Monday 15 February 2016
Tony Parsons - Bigoted Road Hog
After Nigel “Thirsty” Farage made a prat of himself by blaming traffic levels on the M4 motorway, which allegedly prevented him getting from London to South Wales in time to attend a UKIP bash, on the level of inward migration, politicians and pundits have steered well clear of this particular hazard. But cometh the hour, cometh the born-again intolerant bigot to tell anyone listening that Nige Was Right, Honestly.
To no surprise at all, the latest claimant to this particular foot-in-mouth title writes for the Murdoch Sun. And to even less surprise, it is Tony Parsons, now firmly ensconced in the pantheon of miserable, whining pundits for whom the modern world is just too much of a challenge. “Reason traffic’s so slow? There are too many PEOPLE in Britain … There is nothing racist about acknowledging that this little island is full” carps the headline.
What Parsons seems unable to grasp is that when he first took to the roads in the 1970s, the population of Great Britain was already around 56 million, but road traffic was a mere fraction of what it is now. There are several reasons why traffic is so grim, especially in big cities, and none of them is immigration. Cars are cheaper to buy and run. Street public transport outside London is poor. Demand for mobility has grown - a lot.
The Sun’s rent-a-rant drives his daughter to school. So do lots of other parents. Their parents most likely left them to walk or take the bus. What does that do? It creates more congestion - no immigration is needed. “I drive my daughter to school on one of the slowest roads in the country, the westbound A40 in Camden, North London, where we chug along at an average 4.9mph” whinges Parsons.
Why the f*** don’t you both walk? Why aren’t you lobbying every politician for better cycle provision? It gets worse: “If you have a job, then you get in your car in the morning. If you don’t have a job, you stay in your pyjamas, eat Pringles and watch the Victoria Derbyshire show”. Bullshit. I’ve done several work assignments where I’ve commuted by train. It’s far less stressful and more reliable than driving.
No, Parsons is too stupid to listen. Instead, he drones “The slowest rush hour in the UK is the morning commute of the A306 northbound in Richmond upon Thames - a soporific 3.5mph”. Proper immigrant territory, Richmond, eh? No, he still doesn’t get it: “But the No1 reason we have all these cars doing 5mph is immigration”.No Tone, cities across the world get choked with traffic, immigration or no. You’ve missed the point.
Our love affair with the car - they’re more reliable, they last longer, they’re more comfy, we can slob out and keep the rest of the world out as we motor along - is what brought us to this point. Parsons has woken up to the result of that affair - he’s just too slow to figure out how we got here. Then he sees that immigrants are allowed to buy cars, adds two and two, and gets a number that is not even approximately four.
Tony Parsons, the clueless bigot’s clueless bigot. Stuck in a traffic jam somewhere. Good.
"If you don’t have a job, you stay in your pyjamas, eat Pringles and watch the Victoria Derbyshire show”
ReplyDelete0/3 even though I retired 10 years ago.
Clueless twat. Can even manage to insult his own readership.
ReplyDeleteLa Mensch has some full-on competition.
Why does this dope drive his daughter to school at 4.9mph. That's walking speed. He and his ilk are the problem. Surprise, surprise, during half term the average speed suddenly goes up significantly.
ReplyDeleteTony Parsons hates cycling likening it to masturbation, says all you need to know about him
ReplyDeletethe westbound A40 in Camden, North London
ReplyDeleteHold on. The A40 might well go through the borough of Camden but it's not actually in Camden per se - it starts in Holborn and then goes through St Pancras, Euston etc til it becomes the Westway. From interviews, it seems Parsons lives in Hampstead.
At the very least he'd have been ultra-aware of the likely route to school since it seems, again from interviews, that his daughter was 11 in 2014, so is either 12 or 13 now - thus recently arrived at secondary school (and he claimed that Hampstead has 'great schools' in another interview). Whatveer school it is, it is definitely a school he and his family actively sought out, and whose location they knew in advance. Seems a bit silly to choose a school with such hideous transport links (Hampstead to A40 is a pretty long way) and then to blame that on the immigrants.
Like his ex-wife Julie Birchill the pair posed as hipsters in their youth using youth culture to join what they always aspired to-the establishiment (that would still think they are yobs)so their ghastly right wing Thatcherite ideas could flourish.
ReplyDelete"If you have a job, then you get in your car in the morning."
ReplyDeleteWrong - I leave the house, walk 200m to the railway station and take a 15 minute train trip. It takes at least 30 minutes by car and the rail fare is cheaper than the fuel and car parking charges.
