Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- A useful summary of the policies of each of the main parties ahead of the elections.
- Surprisingly, 3 years after the horrendous train crash outside Santiago de Compostela, the total security systems recommended still haven't been installed.
- I've talked often of the other Spanish economy below the one growing at an impressive rate - relative to other EU states, that is. Here in Galicia, as many as 33% of young people (18-35) don't earn €1,000 a month. And, whereas 10 years ago 25% of them were earning more than €2,500 a month, now only 16% do.
- Perhaps that helps to understand why more than 30% of women younger than 30 here don't plan to have children.
- Following on from details of flight cancellations, here are details of non-performing trains this holiday weekend. Staycations?
- Taking of slow public projects in Germany and Spain, see the article below on Britain's high-speed train plans. Reckoned by many to be a useless, vanity project. Other people's money, of course.
- Good to see true-to-form Fart shooting from the mouth to give the French valuable advice on how to deal with the dreadful Notre Dame fire.
- The Amazon system of customer ratings is being undermined by a “flood” of fake five-star reviews for products made by unknown brands. The consumer group Which? found that top-rated items were dominated by unknown brands, which had thousands of reviews that were not verified, meaning there was no evidence that a reviewer had purchased the product. There's a surprise.
- Ex Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann: I've never seen a more biblical president than Trump: We will, in all likelihood, never see a more godly, biblical president again in our lifetimes. Someone else suffering from that syndrome, the name of which I can never recall. Too stupid to realise how stupid they are.
- Odd Old Word: Calf-love: 'Love in a very early stage of life, an attachment formed before reason has begun to set in'.
- I might have mentioned that I have something that turns off all TVs in public places. When I did this in my regular café yesterday morning, no one noticed for the 20 minutes I stayed there. Just part of Spain's high level of background noise. I can't say I was surprised.
Who will have the courage to scrap HS2, a wasteful product of our failed politics?
Incredibly, HS2 has run like a constant through a political system otherwise in ferment. First proposed under Gordon Brown, it survived the toppling of his wasteful government, was embraced by Osborne and Cameron, has shrugged off criticism of its obscene cost (now £56 billion officially, but ultimately likely to be £100 billion), and still has the support of the Government and Labour.
It is apparently too big to cancel: a monument to the risks of cross-party consensus, and of letting politicians indulge their fantasies of “guiding” the economy using taxpayers’ money. Our leaders have too much at stake to change tack now, hence their lack of shame at the nebulous and ever‑shifting case for spending such vast sums on this white elephant.
Thank goodness, then, for Liz Truss. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury said in an interview with the Spectator last week that HS2 will feature in the “zero-based capital review” the Government will shortly conduct, and will be assessed for value for money. Let us hope that rigorous cost-benefit analysis will reveal (again) that the billions would be better spent on regional rail, roads or tax cuts. But would even that be enough to kill this scheme? Remember that Theresa May announced a review of the similarly wasteful nuclear power project, Hinkley Point, when she first became prime minister. It is still going ahead.
HS2 cannot be separated from the failed politics that spawned it. So long as parties persist in the delusion that they can engineer a top-down reorganisation of the economy, predict the technological future, tax people off the road to get them on to public transport, and take their core supporters for granted as they drive a whopping great rail line through some of the most beautiful parts of England, we will be stuck with it.
At some point after the fall of Mrs Thatcher, Conservative Party politicians lost confidence in her vision of democratic capitalism. They started plundering other traditions: continental Christian democracy; French-style bureaucratic control; and, ludicrously, happiness “economics”. They wanted Britain to be more regionally balanced like Germany, and to mimic China in the ambition of its state-directed investments.
Never mind that the UK has its own peculiar strengths, or that the British state clearly lacks the capabilities of Beijing’s central planners (not least in being constrained by democracy). Politics became a game of triangulation, “mastered” by George Osborne under the Coalition, and taxpayers’ money became a political tool, in this instance for winning the endorsement of Labour councillors in the North (northern voters, incidentally, aren’t that keen on HS2).
The only chance we have of seeing this terrible scheme scrapped is a new Tory leader committed to abandoning the Coalition’s toxic legacy and recommitting to a conservatism that sees more virtue in liberating people and enterprise to rise on their own merits than in self-important grands projets. You never know, it might just be more popular than HS2.
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