Michael O’Leary’s Cash Cow Returns

Back in August 2009, I looked at the (then) latest bout of corporate mardy strop throwing by Ryanair, the Millwall of air carriers (everybody hates us and we don’t care), as the carrier pulled all its routes – except for the one to Dublin – from Manchester Airport, after management there declined to lower their handling fees, which were already no more than £3 per passenger.

And as was pointed out at the time, there was little incentive for the airport to give favourable treatment to Ryanair when there were other demands on capacity – notably from carriers like EasyJet, who continued to use Manchester. Moreover, Ryanair flew to secondary airports – Girona rather than Barcelona, for instance – making their offering less appealing.

Two years on, though, with the amount of growth wrung out of those secondary airports reaching its limits, Ryanair has come back to Manchester, putting a brave face on their volte face. Not only is the carrier returning, but will now be basing two aircraft there. Does that mean they will be getting a discount on handling fees? No. It means they need to come back to keep growing passenger numbers.

Problem is, the offering is very much as before: Girona rather than Barcelona, Orio al Serio (Bergamo) rather than Milan, Hahn rather than Frankfurt am Main, Charleroi rather than Brussels, and Beauvais (still not open 24 hours) rather than Paris CdG or Orly. But they are doing the Spanish Costas: Malaga, Alicante and Valencia all feature, as does Palma de Mallorca.

Put alongside those carriers that fly to primary airports, this looks as cheap, nasty and brazenly operator convenient as before. I’m sure that Ryanair has maintained ideological purity in pursuing its lower-cost-than-anyone-else model, but whether Manchester Airport’s customers want to play is another matter. And if they don’t, then what next for Ryanair?

After all, you can only throw a mardy strop from so many airports before the business gets wise to you. Michael O’Leary’s finest have pulled that stunt once too often, and he’s running out of road. The number of available airports willing to help drive Ryanair’s growth is running out.

The boot, right now, is well and truly on the other foot.

The Iberian Journey Changes Capitals

On a quiet and still damp morning in Lisbon, I walked across to Santa Apolónia station, wondering if I should have had another ten minutes in bed. Soon after arrival, another downpour gave the definitive answer. At least the 0730 Intercidade for Porto was ready on Track 3, and well filled for a Saturday, despite rising ticket costs. It made swift progress to the railway town of Entroncamento.

Lisbon, between the showers

There, a change of train was needed to continue the trip into Spain. A single coach railmotor rolled out of the bay platform at 0845, bound for the walled town of Elvas and then Badajoz. Service cuts could yet remove this train, the only service to cross into Spain from Elvas, a strange paradox given that in future there will be a high speed rail link between Lisbon and Madrid, and routed this way.

Lisbon seen from Parque Eduardo VII

A few minutes late – the state of the track that crosses the border is pretty poor right now – we arrived at Badajoz, an overspecified station with three platforms and lift access to two of them, but which has all of seven departures a day, six of them from the platform not needing lift access. Three of those six serve Madrid: connecting provinces to the capital is what many Spanish rail links are about.

Damp departure from Santa Apolónia

And, although there was a step change from an early 1950s railmotor – albeit refurbished a decade ago – to a new tilting train, this was still well off the electrified network, and all single track. Towns are well spaced out here – some runs between stops took a full hour – and the terrain means lots of twists, turns and rather tasty looking gradients. It’s a long journey.

Badajoz: city gate

How long? Another five and a half hours to do the 320 miles or so to Madrid, despite some good speed, and a journey ending well after dark at a characteristically chaotic Puerta de Atocha station. Fortunately, access to the Metro heading north is step free and the ticket machines work (like Barcelona, and Boris’ apparent intention, there is no manned ticket office), though ticket prices have gone up. A lot.

Old and new together at Badajoz

What did I find out on the way? There are a lot of folks sleeping under canopies and archways in Lisbon – you see that by being out and about early. Lots are taking the Intercity train. Few are using the link into Spain, and not many boarded the afternoon train from Badajoz to Madrid. But the Spanish capital is as busy as ever, although after Saturday night that might change.

I could have done this trip by air, but would have missed the towns, the sometimes rugged scenery, and the sense of space that rural Portugal and Spain gives you. And I would have missed the supermarket in Badajoz, and the customer in front of me who handed back a cake as it took her spending over the amount of cash in her hand. The bloke on the till sent it back, together with someone else’s large pizza.

