As a friend of mine in the blogosphere recently suggested to me that Britain, and he ment the English, are supine in their willingness to ignore the dangers of virtually anything which inhibits a quick return on investment.
The reason we are in the predicament at Hinkley Point, where we
have to rely on the French and the Chinese because no longer have the
skills to design and manufacture our own nuclear power plant, never mind
the willingness to invest our own money in the
project, is down to a lack of long term planning and foresight. We
simple did not invest in the skill base that once was the backbone of
this country. From proper apprenticeship schemes to encouragement of
niche engineering expertise as the French have done
as a part of "their" strategic responsibility towards the
security of their country. Nationalisation is not a dirty word in France
when it is recognised that a project is beyond the scope of private enterprise and needs the taxpayer to bulk up the commitment.
Our masters took the American view that private enterprise would be the only source of finance but what they didn't
factor in was the fact that, the American government was the major
procurement body particularly through its armament industry which its
self was financed by the stranglehold the dollar had over overseas
markets and able to run up trillion dollar deficits on its own account.
Successive governments in this country blow hot and cold on projects depending on their political ideology and little
beyond a 5 year window can be assured. There should have been cross
party agreement pre Thatcher to encapsulate an investment package
which lay outside current government tinkering to ensure we kept the
skills and the structural backbone to run a modern economy. These issues
should be outside politics and of course when Margaret Thatcher
arrived, championing the free market, in line with
her friend Ronald Reagan, both under the throes of Milton Friedman
economics, then the decline set in. Yes she gave us cheap houses or
rather she sold our national asset back to us, not unlike the Russian
Oligarchs who plundered 70% of their nations assets
for private gain, national assets in our own case which we have never even attempted to replace.
Yes she was quite a girl our Margaret.
Hinkley has been put on hold by the new PM Theresa May because it
is rumoured she has doubts about the probity of the Chinese. The worry
that they will develop and install software in this strategic piece of
national infrastructure which will, if politics
demands switch off the lights in this country by this foreign power
which as a matter of interest if no one has noticed is communist the
antithesis of the ideology we subscribe to. It's I bit like putting the
Vatican under the control of ISIS.
We are already ingratiated with the Chinese in British Telecoms current national upgrade of our telecoms system, they the Chinese won't need hackers, they now have a direct line !!
Short sighted and low on strategy we are led by the bumblers who's vision is governed by the past not the future.
It's everywhere. I walked into a meeting on Friday to hear that the architect a privately educated university man with a
plummy accent had directed the builder to change a suspended ceiling
system into a solid gypsum board ceiling so that it complies with
fire regulations. The suspended ceiling has been in situ for 20 years
but because some other walls have to be removed they are forced to enact current fire regulations.
Ok that's as it may but what about the access to the cabling which runs above the suspended ceiling. It will be enclosed as soon as the ceiling is installed, enclosed and therefore impossible to reach.
The highly paid professionals, the architects who are supposed to
be trained to envisage all aspects of a building, including the supply
of services such as the electrical supplies are oblivious of the need
and the total flexibility required by the data/telephone
installer who is constantly installing new circuits as the needs of the
building change. The architects are either ignorant or oblivious to
this. For them the imprint of the building on day one is cast in their
psyche, no other manifestation of their design
can be envisaged as they sit back and dream of the next incarnation of
their portfolio. The buildings have no functionality beyond that which
was presented in the original brief and the access to services in many instances is virtually non existent.
Having forcefully pointed this out access hatches will now be provided but if I hadn't attended and I wasn't scheduled to attend, we would have been like Hinkley Point "hoisted on our own petard".
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