Driving Home For Christmas - In Circles... by Wiggiatlarge

A recent excursion onto our new but flawed Northern Distributor Road reminded me of the inadequacies of the Highways Department and planning, this built on the cheap, not in a monetarist way I might add - after all this country specialises in overpriced and late infrastructure - but in the final delivered article.

All junctions are roundabouts even when it is obvious a flyover was the answer, but we don’t do flyovers and tunnels as they are too costly despite the fact our near continental neighbours would not dream of building a decent road without either.

The first thing you notice when entering the roundabouts, and they are all the same, is an extra lane appears on your inside before you exit as can be seen in the image below:

Naturally this has caused both confusion and accidents plus a vocal lobby to change the markings, all to no avail as nobody in the Highways Dept would ever want to admit they made a mistake and they speak of ‘safety is at the forefront of all we do’ and drivers will “adjust” there has been quite a lot of adjusting but accidents still happen and here you can see why.



The driver is at fault but you can see the problem coming from two lanes to three and needing to get into the outside lane to exit. What was the Highway Code ruling? You do not change lanes on a roundabout, although here you have to.

Another local gem is this traffic calming scheme that the jobsworth in the video claims is worth the money as they had to spend by the end of the financial year. Shame that someone didn’t bother to see it spent wisely.

The obvious fault and the one causing accidents (something else that is claimed is because it is new to drivers and they will get used to it, though they haven’t) is the fact there is no right of way, no red arrow, white arrow and signage showing who has the right of way, so it becomes a free for all and the speed limit supposedly imposed by the traffic calming goes out of the window as drivers, idiots, speed up to be at the chicane first.

The mini roundabout is another winner at the start of this chicanery. In the video you can see it is so offset as to be almost invisible and impossible to actually negotiate so drivers either cut off part of it or ignore it completely, and no, despite spending more money it hasn’t improved it as they still have no right of way signs. The dept must be run by someone with the foresight of Diane Abbott.

When we lived in Suffolk Colchester was not that far away and exiting the town on the bypass north they decided to put in this little number - I believe Swindon has one as well, known as the ‘magic roundabout’:

Now amazingly it can work rather well. The problem is two fold: not being something that is universally built, for those coming upon it first time it can be daunting to put it mildly, and it also has no obvious right of way so you hesitate, often without reason but with that sense of survival and it also fails when there is a lot of traffic i.e. rush hour using just two exits as the flow is non stop and it is difficult for any other user to get in so to speak. Another complicated solution on the cheap that a flyover would have solved permanently.

You don’t have to go far to find these engineering wonders. Chelmsford solved a problem forty years ago at the Army and Navy roundabout that was a nightmare in the rush hour: you guessed it, they did the right thing and built a flyover crossing it, only this was a cheap one-way alternating temporary structure, like a Bailey bridge, that forty years later is still there and falling apart. In the meantime traffic has increased and the one way at peak times usage no longer works very well; any chance of the permanent structure promised forty years ago? Nah.

I have featured roundabouts but I am sure anyone could do the same with many other worthy road items such as the many badly-marked and -constructed exit lanes; the world is your omelette, as they say.

For example, we have just had a £5.6 million scheme to widen a road near us to twin lanes both ways to make it easier driving into the city. Only they apparently forgot that they had just finished a scheme on the same road nearer to the centre that has been reduced to one lane as a bus lane has been incorporated at great expense. You know it makes sense.

I will finish this rather joyless piece with another miracle of the road designers' art. This is on the A40 at Cheltenham: there are no words needed to describe this piece of failed logic: those that have to circumnavigate it have marked the offending section. Marvellous.

Happy motoring.

AV, not PR

Writing for Briefings for Brexit, Ashley Walsh says the Labour Party should scrap its policy on the EU and abandon its call for voting reform in the form of Proportional Representation.

As a 'former Labour councillor' he is concerned to save the Labour Party. I'm not - and I also loathe the Conservative Party and the 'Liberals.' Political parties are what's wrong with politics. Like flesh-and-blood creatures, organisations have a will to live quite apart from any justification for their existence. The disconnect between Parliament and the people is owing to the absorbing, insular in-fighting in Westminster.

PR would worsen this: it turns voting for a representative into voting for a party, and the latter then decides on who will be your named representative. Many MPs are already too focused on what their Parliamentary bosses and pals want; we really don't need a system that makes the party the unit of political currency.

But as I wrote here long ago, First Past The Post is a terrible arrangement and suits the databank psephologists and strategy managers of the parties, for whom only 'the swing voter in the swing seat' matters. Though I have always voted, throughout my adult life, my vote has had effectively no power at all, with perhaps one exception when the constituency boundaries changed again (and by which time New Labour had thoroughly outworn its welcome) - thanks to the 'safe seat' where I live. The consequence for me and my fellow voters was to be taken for granted.

I suppose Labour likes the idea of PR because according to numbers of votes cast in the latest General Election the Tories would not have gained a majority and Labour would not have had the scale of cull that they have suffered. Result: a hung Parliament, again?