Prices go up, the money to pay for them does not. Go figure.

The Flag And Caucus Bar

Those who marvelled at the ability of the Dacre hackery to inflate a banner headline out of nothing factual to kick the BBC over supposedly abandoning BC and AD now have another fact-free frightener to admire: this time the bogeyman is not the Beeb, or asylum seekers, or even Muslims, but another old faithful, the dastardly EU, which is gunning for the Union flag.

Actually, the EU isn’t doing any such thing: the by-line of “Mail On Sunday Reporter”, code for “nobody would put their name to it, even when threatened with a carpeting from Dacre himself”, gives the game away. The European Council’s communications director – that’s press officer in basic English – was the one making the comments, at a meeting of, er, press officers.

So a press officer – decision making power exactly zero – making comments about promoting the EU’s “brand” becomes a “senior EU official” (“officials” plural in the sub-heading), “outrage” has been caused, and the thundering headline “Now the Union Jack is under attack as EU officials try to take us closer to a United States of Europe” has been invented.

Press officers doing promotion (or, to many people, spin) is not somewhere I’d care to go, but it isn’t policy making. And the Mail story is complete invention: this is agenda driven hackery at its worst. But at least the hack who put this pile of freshly steaming stuff together maintained some anonymity. Over at the Telegraph, their political editor Patrick Hennessy had to put his name to something similar.

“Britain faces new isolation threat from Eurozone ‘caucus’” is the line being fed to obedient Telegraph readers. The piece sounds authoritative: “The document seen by the Sunday Telegraph shows ...” it starts, but then the source is revealed, and it is anti-EU Astroturf lobby group Open Europe. Hennessy tries to bolster this recycled press release by trying to scrape together “evidence”, but fails miserably.

And the most mainstream talking head he can muster is fringe Tory MP John “live long and prosper” Redwood, but at least he didn’t have to follow the Mail into scraping the barrel and coming up with Nigel “thirsty” Farage of UKIP and master of the casual smear Eric Pickles. The only bonus in both cases is the absence of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Patrick Hennessy, like his colleague Alistair Osborne, was once credited with being a serious journalist. Osborne sprayed his credibility up the wall trying to stand up the story about Siemens getting the Thameslink contract in a way that they didn’t, and now Hennessy is expending his own credibility by putting his name to formulaic knocking copy. And that leaves one conclusion.

Which is that the Telegraph is now so bad, it’s worse for your cred than the Mail.

Murdoch Is Served (60)

Rupe and his troops must have thought that, with the continuing cascade of revelations from Phonehackgate, things couldn’t get much worse. And then, on Friday afternoon, things duly got worse. A lot worse. Because one of those troops has been arrested on suspicion of participating in the oldest of The Dark Arts, that of bribing a serving Police officer for information.

And it’s not any old hack who has had his collar felt: Jamie Pyatt has worked for News International for all of 24 years. His arrest is connected to a six-figure amount of money which is thought to have changed hands to facilitate the passage of otherwise confidential information to the Sun newspaper. Pyatt is looking at what the more tactful call a custodial sentence.

Moreover, the old days when, as Nick Davies put it in Flat Earth News, “dog doesn’t eat dog”, are over: the Guardian has company in reporting the news this time round. The Maily Telegraph named Pyatt and gave the piece prominent billing. The Independent was in there too. Even the Mirror, which might have desisted from openly mentioning its rival paper, has the story (but not the name).

What is more revealing, though, is those supposedly fearless pillars of the blogosphere who have thus far declined to mention the arrest. Step forward the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his tame gofer Henry Cole at the Guido Fawkes blog, the Laurel and Hardy of the blogosphere, who kept schtum for several hours after the story broke.

Finding out what they're not talking about

That, though, is little surprise, given the inability of Staines and Cole to call Phonehackgate correctly in the first place. Their inability to follow the money and instead launch an evidence-free campaign against Piers “Morgan” Moron gained them no credibility at all – plus a few more news outlets who won’t take them on trust again – and their unwillingness to look elsewhere is telling.

In the world of Staines and Cole, going after their pals – that’s the Murdoch press, Associated Newspapers (the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday), and the Maily Telegraph – is something they are unwilling or unable to do. In their world of blinkered tribalism, everything bad is caused by rotten lefties, which means the Mirror, Guardian and above all the BBC.

