Freesteel Blog » In the future Boris won’t be funny anymore

In the future Boris won’t be funny anymore

Tuesday, May 17th, 2016 at 4:22 pm Written by:

I met my first Leave Europe supporter yesterday, but didn’t have enough time to quiz them. But they referred me to Boris Johnson’s speech in Manchester as an explanation.

I listened to it all.

Boris banged on about those nasty EU regulations infiltrating every part of the nation:

“They can’t tell us what sort of trains we can run, can they?

“Oh yes they can!

“Oh yes they can!

“The EU Commission told us that by 10 Nov 2018 we must create a rail freight corridor to Glasgow and Felixstowe, which means that Network Rail can be legally obliged to accept rail freight trains in place of passenger trains.

“Of course our excellent transport minister spotted this insanity, with the west coast main line full to capacity. If we had more freight trains, fewer passenger trains, there would me more overcrowding and higher fares. So he wrote a fierce letter to the Commission complaining that they were circumventing requirements, bending the rules, and of competence creep aka sticking their nose into something that wasn’t their business. But the Commission told him to ‘go and jump in a lake.’

“So we took them to the European Court of Justice, and what did the Court of Justice say? They told us ‘allez vous plonger dans un lac.’ They ruled on that occasion as they have done in 80 per cent of the cases in which Britain has been involved – they rules against us.”

Now these are the days when the world is interconnected, and we have a Channel Tunnel, and roads that are utterly chockablock with a hundred thousand fat diesel trucks that can freely drive onto the motorways in enormous numbers.

In the meantime it’s practically impossible to arrange for a zero-carbon electric train to haul heavy steel products direct from the steel mills on the Clyde to the construction sites in Barcelona because of the amazing national railway bureaucracies along the way.

It takes years of painstaking systematic work to identify and address these problems, like those articulated in a Select Committee report from 2005:

Many of our witnesses told us that getting rail freight through France was very difficult. The significance of this problem is greater because France’s geographical position means that international rail freight to and from Great Britain and the Iberian Peninsula travels through France. We were therefore encouraged by Mr Hilbrecht’s confirmation that Europorte 2, a subsidiary of Eurotunnel, had received a licence and a safety certificate to operate in France…

The French two-part tariff system was also said to be a particular barrier to open access and fair competition within France. Mr Hilbrecht was happy “to say that we have achieved agreement with France . . . . They agree that it (the two-part tariff system) should be changed”. Unfortunately the French government claim that because of the public service contracts with regions they cannot do so before 1 January 2006. This two-part tariff system needs to be abolished. We hope that the Commission will ensure that the French government abolish it as soon as possible.

The last problem that we identified is the least tangible, but is nevertheless an important challenge facing the rail freight industry. The evidence we received led us to believe that the rail industry in general, and in particular the rail infrastructure managers, have inadequate incentives to win new traffic. We recognise that, for political reasons, rail passengers are given priority over the movement of rail freight. This appears to have resulted in an institutional framework within the rail industry in which there is little incentive to increase and improve rail freight.

Whatever the cause of this lack of commercialism and competitive performance, it has to be overcome if the rail freight industry is to revive and achieve its potential.

But Boris doesn’t give a toss about this if he can make people laugh at his stupid jokes.

He’ll say all EU directives and ECJ rulings are about Brussels bureaucrats meddling in everything with their crappy regulations, when these ones are about unpicking the thicket of stultifying regulations and prohibitive monopoly rules that make it impossible run trains across national borders.

You have to pass laws to repeal laws, and fight hard to get rid of bureaucracy.

Anti-democratic? Never mind that each one of these directives is examined, amended and passed by a European Parliament that gets elected every five years where every vote counts equally, so that when the Green Party gets 6.7% of the votes, it gets 6.7% of the seats — unlike in the utterly screwed up system in the UK that gives disproportionate representative power to tosswits like Boris to tell us like it isn’t.

Yes, I mentioned that steel industry, the jewel in the crown of Britain’s awe-inspiring industrial revolution of the 19th century. You remember how a private corporation in one of our former British empire colonies bought it in its entirety for small change ten years ago and then shut the whole thing down last week? How humiliating is that?

So much for the Commonwealth Dream, eh? I don’t see Britain owning any comparable assets in foreign lands, other than a few seedy tax havens.

This should have been a seminal moment in our nation’s self-image.

But it isn’t because our political feelings have become pathologically detached from reality.

Apparently the EU tried to save the steel industry by putting tariffs on Chinese impots, but this effort was blocked by the UK government because our policy is to toady up to everything the Chinese want no matter what the cost.

That’s because the country that built the first commercial nuclear power station in the world in 1956 needs that Chinese finance to pay French engineers to consider building a new one — at a cost not quite as high as the International Space Station.

It’s not going to fly. And it doesn’t include the cost of taking it down, let alone in time for the sea levels to rise and wash the resulting radioactive sludge inland to Bristol and all along the North Devon coast with the tides.

Isn’t it curious the highest profile proponents of the Britain to Leave Europe are also climate change denialists? Once you have one delusion of supremacy, it’s easy to get more.

As Professor Danny Dorling pointed out:

The UK is not a typical country in Europe. If we were more typical I would have more patience with those who suggest that we could leave and our lives would improve. But in many ways we’re a poorly performing affluent country. This poor performance has little to do with the EU, and a lot to do with us, and our legacy of having had an Empire. From the Suez crisis right through to the Panama papers, there’s a series of embarrassments that have occurred and, in a way, this referendum is just another one of those embarrassments.

Some people have a fantasy (enjoyed by the majority of the Brexit group, particularly the Cabinet ministers) that if we were to leave we would become ‘Great’ again. We could become the richest country in the world again, and our EU membership is why we are not ‘Great’.

And, so, because a lot of sensible people are sick and tired of arguing with these total idiots, we feel like letting them have what they desire, and getting us out of Europe. And then the Europeans are not going to help us with driving our trains, cars, people, money, goods or anything else across our the borders and into their lands. Things will pretty quickly stop working and go south.

And these politicians who sold us this knackered bill of goods will absolutely own it. We’re going to have to finally learn the hard way how Not-Great we are. It’ll be good in the long run — if there was a long run — for us to have a more realistic perspective about who we are. After all, losing their big wars seems to have done a power of good to the standard of living of the people in Germany and Japan.

In the end none of this matters one little bit. We are arguing about these petty matters when we should be freaked out by the fact that the near-term human extinction has become inevitable.

At some point everyone will learn that we are nothing more than ten billion monkeys farting around on one lonely planet with made-up borders. We’ve used our big brains just enough to fuck things up royally, but we just cannot be arsed to turn it up another notch to avert disaster, can we?

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