back of the Russia report, which showed how Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin had undue influence on the UK. And the Tory response…make em lords of the land! Meanwhile John Bercow becomes one of the few speakers in history not to get a peerage.

Johnson with his mate (and now a lord) a Russian Oligarch friend…that’s taking control…if you are Putin that is!

But we are supposed to get a “world beating” set of trade deals….you mean like the ones we had while within the EU, with not just the EU and EEA nations but 50 nations other around the world. While it is true that trade talks between the EU and other nations (such as the US) have failed, that’s generally been because the EU negotiators concluded that such deals would be too detrimental to outweight the benefits (there is is certain give and take with trade deals). The same applies to the UK. You can have a trade deal…if you don’t mind making a lot of farmers unemployed. And you are prepared to lower your food safety standards or privatise the NHS.

And who is behind the UK’s trade policy? Another drinking buddy of Dominc Cummings & Michael Gove, who is seen as a “snake oil Merchant”, even by fellow leavers. And in Kent the local MP’s (who voted for brexit) are complaining about the plans to build several massive lorry parks to hold all the trucks queuing up after January. They want their no deal brexit…but only if everything stays exactly the same!

I’ve heard it asked whether Boris & co are pretending to be mad in the hope of getting a trade deal from the EU, or are they actually mad. I’d argue, neither is true, they are just corrupt. They know that their backers and donors can profit from a no deal (its called disaster capitalism) and they can blame everything on covid, the EU and migrants/poor people.

I previously compared the Tory government to Brazil’s operation carwash. In truth that is insulting to Brazil’s most corrupt politicians. They are no where near as bad as the Tories, who aren’t even bothering to try and hide their contempt for the people (there’s a Tory MP arrested for rape who is not even been suspended from the party). Yet what”s the bet many of the racist mugs who voted Tory last election will do so again next election. That is brexit Britain for you, a “worldbeating” kleptocracy.

Is it just me, but when Tories say “worldbeating” they mean sh*t. If so, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go to the bathroom, I have some “worldbeating” business to take care of.

Nightmare journey! Courtesy of Virgin Trains

Got the to train from Glasgow to Coventry the other day. I got to the train station at 7:30 am, got on an early train…only for it to go nowhere for 2hrs! Finally, they came on the intercom on told the entire train (which now due to the delays consisted of the passengers from 2-3 trains) to decant and hurry over to Motherwell where the train would now be leaving from. We all had to rush off and squeeze on to a commuter train (at the back end of the rush hour!). After a bit of a wait on an overcrowded Motherwell platform, we were off again, on a train that looked suspiciously like the one we’d left behind in Glasgow Central….suggesting that the reason why it hadn’t left for two hours was due to some box ticking H & S malarkey…or because they couldn’t be bothered to fork out the extra cash to get maintenance done on a weekend!

Anyway, I then received conflicting instructions, one lot told me to stay on the train and get off at Wolverhampton, the other said, get off at Carlisle, which I got just as the train was pulling into the station. Ran off the train, and only realised as it was pulling away that I’d left behind my laptop bag on board!

Anyway, the train for next leg of my journey shows up, I was told to change trains at Warrington (another guy on the train in a similar predicament and been told the train would stop at Stafford, but it sailed on thro). Then I was supposed to get train from there which was supposed to stop at Coventry, but it didn’t go there and instead went straight into London Euston. As this was the likely spot to find my laptop, I decided to go visit Lost and Found, but “we’re lost ourselves” is the best way I can describe the staff there, they were no help!

But there were more useful than Virgin train staff, who won’t let me board the train, and then had the nerve to charge me an extra £26.50 to get to Coventry (even tho I was only there due to their incompetence!). They seem to have a fairly mercenary attitude the Virgin train staff in London, which boils down to “here comes a customer, lets see how much we can stiff him for”. Terrible people! While Deutsche Bahn‘s corporate motto is “travel better by train” I assume Virgin’s is “stand and deliver! You’re money or you’re life”

That night I was sick, likely due to a dodgy sandwich I bought on the train!

Anyway, last time I ever go by Virgin trains again, plan to avoid railways as much as I can now and next time I’m driving to Scotland. The UK train system is now so expensive, so badly run, that its little short of a waste of time. Environmentalist I might be, but I’m also not a mug, and if you use the trains regularly, then you’re a mug! Keen as I am on train travel, the UK’s train system is simply so decrepit and eyewateringly expensive that its become pointless to use it.

I avoid using my name sake airline (Ryanair, no I’m not related in any way to this guys, so don’t bother e-mailing me about the time they lost you’re bags) unless I absolutely have too, because while you can get a good deal from them, when things go wrong, you’re fucked! (I assume that the motto of Ryanair is “what the fuck do you want now”). The train companies, notably Virgin, are essentially offering Ryanair service for British Airways prices. If anything goes wrong with you’re journey, as with Ryanair, you’re well and truly stuffed and the Virgin staff are practically rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of what they can shaft you for. Hence, I see little to be gained from traveling with them. As I’ve previously pointed out, its actually cheaper in many cases in the UK to drive for less than the off peak (nevermind any time) ticket price.

Conditions of Carriage

To those down trodden commuters who feel they have no choice but to take a train (or a bus) I’ve one bit of advice – stand up for you’re rights as specified in the conditions of carriage. In essence when you buy a ticket on public transport you’re essentially entering into an agreement with the rail company to convey you to you’re destination within a reasonable time period. If they fail to complete this in a timely manner you’re entitled to compensation. And of course, if they fail to complete the journey at all (the bus/train breaks down or is somehow cancelled or delayed to the point of making the journey impossible) its basically their responsibility to get you to you’re destination, regardless of what that ultimately ends up costing them (if they have to get you and everyone else on the train to travel 40 miles by taxi, so be it!).

