The Prime Ministers speech

 



Subject: The Prime Ministers Speech



Words have the magic power to transcend common sense, they describe the art of the possible but not the probable, they waft in the air like incense emitted from a thurible swung in a church service. Perhaps words are meant as hyperbole and not taken literally, aspirational, a yearning, to hanker after and only part of a ‘political promise’ which we know is often full of holes.
The question we must ask, why now and not back then. The Tory Party has been in power since 2010 and whilst  admittedly they have squandered political leaders like a dog shaking  water off its coat, the man currently tearing up the rule book has held power as Chancellor and PM for a couple of years but non of today's announcements seemed to be more than a glimmer in his eye prior to this Conference speech today.
It was clearly the opening salvo in the up and coming election campaign and apart from the cancellation of the bulk of HS2 with a promise to spend the savings on localised transport it seems somehow appropriate for Britain, having spent up to £25 billion without a piece of track laid mostly on placating wealthy people in the Cotswolds by building tunnels under protected woodlands and by making the line unseen protect property prices. This is one of the reasons why the project has ballooned in price from an initial budget of £37 billion in 2011 to a projected £180 billion  in 2045 the completion. It never really had a chance to nose its way north and was one of those must have things since many countries now have them. We will have our own version of a stunted child a bastardised version with a high speed link only up to our second largest city, Birmingham situated in the Midlands and nothing remotely like a link fromLondon  to the North.
There is the beginning of a realisation that the project has really been one big con and that if they had been serious they could have started the project in the North and modernised the infrastructure there first before embarking on the southern leg.
It seems the only reward will be ‘Trams in Leeds', a city which had trams before the Prime Minister was born.
How gullible are we to believe their guff.  Lots of rich city types have made a bundle out of the project so far. Maybe at the turn of the century they will have tours of the tunnels like we do of old war time outposts, at least they showed some use.
He spoke of reorganising the Education Departments exam system once again as a new baccalaureate.
There was a proposal to have another crack at training doctors and reorganising the NHS to get it to resemble the ‘American Heath Service’. This project might be attained simply because ‘we don't want it’.
And the perennial, ‘crack down on smoking’.
Mostly the rest was fluff designed to sell himself since, prior to his arrival in the job he was never paraded in front of the electorate and although he seems to stand out from his cabinet as one of the better ones he is no Margeret Thatcher, just as Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.