Still, they’re number one, or so they say. Keep up the ritual incantation, lads.

[Staines and Cole have had a whole day to raise a single Tweet on this story, but have failed to even reach the start line. Fingers in ears, La La La, they can’t hear you (continued excuse #94)]

TPA – Low Lying In Hull

Although the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) has, as Zelo Street revealed exclusively recently, abandoned its street campaign against Trade Union Representatives’ facility time – which the TPA dishonestly dubbed “Taxpayer Funded Trade Unionism” – they have taken to the streets in pursuit of “competition” and “freedom of choice”, but no less dishonestly.

The TPA’s “grassroots coordinator” Andrew Allison – a title denoting a non-job if ever there was one – arranged this event on his home turf in Hull last weekend, with a “campaign” to end the supposed monopoly of Kingston Communications, Hull’s telecoms provider. Allison alleges that “almost everyone in the city wants a choice in who supplies their telephone and broadband services”.

Were I a betting man, I would wager good money that Allison and his pals did not canvass a statistically significant part of Hull’s population in pursuit of that proposition, nor that they put their questions in a way that was other than leading, or otherwise slanted. Ditto the assertion that “We also know people feel they are paying too much, and suffer from poor download speeds”.

I would challenge the TPA to share their questions and the way in which they were pitched with a wider audience, were I less than certain that Allison and his fellow non-job holders would prove, as so often, of less than perfect courage. But one thing of which I can be certain without further enquiry is what the TPA did not tell those polled, and what they didn’t in Ashton-under-Lyne.

And that is the remainder of the TPA agenda: to abolish the minimum wage, lower the poverty line, demonise any kind of Government, urge removal of assistance for local public transport, and spread misinformation about the NHS. Merely keeping schtum is not good enough: the TPA will claim the signatures gathered last weekend as a barometer of support.

Were the people of Hull to have been given that information before being offered the petition to sign, most of them would not have gone near it. Were they to be told after the event what the TPA was really about, many would be horrified. What Andrew Allison and his pals did last weekend was utterly and inexcusably dishonest: they should be ashamed, but this is not a condition the TPA recognises in itself.

No change there, then.

Greek Reverse – Not By Greeks

A referendum can be a difficult thing for the why-oh-why part of the Fourth Estate, especially when it is proposed by one of those people from countries who not only talk foreign, but also write funny as well. So it was when Greek PM George Papandreou called one over the financial restructuring package offered to his country by the EU.

One might have thought that, given all the howling for such a vote in the UK on our remaining within the EU, there would have been a chorus of approval, but the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre was having none of it: Greece was “A corrupt nation holding a gun to the EU’s head”, asserted the furious headline.

But the Daily Mail need not have worried: Papandreou clearly had another think about it, and today declared that the Greeks were not, after all, to be offered a vote on the bailout package. This, though, was even worse: this was an “EU turn” (geddit?!?) and Greece had been “bullied” into changing tack. The thought that Papandreou had thought better of it – and considered his future – did not enter.

Who was behind the “bullying”? The Mail’s unfeasibly smug James Chapman had the answer: it was “Merkozy”. Wow. As Derek and Clive said, he ought to be on the radio with stuff like that. Also bidding for a place in the limelight is his colleague Tim Shipman, who says the Treasury admits the Euro is breaking up. How will I pay my hotel bills this week with those worthless Euro?

How? Those Euro aren’t worthless, so I won’t have a problem. The Treasury didn’t make the admission, Shipman is full of wind and water, and the Mail is misleading its readers. Pope Catholic, bears dump in woods. The Express is even in close pursuit, pushing the line that Papandreou has been “backed into a corner”. At least they’re all facing the same way now.

Pity it’s not the direction they were facing in yesterday. No change there, then.

The Iberian Journey Continues

There may be a brief interruption to blogging, as tomorrow brings a long and leisurely journey away from Lisbon. On the face of it, Portugal’s capital is as ever, almost a throwback to the past with its narrow streets, little shops, old neighbourhoods, faded buildings and the constant sound of tramcars passing nearby. But merely to look does not even scratch the surface.