Of course for obvious reasons, staff at many train companies have a habit of developing “selective amnesia” as regards these rights, hence why its important that you apply them. If everyone whose journey was delayed by that cock up in Glasgow the other day claimed compo like I did, then after that happens a couple of times, trains would be delayed a lot less frequently, as the company simply could no longer afford to keep paying out compensation! Of course, the rail companies will try every trick they can to make things difficult. The claims process is bureaucratic (they’ll practically want you to show up with both parents to prove you’ve been born sort of stuff), they’ll loose the odd form (course Royal Mail being a similar bunch of incompetent wasters will often do this job for them), they’ll take months to process it, they’ll misspell you’re name on the compo cheque, every trick they can in the hope you’ll give up and go away. But like I said, stick with it. Enough people do, then things will start to change.

Of course, as I see, the quickest way to bring about change on Britain’s railways is to avoid them altogether and deprived of passengers, just let the whole sorry mess keel over. Then on the wreckage a “proper” railways service can be built in its place. I mean would people in any other part of Europe put up with this combination of overpriced, crowded and unreliable trains? No way! they’d skin ya alive! It would be a resigning issue in many other countries if trains were run this badly.

My laptop loss is playing havoc with me. Its like loosing a limb! Again, I reckon there’s little hope of recovering the laptop as Virgin seem pretty lousy at recovering lost property….although my suspicion is it was likely nicked by one of their staff! While I’ve backed up most of the stuff and now have a new machine up and running, I’ve been too busy the last few weeks to back up stuff, so I’ve lost the best part of two months worth of files. Either way, I suspect next time I go between Glasgow and the Midlands, I’ll be going by bus or driving.

The State of Britain’s Railways

Two big stories as regards the UK’s railway’s caught my attention this week. Firstly, HS2 which has finally been given the go ahead (more on that later), and secondly, an article by the Beeb in which they attempted to identify the UK’s most expensive railway journey. The result of this brief (and admittedly not entirely scientific study) are staggering, Britain has some of the world’s most expensive railways!

While it should come as no surprise to learn that the Heathrow express tops the billing at a whopping £1.17 per mile, the price of 80p per mile on the London to Manchester line, is incredibly high. Even the 40p off peak and 14p season tickets on this route are pretty expensive. London to Kettering or Swindon/London lines are also in the +70p anytime range, with an average of 20-30p per mile across the entire country. This is about 3 to 10 times more than what our cousins in the rest of the EU pay for rail travel. Indeed, I just hopped onto the Amtrak website in America and its about 62p per mile (UK) for the gourmet expensive Acela Express NY to DC (anytime) to about 4.5p (yes really!) for a cheap advanced ticket on the Chicago to California Zephyr. The Americans often joke that they have a railway service that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. The UK has a railway system that the Americans would be ashamed of!

Consider for sake of comparison that the typical cost of motoring is about 7-10p per mile. While this motoring cost only accounts for fuel, with insurance, tax and depreciation costs of the car adding yet further. But its doubtful that the cost of motoring would be any more than, say 20p in the most cases, or about half the off-peak fare price on the Manchester-London route, a quarter the anytime price (which would be a fairer comparison since a car represents “anytime” travel) and 1/18th the cost of the Heathrow Express! And if you’re starting to think rail travel is a tad pricy spare a thought for Londoners. The standard fare on the underground now works out at the equivalent of £5-10 per mile! That’s about 25-50 times pricier than driving! It is thus no surprise to learn that the average commuter in England can spend the best part of several thousand pounds, for a spot to stand for an hour pressed up against someone’s sweaty armpits twice a day. The comments page on the above beeb article clearly indicates much anger among British commuters about this sorry state of affairs.

Now the rail industry would counter the above by pointing to their “advance” fares. My reply is, yes if you’re incredibility lucky enough to get an advance fare they are pretty cheap, but they are rare as hens teeth. I’ll do the odd long journeys across the UK and will often specifically look out for such tickets. I have regularly searched the booking system trying to get advance tickets (searching as far in advance as the website allows) and 9 times out of 10 have failed to get anything better than the standard off peak fare.

And at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that the rail companies seem to go out of their way to make booking cheap fares as hard as possible. For example, probably the best bargain you’ll get on the railways, is the Sail/Rail ticket. For an incredibly cheap £30 single, you can get a train and a ferry ticket from the Midlands all the way to Dublin (Ferry and rail combined). I think its about £38 from central London, with similar deals to France to be had for similar bargain basement prices.

However, you try booking one of these tickets through the railway company websites! It will usually refuse to allow you to book a seat on the most convenient trains. This can be bypassed by ringing up the Ferry company, who are usually more than happy enough to book you on the specific trains you want (i.e. the boat train that waits for the boat and coincides with its departure). However, this is not always an option, if for example, as I was over Christmas, coming from Ireland to Britain, but booking the ticket in Britain, you have to go through the rail company. Ring up, and you get put through to an Indian call centre, where they will struggle to understand you’re accent, and to be perfectly blunt, the staff at Indian call centres I find simply do not understand how the British rail system works – which is hardly a surprise nor the staff’s fault, as the Indian train booking system is completely different to the UK one (see here for more info on the Indian train booking system). Try booking a bike on a British train through a Indian call centre and see what happens (when I moved from Scotland to England my bike ended up chained to a lamppost outside Patrick station for a week as “the Trainline” call centre screwed up my booking, I had to eventually transport it south by car!).

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