The Lies of Parliament - Part One

This blog is going to be in three parts. Part one today is about transport and greenhouse gases.

I am having a moan about government. When I say govt I mean all of them, parliament so to speak. I am talking about the process of who taxes us. When it comes down to it, we are all just characters from ‘Animal Farm’. The book not the porn film by the way.

Today we have governments and opposition droning on about how we need to get out of our cars and use public transport. For those of you that may have forgot or didn’t realise, in the early 1960’s the conservative party closed down 9,000 miles of railroad. Closed over 2,000 railway stations and made over 70,000 people redundant. As they put it, this was the dawn of the car and the railways were losing money. This was a fair point to a degree. Many parts of the railway were not being used. The conservatives actually said that the problem had been the previous privatisation of the railways. Amazing that not only did they decimate it they then re-privatised it under John Major.

The result was that car tax had to rise by 67% over the next four years to pay for the modernisation of the roads. Had this increase in tax been used to keep the half of the railway network open that was still viable, then we would not have any of the problems we have today. The short sightedness of govt just went to prove how they did not give a shit about the people. Other countries were improving and increasing railroads. Don’t be fooled by the old chestnut ‘other countries were flattened in the war, so could rebuild’. We had rail tracks and stations everywhere. It was closed down simply to increase revenue from car tax, which has very rarely been pumped back into the economy for the improvement of transport.

This is another example of the shambles that is government. While I am complaining about the destruction of the railways consider another thing. Tens of billions of pounds is about to be spent on reducing the time it takes to get from Glasgow to London on the train (only for people in west country mind you). It will amount to a few minutes saved. All this will do is increase the length of journeys people make and increase travelling. This has happened everywhere this has happened. Surely in this apparent world of reducing C02 we should be improving local transport services to reduce people’s use of cars for shorter journeys. This may then encourage more local employment.

Let me give you an example. If you get the train from Long Eaton to Nottingham and return, you save half a kilo of C02 for the trip. If you increase that by the two trains an hour for lets say 8 hours with an average of just 80 people (remember the morning trains are rammed) for a return trip makes a saving of 1280 kg of C02. That is the equivalent of boiling 1680 kettles. So if the local services were improved how much C02 could we really save. some traisn have 500 people on them. The saving could be incredible.

The moral here is quite simple. The governments are simply lying when they talk about green issues. Everything they talk about has only one interest to them. Can they raise taxes from it? If they were green they would be laying local tracks for trams and trains. They don’t really want cars off the roads. One millions cars of the road would lose an awful lot of tax revenue.

And remember one more thing, in the mid seventies govt told us that the world was drastically cooling down and we needed to increase C02 emissions. It is about time we started to completely ignore anything said by Parliament. I think The Daily Mail should sponsor Parliament. They could quite happily bullshit together.

In future parts of this Bri-rant I will be discussing, Europe, Mad Cow disease and tax, Pensions and defiantly MP's expenses.