Lisbon sprawls out over its nearby hills and across the Tagus, and much of that is recent, often middle-rise apartment blocks as one might see in Amsterdam or Barcelona. Some of the neighbourhoods are pleasant, but others have their share of problems. There is more to this city than the Baixa, Chiado, Bairro Alto, Mouraria and Alfama.

There is also more homelessness than before, and more people openly begging, either on the street, or on occasion on the city’s Metro system, which is supposed to be wholly gated, as is that in London. There are protests not just outside Parliament, but across the city, and regularly: yesterday one such occupied the Praça do Comércio during the afternoon.

Austerity programmes have cut salaries of public servants and increased their pension contributions – the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance and their chorus of nodding donkeys would be deeply impressed – and there has been a cull of infrastructure projects. There is even a suggestion that city public transport should cease running late at night, which shows that politicians need to get out more, as in the UK.

Many businesses open well into the evening, and how their staff will get home to Amadora and Odivelas is not told. Not everyone can afford to live in the city centre. This has an echo of the housing benefit debate facing Londoners right now. And too much austerity means less folk employed, and less economic activity. Portugal, like the UK, needs a Plan B if there is to be growth.

One small plus point is that the Auto Europa plant over the river is now exporting its VWs to China – rather than those exports being done from Germany. But the overall picture is not good. And with that thought, it’s on to another troubled capital city tomorrow. More from the Eurozone later.

TPA – Showing Their True Colours

Second homes, or more often holiday homes, are no doubt A Good Thing for those who own them. For many locals in the areas where the better-off drive up house prices and effectively bar others from the market, they are a wasted resource, lived in for a few weeks every year – maybe even week Singular if owners are busy or holidaying elsewhere.

Yet second homes still command a 10% Council Tax discount, mainly because they do not require as much of the local authority’s resource: there is generally less refuse to take away, less demand on services like libraries, parks, public transport and education. But those same local authorities are now being allowed to withdraw that 10% concession.

For most second home owners, that will not trouble them in the least. But for one supporter of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) this is a terrible thing that Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has done. J-P Floru, who no doubt by sheer coincidence is also a leading light of the Adam Smith Institiute (ASI), that museum of outdated economic thought that has fraudulently appropriated the name of the founder of economics, is horrified.

M Floru, who claims to be a “classical liberal”, argues that this move will cause harm to second home owners, and is just about “greedy councils”. This should surprise no-one familiar with the Floru oeuvre: he has previously argued passionately for scrapping the 50p rate of income tax, as he knows people who have been “forced” to “flee” the UK as a result of its imposition.

Somehow, however, I doubt that this defence will count for much with folks in Devon and Cornwall, the Lake District, and parts of Wales, where outsiders have bought significant numbers of properties, reducing the available housing stock, forcing up prices, while all the time not being there most of the year and therefore harming local businesses and the wider community.

This will be no problem for a “classical liberal”, which is code for someone who believes laissez-faire economics should mean exactly what it says on the tin. But, as Margaret Thatcher didn’t say, there is such a thing as community, and M Floru’s overmonied pals should not be getting special treatment for messing around with it just so they can have a place in the country.

The Frack Fracking Well Did It

Anyone in any doubt as to the reason for Cuadrilla Resources’ glowing report on the prospects for shale gas exploration around Blackpool need doubt no longer: the findings of the investigation into two earth tremors near the site of Cuadrilla’s test well – which were found to “have a similar mechanism” – have been released. And the conclusion points at that well as the source of the shakes.

Small wonder, then, that Cuadrilla suggested that the reserves of gas could be on such a huge scale: that would help move public opinion outside the north west – in other words, those whose lives would remain unaffected by the earthquakes, but who would like the prospect of cheap energy – in their favour. It’s a cheap and blatant ploy. But some pundits have bought it uncritically.

What now? Well, what won’t be happening is Cuadrilla getting carte blanche to sink dozens more wells deep into shale beneath Lancashire. The tremors may have been comparatively small – around level 2 – but turning the test well into a productive field would mean scaling up well numbers, and potentially scaling up the number and strength of earthquakes too.

The opposition to continuing hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – will be heard: those living near to the proposed wells and the surrounding area are unlikely to be agnostic on the prospect of more seismic activity, and protests are certain to come from environmentalists opposed to the release of significantly more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

The latter, in the form of the group calling itself Fracked Off, has now occupied Cuadrilla’s test rig at Banks, near Southport – another seaside resort that, like Blackpool, stands to lose business if fracking is permitted and starts in earnest. One should not have to consult the Echo to understand that folks in Liverpool are watching events with some concern.