It's not by chance I happen to live 200m from a railway station!
All I will say to him is unless he has any solutions to the problem he encounters - and its not about immigration - he can look forward to misery for many years to come. Enjoy your steel bubble.
I learned last week that by 2030 the M62 will become the UKs most congested motorway (even worse than M25) - it will be one permanent slow moving queue of traffic for the 40 miles between Leeds and Manchester for most of the day
If he'd bothered to look elsewhere in the Murdoch empire he'd have found an article in the Times which says that traffic has slowed down because of delivery vans (not sure if this link will work - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/transport/article4688737.ece?shareToken=7e687a2e0dee2c9385f3518cb29e5c6a)
ReplyDeleteHis comment about "if you have a job then you get in a car in the morning" is also nonsense - something like 80% of the population of London don't drive to work (and the 2011 census says that more than half of the population of inner London don't even have a car)
As a regular commuter from Stoke to Crewe (using Stoke, Longport or more often Kidsgrove railway stations) I concur. The roads are worse than bad because too many people use them for journeys that the network can't handle. This David Whitby Way will "ease" congestion... for about one milisecond, before it gets clogged in its own turn.
ReplyDeleteEveryone needs to get on board and demand that the rail service be improved. Reopen closed lines and get more trains, in particular, not enough trains are leaving Crewe bound for Stoke and I fear it will get worse with very small stations after HS2. Walking and cycling to school and something needs to be done, in all honesty, to compensate cyclists in the way that car drivers are compensated. Drivers in Stoke go round as if the cycle lane was a joke, the number of times I've been put in danger when exercising my rights.
Also the rural bus "service" is worse than bad and has degenerated even further since September. The Tories would probably say "let's get everyone rich and they'll all be able to afford cars and no one will need the bus" or "fuck 'em", depending on who you ask. But it has nothing to do with Polish lorry drivers or asylum seekers (none of the asylum seekers I know, and I'd wager more of them than Parsons, has a car anyway.
"I fear it will get worse with very small stations after HS2."
ReplyDeleteNo, it will get better. Part of the justification for HS2 is that it will make it possible to run regular frequency stopping services on the WCML, of the kind that it's impossible to run at the moment despite strong demand because of the need to find paths for high-speed and freight trains.
Ah, Tony Parsehole.
ReplyDelete"I'm not racist because I'm married to a wonderfully hard working Chinese woman. I wrote a book once. My dad fought in a war. Kids eh? Tell you what, pop music's rubbish these days. I'll tell you who were a good band, the Sex Pistols. I was on a boat with them once. Did I mention my dad was in a war once? He didn't like to talk about it though, and I admire his modesty. He was in a war and killed some Germans. Bring back boxing. Teach kids discipline. Bring back national service. Germans? They're up to something. 100 words inv. enc."
I now live in Australia and have been planning my next UK visit which will include visiting relatives & friends in far flung places. I love trains but trying to plan a train journey these days to Scotland or Welsh villages- my pals just say 'forget it..no services, just hire a car cheaper and more convenient'. Oh the joys of privatization which apparently Parsons seems ignorant of but no doubt wholly supports.
ReplyDeleteOscar: your pals are wrong - trains in the UK are still easy to organise and frequent, it's just that complaining is the national sport. www.seat61.com is always a good start point.
ReplyDelete(they also aren't, in any reasonable sense, privatised: services and fares remain specified by the government).
The best way to be able to shrug off this vile little piggy eyed excuse for a human being is to read the Tony Parshole column in The Viz.
ReplyDeleteUltra nauseating hypocrite who championed the Punk rock cause in the 70's but now writes articles about 60 glorious glorious years of he majesty and likes to make it know that he goes to the opera. Horrible nasty little social climbing maggot.
Well Parshole and your ilk who think that Opera id just another step on the social ladder. In times gone by classical music fans viewed opera as a very dumbed down art form for the lower social classes, rather than attending an orchestra.
But then again you have no real intelligence of any art form whatsoever, just another sad failure in everything that you did, so the only option was to become a "critic" who spouts bile about what all of us unenlightened plebs should be listening to and watching.
Parsehole has the sort of nasty little face will piggy little eyes that you would never ever get sick of hitting. Reminds me a bit physically of that other little piggy eyed cockney (sorry Essex) cunt Malcolm Smith. I actually though Dyer must have been some ex cage fighter hard man or something turned "actor" when he first crawled out from under a stone the way he was billed as a "hard geezer" but no. Just a sort of loudmouth ex football yob with a penchant for slapping women about.