But I'm not convinced that AV would have had the same result. Under AV, you list your preferences so second and third options can come into play if there is not a clear 50%+1 majority in the first count (and two-thirds of seats in the Commons - including the one for my constituency - are gained on a minority of votes cast). The winning candidate is likely to be the one who has tried hardest to win over the centre ground - a centre that will be different in each constituency.

Had AV been the system ten days ago, I think the Conservatives would still have won, thanks to crossover voting from Brexiteers. Let's also not forget that there could be others for whom the Tories might have been a grudging second preference - after all, think of the Northern Labour voters who even held their noses and plumped for Boris as a first choice!

A version of AV is what MPs themselves employ when deciding on a new Speaker - in that case, it's done by a series of rounds in which the lowest scorer is eliminated each time, so the voting behaviour is influenced by who is left in the competition. It doesn't guarantee a great Speaker, but what could?

AV is also the system that the National Government wished to introduce in 1931; the Bill passed the Commons but the government fell before it could pass through all of the other stages. (The Lords wanted PR - why?)

In an extraordinary General Election, we've had the 'second referendum' that the subversatives wanted; perhaps the other second referendum we should have is a rerun of the 2011 one on AV - this time, with balanced media coverage for a change, as we had in 2016 (I still puzzle over how the latter happened). And this time, Labour might go for it.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Christmas Box, by JD

Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" is not meant to be a Christmas song but it sounds as though it ought to be so I have included this excellent cover by Sarah Jarosz.

"The Holiday Blues" and "Longfellow's Yuletide Poem" come from Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour - https://www.themetimeradio.com The much maligned BBC used to broadcast this on Radio2 and I enjoyed listening to it; the Beeb is not all bad you know!

Longfellow's poem was turned into a Christmas Carol in 1872 with music by John Baptiste Calkin and there have been two other musical versions since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Heard_the_Bells_on_Christmas_Day

The NHS: an alternative, by JD

In response to the recent post on NHS failings, Nick Drew commented:

It's a ghastly story, Sackers, and very saddening. But my observation is, that the NHS is really only for delivering a broadly-based, rather undifferentiated 'mass average service', which on average will do quite a lot of good - a kind of "hygiene plus" - mass inoculations are a prime example.

If what's wrong with you can be (a) recognised fairly easily, and (b) improved or cured with simple measures - drugs for the most part, but other things like re-hydration and rest - then chances are, you'll see the benefit. Anything requiring subtle diagnostic detective-work, or a highly-trained eye, or an ultra-tailored course of treatment ... and you're back in the lap of the gods. Only the Queen is guaranteed to get the very best that medical science has to offer

The parallels with education are strong: take an illiterate population and impose compulsory, fairly decent basic schooling, and you'll raise the average level quite markedly - indeed, you'll effect a trnsformation. Will every child get exactly the customised teaching etc that would absolutely maximise their life chances? No.

To which I replied:

In principle, agreed; but the f-ups here were down to lack of basic skill (hoist usage), care and attention (reading X-rays, monitoring drug combinations, noticing when the patient isn't sleeping) and not following the sugeon's after-care plan (not the only case I've seen).

Ticking boxes is no replacement for vigilant, shop-floor-walking management.

Now JD offers his perspective, based on his own experiences:

**************

Have you heard of Henry Willink's 1944 proposal for a National Health Service?
https://www.conservativehome.com/highlights/2018/01/profile-henry-willink-the-conservative-who-proposed-a-national-health-service-before-bevan-created-one.html

As I understand it from various other references, Willink would have retained the many Cottage hospitals in the country. Most have now been closed in the name of 'efficiency' meaning 'customers' are obliged to travel to the nearest big shiny new hospital. This is an example of the 'bigger is better' approach to health care which in reality is nothing more than an extension of Henry Ford's production line with doctors and nurses instead of car builders. We already see it on a smaller scale with your local GP allocating ten minutes only to each patient.

Now that I am old I have had the opportunity to enjoy(?) the experience of our sanctified NHS. It doesn't work, it serves only to hand out coloured aspirins (my grandfather's phrase for the pills and tablets handed out for anything and everything).

The medical profession accept the reality of psychosomatic illness. Why then do they not encourage the equally valid concept of psychosomatic well being?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychosomatic-Wellness-Candace-Pert/dp/B0010R3ZR2

"Candace Pert, Ph.D. is a research professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Pert is best known for her discovery of opiate receptors in the brain. She was a featured expert in the highly acclaimed Bill Moyers PBS series Healing and the Mind. In addition to her research efforts, Dr. Pert lectures and teaches about how our minds and feelings influence our health and well-being. She is the author of the bestseller Molecules of Emotion."

I read about Dr Pert a long time ago and I have discovered for myself that psychosomatic wellness does work after doing the opposite of what my epilepsy doctor told me to do: instead of increasing my tablets, I reduced them. She was not amused when I told her which is understandable but I have had no seizures since that time. It's all in the mind!

....and yes, it is the management which is in urgent need of reform, starting in Whitehall!

Boris Johnson: are we in trouble already?