It will be interesting to see how James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole and his mentor Christopher Booker now approach the subject. Perhaps Del Boy will continue to tell that it’s all “Oop North” and therefore should not stand in the way of his desire to have cheap gas for Himself Personally Now. Perhaps he will realise that those “Oop North” possess rights equal to those he enjoys.

Or perhaps he will continue to spout abuse in pursuit of personal aggrandisement and the enjoyment of his echo chamber of admirers (Sid and Doris Bonkers). For some, it’s the simple pleasures from which they take the greatest satisfaction.

[Delingpole has now decided not to mention the wellbeing of folks in Lancashire, but has dumped on the BBC instead for not serving up the news in a way that he finds ideologically acceptable]

The Protests Spread

Lisbon has in the recent past been a very accessible city: few parts of the city are off limits to the public, unless admission charges are levied. That extended to the Parliament building at the foot of the long hill that leads up to the suburb of Estrela, but then came the marches and the protests. The Police turned out in force, and then the barriers went up.

Actually, visitors can still get close up to the building, and most of the time security is discreet. But opposite the imposing facade of Parliament, a protest vigil has begun, and access from the front steps has been barred. Banners hang from the barriers, making a sad contrast between the comfortable within, and the less fortunate outside.

This isn’t a protest on the scale of that outside St Paul’s cathedral, which has provoked such a storm of controversy, but it is a vigil which has not been deterred by some appallingly wet weather, and the apparent indifference (thus far) of those elected to serve.

And, yes, there are more strikes and marches lined up between now and the end of the year in and around Lisbon. Those giving all their attention to Greece might do well to remember that there are other countries in the Eurozone suffering the less than beneficial effects of austerity programmes right now.

It’s Still A Mad Mel

What, I sometimes wonder, is Melanie Phillips’ problem? Yes, there are protests around London and across Europe, politicians of all stripes face new and testing challenges, and much of the world faces a future less certain than a decade ago. But that is no excuse for spewing out apocalyptic ranting and trying to frighten folks with visions of conflict, or even war (as in nuclear war).

But that is, more or less, what Mel is offering Daily Mail readers today. Anyone protesting brings out the intemperate and authoritarian in her, the Coalition Government gets it in the neck for, well, being a Coalition Government – Young Dave cannot do anything that meets with Mel’s approval – and everyone in the Middle East outside Israel is bent on wiping it out.

It’s hard to decipher her reasoning, other than that it consists of screaming denunciation of anyone not doing her bidding, an appeal to crack down on anyone dissenting or having the temerity to enjoy themselves (and throw lots and lots of folks into the nearest slammer), and a further appeal to allow the Government in Jerusalem to take out a few of its neighbours.

I hate to dissent from Mel’s Weltanschauung, but this is total crap. We didn’t get half decent workplace conditions by not occasionally rocking the boat. Universal suffrage only happened because folks were prepared to kick off about the UK being, prior to 1918 (that’s less than a century ago), a less than totally democratic country, and change is unlikely without someone first saying that something is wrong.

And that includes the phoney and ineffective “war on drugs” which Mel wants pursued with even more vigour – until someone mentions that it is absorbing serious amount of money and getting us precisely nowhere. Then there is the question of the Middle East, which she insists on bringing up at every opportunity – it’s the subject that got her binned from the Spectator.

Israel will not co-exist peacefully with its neighbours by aggression, and that much is obvious to Bibi Netenyahu and his fellow members of the Knesset. Pumping high explosive – and maybe worse – into Iran on a whim is not a fruitful way to achieve any kind of settlement in the region. In any case, as Mel might have noticed, the IDF has not suffered any serious military setback since it was created.

First Amendment considerations dictate that Melanie Phillips and her like should be able to say what they like, and when and where they like. I commend her persistence in the face of reality. But just occasionally I wish she would go and have a long rest – then try looking at the world without the prejudice that is shot through any and all of her ramblings.

And Mel – save us the witless Gandhi reference and do some homework.

Iberian Journey

As the clocks go back and November begins – but the UK still remains untouched by the predicted wintry weather and temperatures “as low as -20C” – Zelo Street is on tour in Iberia. Tuesday afternoon brought departure from Liverpool Airport on the last EasyJet flight of the season to Lisbon, a route the carrier should be running all year round, although carrying skiers may be more profitable.

