Ruth Kelly, the new Transport Minister, has denied claims that the Department for Transport was blackmailing local authorities in England into introducing road pricing schemes.
This is an absolute lie and I know for a fact that at least one local authority in Shropshire is being blackmailed into introducing road pricing.
Shrewsbury is the mediævil county town of Shropshire. The entire town centre is a maze of one-way systems and pedestrianised areas. Most of the town is bypassed and the town centre, at its busiest, is almost never congested. In fact, the only time I’ve seen the town centre congested is when the buses all converge on the same stretch of road. Other than that, there is one major bottleneck at the Welsh Bridge and one at the Train Station. Congestion, of the sort you would find in a large town or city is none-existent. It is perfectly possible, in rush hour, to travel from one side of town to the other in no more than 10 minutes.
However, despite the patent lack of congestion, the Department for Transport has made funding of a new bypass (which has been postponed for years) dependent on the introduction of a road pricing scheme for the town centre. The Tory-controlled county council, which seems to have been as convinced by the global warming scam as the party, has put in a bid for funding for a pilot road pricing scheme.
If the aim is to remove the car from Shrewsbury town centre than it will be successful. A few miles down the road is the Telford Centre – several hundred shops in a covered complex with cheaper and more convenient parking and a good selection of brand-named stores. Shrewsbury, on the other hand, has an uncovered high street, a couple of small covered shopping centres and a 1960’s market hall that could only be improved by several tons of high explosives. Don’t get me wrong, unlike my fellow Telfordonians I really like Shrewsbury. The high street is full of timber framed buildings and little alleyways with overhanging timber framed buildings that really do make it possible to imagine yourself back in time 500 years. But beauty alone won’t be enough to stop people abandoning the town if congestion charging is introduced.
I know that irony does not ‘travel’ but, at the risk of suffering severe English opprobrium, I will say, in all ironicalism, that you, matey, are a dinosaur.
Here’s to Independence!
Clarify?
“by several tons of high explosives”
You said “tons”? You really said that?
As for Gruff calling you a dinosaur he apparently meant that your thinking is “old style” and you are not fascinated by the fresh “green commitments”, “open-mindedness”, “modern way of seeing the world”, blah-blah-blag-lefty-liberal-politically-correct-blah. A Calum No 2.
You what about me Scaffold. Glad to see that you just can’t get me out of your head!
Also, you lump me with the “green commitments”, to be honest i think people blaming climate change on man is a load of shit. To be honest, i ain’t even to sure if the world is getting warmer, major cities, such as Paris have in fact seen a fall in average annual temperatures over the past 20 years! Furthermore, when people talk shite saying that global warming is making deserts increase in size, it is just that, shite, in fact the Sahara has shrunk in the past 30 years.
If one accepts the premise that the world is getting hotted, that global warming is actually happening, then why do we assume it is because of us? It is such a egoistic, anthropocentric thing to do, and so typical of mans self obsession and bigheadeness. Furthermore, people tend to forget that the earth is coming out of a really big ice age, which we have been in for several hundred million years, we have been progressively getting warmer and warmer for hundreds of millions of years, technically the earth is still in an ice age, so duh, of course it is going to get warmer as we move out of the ice age! Furthermore, there is more substantial evidence to suggest that the reason for the world getting hotter is because of the number of sun spots has increased, with there being a direct correlation between number of sun spots and heat of the sun. In the past century the number of sun spots has increased, and so has the suns temperature, ans therefore so has the temperature of the earth.
However, that said, i still think we should pollute less and use less energy, why? because using less energy make economic sense, i mean who doesn’t want a lower electricity bill? that’s why i turn off the lights when i leave a room. Also, i would like to see less pollution because i would like cleaner air, i would love to be able to walk in the center of London and breathe air as clean as that in northern Scotland. This week i was in Cairngorms, near Inverness on a Duke of Edinburgh silver expedition and i could feel the difference in the air when i came back home to London, i would love the London air to be as clean as the air up there. Also, i makes sense to switch from carbon energy because we are running out of coal and oil. But, i don’t mean that we should instead all have a shitty windmill on our roves, but instead i think that we should use nuclear power, as it is the more efficient (and cleanest) source of power around.
If i we the PM and had the choice of how to spend 5bn tomorrow i wouldn’t spend it on a load of effing windmills off the coast, i would invest it in social housing or something that will actually make a real tangible difference to peoples lives.