This morning the news is that PM Boris Johnson intends to get the Article 50 deadline enshrined in law - but Classic FM also reports that he is referencing the Political Declaration as the basis for the dealmaking he is to do.

I discussed the changes to May's (or rather, Barnier's) version of the PD in this article on The Conservative Woman - and at the end there's a spreadsheet of the alterations in it.

Unless BoJo goes through his revised version with a thick black censor's pen we will (in my view) continue to be horribly entangled.

More haste, less speed?

My latest on 'The Conservative Woman' - can Boris fight globalism?

In which I argue that Boris Johnson has short time to start changing the system or it will go down:

https://conservativewoman.co.uk/get-cracking-boris-theres-no-time-to-lose/

Boris Johnson's 'One Nation'

A landslide victory is not enough. Tony Blair had one in 1997 and even many of those who hadn’t voted for him were prepared to give him a chance; a chance he threw away with both hands, preferring to fight the next election from Day One. His student-ignorant ‘eye-catching initiatives’ didn’t tackle the roots of our economic malaise – for a touchstone, just remember the meretricious stupidity of scrapping the Royal Yacht, that floating trade mission for the UK.

Johnson doesn’t have the luxury of a honeymoon period: the malcontents have already started their civil disorder in London. He’s ‘on appro’ and we’ll need more than fast talk to retain the nervous new Conservative voters in the North and other long-suffering working-class areas. Mess this up and it’s ‘après soi, le deluge’.

In fact, it could already be too late, if the banking debt in the Eurozone brings the temple down around everyone’s ears before we can get out. BoJo’s vow to work around the clock had better be sincere. And he’ll have to work at the right things. It’s no good fixing the roof when the foundations are cracking. It’s structural and it’s not going to be a quick job, so he’ll have to start straight away.

The late Sir James Goldsmith clearly saw the threat back in 1994, at the time of the GATT talks – the first part of the interview is here. His argument was that sweeping trade liberalisation sets workforces across the world against one another and tips the capital-labour seesaw savagely in favour of the former, inevitably causing growing social tensions in the developed world. It may seem odd that a billionaire should make such a case, but that is to forget that his moral roots were in one of the three Abrahamic religions, all of which impose an obligation to care for the less fortunate.

We are in a secular doctrinal crisis, because the two principal political parties have long since become institutionally globalist. For the party of the CBI, Institute of Directors etc there was just too much money to be made from undermining the British workers (many of whom now have to claim benefits even when working); for New Labour it was too much fun being ‘intensely relaxed’ feasting with oligarchs and too easy to get votes for flinging bones to the dogs under the table while pursuing the neoliberal agenda. Man, what a party that was, and ‘I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left.’

What a stroke of luck it was for the Tories this time to face Corbyn, who traduced his own beliefs about the EU and tried to win popularity with a commitment to providing more bones; that, and his propensity for rubbing shoulders with people who shoot dogs. For I’m far from convinced that the life experience of our latest Etonian, though he is undoubtedly bright, has equipped him to understand the need for radical reform. I fear he feels it’s just a matter of ‘think pos’ and another dose of what’s made us sick, get it down you, mate.

If Boris is to prove me wrong, he needs to aim at what Sir James intended when setting up the Referendum Party: getting us completely free of the Lilliputian entanglements of the Berlaymont. If Gray May  and Bullneck Robbins had negotiated with the French after Waterloo we’d have ceded Kent and Essex and paid compensation to the Grande Armée; yet Johnson still clutches the awful Withdrawal Agreement and the even worse Political Declaration (that love-letter from Josephine to Napoleon) with only a few of the more compromising passages redacted.

The current system, globalism, is designed to enable a concentration of wealth and power, which is deflationary: the money boosts asset values rather than being recycled within the economy. So the velocity of money slows, ordinary people find it harder to make a living, the tax base shrinks even as the demand for financial support increases, and austerity eats itself like the worm Ourobouros. It’s great for the winners, until suddenly it isn’t – where are the rich Mayans now?

For all its talk of brotherhood, the EU is a scale model of globalism. Its ‘four freedoms’ allow companies to trade goods and services within the Union, challenging smaller businesses with both the costs of universal regulation and also their bigger competitors’ economies of scale (though, so I understand, discriminating against the financial services where the UK has an advantage); the free movement of capital allows companies to incorporate in the cheapest tax regimes while smuggling out profits from their foreign subsidiaries under the guise of internal transfers to pay for training and other services; and the freedom of movement of people is their liberty to go wherever work is to be had, racing to underbid their fellows.

We have to escape both the frying pan of the EU and the fire of unfettered global ‘free trade’. We can’t abruptly start a trade war with the developing world, but we have to manage the rate of change, compensating via tariffs and trade agreements for the unfair disparities in hourly wage rates that have turned the British working class into claimants.

Perhaps then we can become once again what Napoleon so despised, a nation of small shopkeepers; a nation of modest prosperity, self-reliance and the love of liberty.

Is Johnson’s mercurial mind up to such a detailed and sustained campaign?