So the loading of just 90 – most of them Portuguese returning home – was no surprise, and pushing back at 1645 on the dot not a problem. A slightly bumpy encounter with the Atlantic Jet Stream led to an early arrival, but any optimism was deflated by the realisation that this was a new part of Lisbon Airport, with a remarkably long walk (with hand luggage) to get out of the place.

Tuesday was a public holiday in Portugal, so downtown was quiet – but rather quieter than usual. Just how quiet the austerity drive has made this most intimate of capital cities will be relayed later in the week. There has been talk of economising on street lighting and stopping bus and Metro services earlier in the evening, but this would hit both local and tourist economy badly.

Already, those bedding down in shop doorways have been noticeable: how many more there are remains to be seen. And one should bear in mind that this is not a Mediterranean city, or indeed country: the winter months bring their share of cooler and wetter conditions. Indeed, the forecast is for some heavy showers and even some thunder. Sleeping rough is no soft option.

And, as it was the last flight to Lisbon, how does the return home happen? Ah well. This is also scheduled to be with EasyJet, so it won’t be from Lisbon. The Iberian journey continues later, in hopefully more leisurely style. But the realisation that this part of the world may contain economies that are close to the edge will also be kept in mind.

I’ll post more on this later in the week.

A Sad Story From Lymington – THE END

Today in Southampton, the case of ticket clerk Ian Faletto reached Southampton, where a tribunal hearing was scheduled for 1000 hours. Many press representatives were present, maybe with the hope of seeing the little man triumph over dastardly South West Trains (SWT). Sadly for the hacks, and everyone else who turned up, there was no tribunal hearing.

This is because Faletto’s case was withdrawn before the hearing started. This was after SWT presented evidence to his counsel that precipitated the advice to withdraw. Faletto has conceded that he would not have won the day, but has maintained that he did clear a shopping trolley from the track at Lymington Pier station.

SWT has disputed that claim. But then, as the case did not come to a hearing, none of the evidence will be made public. This gives the Fourth Estate plenty of scope to kick both SWT and the RMT, while suggesting that Faletto is somehow innocent, despite his admission. But the why-oh-why punditry will have some difficulty, given the vehemence of SWT’s statement.

And the fact will remain that Ian Faletto’s dismissal stands, and he hasn’t been paid off. As none of the evidence held by SWT has been presented, I will not be presenting anything held by Zelo Street. But, as one long serving railway worker has said, it’s not easy for anyone with 20 years’ service to get themselves sacked by The Railway.

THE END

Telegraph In Rail Confusion

Commercial pressures on newspapers mean less hacks who understand anything outside the mainstream: specialism nowadays extends to sport – and often only football – and, for the quality titles, the arts. Transport matters often end up being covered by the same person who road tests the latest cars, with the all too predictable result that they know less than many in their audience.

At the Maily Telegraph, Alistair Osborne was an honourable exception: he was well regarded by even the specialists on the Rail industry. Sadly, though, he sprayed his credibility up the wall in one go with a formulaic EU-bashing piece in July claiming that the Thameslink order was won by Siemens because they could finance the deal more cheaply. This was soon debunked.

Beeching was not here until 26 years later

So now Telegraph readers have the wisdom of Michael Deacon, whose latest effort, about former BR chairman Richard Beeching, is confused and misleading. He talks of “a poem about an empty train station”, while someone has rustled up a stock photo of a station that was anything but empty: London’s King’s Cross, taken in September 1935 as the “Silver Jubilee” departs on its first trial run.

Many hacks didn’t get on board, hence the numbers watching from an adjacent platform or on the track, a sight that would give anyone involved with health and safety palpitations. This run was famous for one thing: the speeds achieved included two maxima of over 112mph, and locomotive designer Nigel Gresley had at one point to tell the driver to “ease his arm”.

The “Silver Jubilee” was a commercial success, and ran full most weekdays as it brought businessmen from Newcastle and Darlington to London for a few hours at head office before whisking them back north. Its successor trains in the 1960s were one of the things Richard Beeching positively encouraged. It was followed by more “streamliners” before War intervened in 1939.

