Politicians and the strange world they live in...

OK, a disclaimer to start with...

This is not a personal attack on Alistair Darling ok ?

Well, it is really, but its only because he's come onto the radar today, like some sort of brainless twat he's popped up in Leeds to try and pacify the city for the most outrageous decision making process that strung along our local council for half a lifetime with no intention of ......

Oh what the hell, you need the whole story.

Heres the Readers Digest Condensed Version...

Leeds is a large city (by UK standards), lets say about 750,000 citizens and is formed almost into a series of concentric circles around a central area, its unusual in that respect as most old UK towns and cities developed along rivers, but Leeds spread outwards from the central point in an almost uniform manner - imagine a cartwheel with a hub and the spokes are the roads leading in and out of the city.

This inherited design of course makes it ideal for fast links into the city centre, there aren't many places to live within the Leeds boundary where you are not more than 20 minutes out of the centre in any direction - it also makes it an ideal candidate for a rapid public transit system of the light rail type.

But we haven't got one, we've got old fekkin deisel buses instead.

We used to have electric trams but they went in the 1950's and we got filthy deisel buses instead.

But not to worry, when the Labour government were elected to power in 1997 they asked for local authorities to step forward with schemes for rapid transit systems as this brave new Labour government were very keen to get the public out of their cars and into the new "supertrams", high speed electric, clean, green tramways that would whisk its citizens up from their homes and whoosh them into the city centre to work - assuming that they worked in the city centre of course, which many didn't, but thats only a slight distraction.

The brave new Labour government promised all local authorities who produced such plans that funds would be made available from public and private funding initiatives, and even better, authorities with rapid transit systems in place would then be able to levy charges for dirty old motorists who insisted on taking their cars into the city centres instead of using the smashing new rapid transit systems, look why don't I just call them trams from now on OK, or better still, supertrams, that sounds good doesn't it, John Prescott thought it sounded good back in 1997 anyway, it was all his idea originally as he was Minister for Transport, one of several Minister jobs that he seems to have done/still does/possibly.

So Leeds stepped forward, no they didn't step forward, they fekkin ran forward with open arms, we already had such a scheme on the planning boards you see, been planning it for fekkin years by now, just couldn't get the Conservatives to fund it, but now, wow, Labour were going to pay for it with new finance, it was like the bank manager had just become your best friend again, yippee, Leeds was getting a supertram !

It was impressive - 21km of tracks linked NorthWest, NorthEast and South of the city into the city centre...

What ?

Why no East or West links ?

Because thats where the poor people live and they'd have expected subsidies to use the supertram but don't shout that from the rooftops, we're talking serious politics here.

£350million it would cost, but hey, the governments new public/private funding initiative was in place and the work had actually started in the south of the city, traffic junctions were being altered and everything.

Fast forward to last summer and its been nearly ten years since some of the original planning and compulsory purchase options were issued and if they weren't acted on by last september then the whole project was in danger of having its pants pulled down, and the council had already spent £40million of its own cash, sorry, our own cash, thats us local rate payers cash that is, my fekkin money to be precise.

And so on that fateful day last september and after dithering for the last two years and placing as many obstacles in his own path as he could so as not to have to announce a decision at all, the current Transport Minister Alistair Darling finally admitted that although the private funding part of the public/private funding initiative had been found, the government couldnt actually stump up the public funding part of its own public/private funding initiative - in other words for the last ten years we thought we were going for a massive and most enjoyable big shit in the woods, and we'd only managed to fart, not even fart, we'd had a little parp and nothing else.

What a twat.

So today Alistair Darling came to Leeds to announce that the M606/M62 motorway junction is to benefit from a £2.5million junction improvement scheme, and he gets his face on all the local TV stations and local newspapers describing what a great boost to the regions economy this will be.

Fuck off Alistair, two and a half million pounds is fuck all in the grand scheme of motorway maintenance and nothing at all, not even a drop in the ocean in the scheme of motorway improvement schemes, two and a half million will not even repaint the white lines on the Leeds urban motorway, and yet his smarmy face pops up on my fekking TV while I'm eating my fekkin pizza and I'm supposed to think that this great car-share lane scheme that hes proposing for this extremely congested motorway junction is a huge investment for the region and that we should all be so-fekkin grateful to him and his government for them thinking of us when they were spending our tax money.

Well thanks for nothing Alistair, £300million on a supertram scheme would have been a huge investment for the region, taking 19 million bodies out of their personal cars each and every year - £2.5million on repainting a motorway junction instead is taking the piss, big style, you smarmy jerk.

I don't know whether to applause his absolute cheek at actually appearing in the region or gasp at his absolute stupidity that we would swallow his drop of piss in the ocean that is transport initiatives, on the other hand he is one of the common breed of career politicians in parliament now who study politics and business at universities, then go straight into parliament believing that they have all the answers from the books they've read - a little real life experience wouldn't go amiss first - Mr Darling spent a maximum of nine years in a proper job as a lawyer before being elected to parliament and for five of those years was a local politician - I probably got more real life experience at my inner city school before I was ten years of age.

And they actually wonder why we don't trust or respect any of them...


(I feel better for that now, I can do funny posts tomorrow again)