I’m mildly encouraged by the fact that there are more and more commentators and journalists saying we are screwed.
The most interesting one recently was on GBNews where the £3trillion plus debt we have was discussed and the fact that no one in government wants to do anything about it. So much so that the point was forcibly made that anyone lending is going to ask for more interest and then some. And that has started to come home to roost in spades this last week.
Burnham has done nothing but agree to more and more spending in various areas. Not only is there no money for it but at the end of the day none of it will make a blind bit of difference.
Take the VAT relief on household energy bills. Quite apart from the fact that the Price Cap will negate it, the real world has intervened quite dramatically to make this look totally piddling. Up until about 2010, UK and USA gas prices were pretty much the same. Since we started our dash for Net Zero, better known as “destroy everything”, American prices are now one eighth of ours. Just to confirm, our prices are EIGHT TIMES the prices in America for the same volume of gas. And you think Trump is bad? And in case you missed it, one day recently windfarms were paid £35 MILLION pounds NOT to feed power to the grid. That’s just one day. Why? Because too much electricity was being produced. You would think they could drop the amount of gas-powered electricity so that at the worst £35 million was not going up in smoke. But no. Our Net Zero morons don’t think like that. Keep electricity prices as high as possible and ruin every business you can think of. Could they not have diverted it to British Steel, or whatever it’s called today? Might produce a few bars at a saleable, unsubsidised price. But no. Lateral thinking does not exist within the Blob. As an aside even if the UK got to Net Zero, that would only be 1% of world emissions. Everyone else will benefit from our lunacy. We, on the other hand, will have no business left and we won’t be able to heat our homes. And possibly not even charge our phones. The insanity will destroy us.
I’d like to compare 1963 to today. You might think that is a ridiculous thing to do, but bear with me.
You all know the standard wisdom about Beeching’s railway cuts that they decimated the railways, destroyed blah di blah, but have you ever actually read anything about the actual report. I’d be willing to bet not.
Let’s start with the fact that in 2026 money it was losing around £4 billion a year (and growing rapidly). Arguably, you could say that wasn’t too bad, because right now in aggregate the railways are costing taxpayers around £12billion a year. You will appreciate that much of that is made up with infrastructure upgrades and tech enhancements, but the fact remains that there are lots of people who do NOT travel on trains who pay for those of us who use them all the time.
The UK budget in 1964 totalled £7,388,000,000 (£7.4 billion for those with zero-itis) with tax collected of £7,352,000,000 so borrowing required of £36 million - equivalent today of just under £1billion. I could go on and show you how much better things were fiscally then, but I’m talking specifically about the railways.
The apex of railway mileage in this country was a total of about 23,000 miles, and even before Beeching some 5,000 miles had been closed. So financial imperative was already in place for all to see. It was a Conservative Government that tasked Beeching with producing the report and making recommendations. As an aside, he was paid £23,000 a year, such an enormous figure that questions were asked in the House. That’s about £610,000 in today’s money, which, compared to ICI executives (Beeching came from there) was and is peanuts. He delivered his report in March of 1963. Just a couple of points. The least used 50% of stations contributed less than 2% of income. So chop those lines and stations and you would have 98% of the income still. And over one third of the track miles contributed less than 1% of income. So drop track miles by 5,500 and STILL have 99% of your income. In the end, some 55% of stations were done away with and about 6,000 miles of track, which both quite neatly fit with the findings. But here’s a thing. The Tories lost elections in 1964 and 1966 which meant it was a LABOUR government which actually implemented the cuts up to 1970. Can you see ANY Labour Government or Politicians advocating even 50 pence of cuts today? But all praise to the governments of the day who realised this draconian evil man (not really) had to have his plan implemented for the good of the country.
My point in all this is that back then there was general understanding that there HAD to be fiscal responsibility to enable progress to be made. There is no doubt that had the railways continued the way they were before Beeching, we would probably have little of what we have today still operational.
Now I am a great advocate of railways, though the planners have messed up again and again (think bat tunnels) but at some point, infrastructure has to be built. I’m thinking in particular of HS2 which had it gone all the way it was meant to would be a fantastic and useful thing. Its decriers are the same people who said the Elizabeth line was a white elephant – over budget and very late. Even its worst critics now recognise it’s a fantastic piece of both engineering and usage. The whole point here is capacity. It has eased capacity elsewhere and now delivers many more passengers more quickly and in less constricted circumstances. HS2 will do exactly the same. The cost has only risen because we have handled inflation so badly (and planned stupidly). I for one would be happy to pay a premium to use it (in the same way that there was a premium to pay for Concorde). Had our Victorian ancestors had the technology they would have built HS2 in jig time – and not just to Manchester. Glasgow and Edinburgh and everything down to London would have been included. And it would ALL have been privately funded.
Those Victorians eh? What are they like? In Glasgow for the 1888 exhibition – the greatest outside London ever – they built the whole thing from private money. That’s PRIVATE money. Over 5.7 million people visited. And it made a profit of £43,000 (now about £7.5 million) after paying everyone back – with interest. The profit was used to build what is now Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Isn’t it a truly disgraceful way to go about things? I wish we were as disgraceful today.