Deacon also misreads Beeching completely: by the time the former head of ICI arrived at BR, debts were spiralling and the organisation was not playing to its strengths. Closure of loss-making lines and services did not depend on who had read what poem at school: Beeching was utterly unsentimental, and even included his local station in Kent in the closure proposals.

Beeching also encouraged BR to develop its own management programme, to realise that it had to function as a business, and that it had to become far more efficient over time. From his lead came the business led railway of the early 1990s, before “Shagger” Major and his sell-offs caused such disruption. There is a story to be told about Beeching: it’s sad that the Telegraph can’t be bothered.

Guido Fawked – Routine Hypocrisy (Again)

The Guido Fawkes blog, penned by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his tame gofer Henry Cole, the Laurel and Hardy of the blogosphere, has today been passing adverse comment on the recent behaviour of Tory MP Matthew Offord, who represents Hendon. Such comment is not exceptional, but in this case the sheer hypocrisy of Staines most certainly is.

Packs of Stella on 3 for 2 offer at Tesco? Result!

Because the reason for Offord’s appearance on the Fawkes blog is partly due to his apparently being Elephant’s Trunk and Mozart at last year’s party conference: Staines and his gofer helpfully tell that the means by which Offord became tired and emotional was Scotch. Staines, of course, knows full well that the law does not care overmuch whether it was Scotch or beer.

Today's meeting of Pot and Kettle

As many around the blogosphere are well aware, Staines’ relationship with alcohol has been a turbulent one: he notched up his fourth alcohol related conviction in 2008 when he appeared before Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court to be found guilty of drinking and driving for the second time. The three-year driving ban was routine; the 18 month supervision order and three month curfew were not.

And the drinking is not the only thing that has caused Staines to end up in court: he declared himself bankrupt some years ago after a legal battle during which he was accused of playing “fast and loose with the truth”, a characterisation that many who have read the product of the Fawkes blog will readily recognise. So for him to call out anyone for inebriation and dishonesty is pretty rich.

Staines, of course, could have fared worse in that court appearance in 2008: District Judge Timothy Stone told him “I take the view that you do have an alcohol problem ... you are fortunate not to be going to prison today”. And if Staines is caught driving a car whilst in an overtired state again, especially given he has to re-take his test and hasn’t, as far as is known, done so, he will go to prison.

And making snarky comments about minor politicians won’t carry much weight coming from someone doing a handful down the Scrubs.

Heath Was Monty’s Double

Those who do not work in and around the City of London and Canary Wharf (“and other areas of high business concentration”) don’t know what they are missing: every weekday morning, these lucky people (the target demographic earn “over £87,000 per annum”) get copies of free paper City AM thrust their way, whether they like it or not. The paper is edited by one Allister Heath.

Who he? Well, to no surprise at all – given the message that is shouted from every edition of City AM (Government too big, cuts not enough, EU source of all evil not attributable to any other kind of Government) – Heath is also chairman of the "2020 Tax Commission", another front of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA). I’ll put it more directly: Heath is a TPA stooge, and his paper is effectively a TPA mouthpiece.

So the TPA not only gets its propaganda into the national press, onto television, and into the PR world through its former staffers such as Mark Wallace and Charlotte Linacre, but also has a conduit into Government via Susie Squire, now a SpAd to Iain Duncan Smith at the DWP, and a voice in the City via Allister Heath. This last underscores once more why the TPA should be taken seriously.

Especially as the standard of TPA propaganda is equally dismal across the whole range of its outlets: those familiar with the regular outpouring of “dodgy dossiers” from the Comfortable of Tufton Street will be glad to know that City AM’s equivalent is just as easily taken apart. The difficult part is that many of those well-paid readers who should know better believe what they read.

And one who ought to know better – but never seems to get round to it – is ConservativeHome stalwart Tim Montgomerie, who today has penned a gushing tribute to Heath, with the priceless homage “How Allister writes this quality [sic] on a daily basis and edits the newspaper, I will never know”. Maybe it’s because he gets paid to do it and has a staff of over twenty.

So what pearls of wisdom does editor Heath bestow on his readers? On the USA: “the US electorate increasingly wants ultra-low taxes combined with European-style levels of public spending”. Wrong twice, unless you believe the whopper that health care reform was a “Government takeover”, and the Tea Partiers. But City AM does have a supposed exclusive on the EU and bank reform today.

Except that the “internal Treasury Document obtained by City AM” is only selectively relayed. If there was any kind of a story, it would be published. In full. Heath is no better – or independent of the TPA – on HS2: “The ... costs of the proposal ... are much greater than the benefits” he pontificates. Not with a projected BCR of 2.6 they’re not, Allister.

Same misinformation, whether from organ grinder, or monkey.

Cameras Catch Speeders Shock Horror

Those of Rupe’s troops at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun have made a miraculous discovery: there are speed cameras out there on the road network that snap cars breaking the speed limit. Bears dump in woods, Pope Catholic. But the hacks have discovered something else: when you add up all the speeding fines, it can produce a big and scary number.

Clearly, nothing gets past a Murdoch journalist, except perhaps that speed cameras are installed where they are for a reason, and that reason is because they are judged to be an effective means of changing driver behaviour – as in slowing them down at locations where there have been serious accidents in the recent past. The Sun, for some reason, does not mention accidents at all.

Instead, readers are told how Rupe’s troops have been putting in Freedom Of Information (FoI) requests to find out “Britain’s most money-grabbing speed cameras”, which “Between them ... rake in £3 million in fines in a year”. And who pays the fines? “Frustrated motorists”, declares the piece, rather than the more prosaic “motorists who significantly exceed the speed limit”.

So who is the bad guy behind all these “money-grabbing” devices? Oh look, a photo of Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne. It’s the pantomime bad guy, so it must be pantomime season. So we have to be told for the 94th time that Huhne got caught by a speed camera on the M11 (allegedly) and that someone else (allegedly) took his points (perhaps).

We even get the Sun playing both sides: readers are told that “the single most risky route for fines in Britain [if you can’t keep your speed down] was a 12-mile stretch of seafront road in Brighton ... it has 11 cameras, which caught 18,045 drivers in three years”. And if the authorities had done nothing, Rupe’s troops could play why-oh-why about all the crashes and injuries.

The lamentable standard of the piece is confirmed with a quote from the so-called Drivers’ Alliance, which is allied with our old friends at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance. The two bodies have in the past joined forces to selectively use figures to suggest that speed cameras cause more accidents, and the sham has not taken too much effort to thoroughly debunk.

If anything or anyone is to be “named and shamed”, as the Sun suggests, it should be the misleading and myth-sustaining hackery that is on display in their own rag. Papers would do well to call speeding for what it is: potentially deadly law-breaking.

Del Boy And His Fiery Trousers

[Update at end of post]

Showing his usual measured and mild-mannered approach to the subject of climate change, James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole has posted another missive in the bear pit that is Maily Telegraph blogland titled “Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again”, to the approval of his adoring echo chamber (Sid and Doris Bonkers).

Del Boy is still smarting from the appearance on the scene of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project – co-funded by one of the Koch foundations – and its preliminary conclusion that global warming is happening, and that the temperature information provided thus far by NASA GISS, the NOAA, and HAD CRUT is essentially correct.

So when BEST Scientific Director Richard Muller suggested that the warming trend had not slowed down, here was an opportunity for Del Boy to bring forward evidence to the contrary – and shout “liar” again, just to emphasise his rational approach and enhance his credentials. Sadly, though, he relies on Astroturf lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) for his information.

BEST: Axes allegedly skewed

The GWPF’s David Whitehouse presents a series of data covering the first decade of the current century and declares it to be “a statistically perfect straight line of zero gradient”, without any of the statistical analysis that would prove his claim. Whitehouse, while complaining that BEST has presented the X and Y axes on their graphs other than to his satisfaction, has in fact skewed the data himself.

GWPF: Perish the thought!

BEST – and all other major studies of recent temperature data – have showed a warming of around 0.7 Celsius in rather more than 30 years. The GWPF chart covers just ten years, and the gradient of that line is not flat. It’s upwards – though not, given the spacing of the X and Y axes, steeply so. I reckon – and am quite prepared to be corrected – the warming shown is around 0.25 Celsius.

Which fits in with figures for the decades prior to the Millennium. And, other than the misleading GWPF graph, and Whitehouse’s assertions, the only scrap of evidence that Del Boy brings to the table is Mail hack David Rose, whose selective attempts to rubbish climate science have been so thoroughly debunked in the past couple of years.

“Note how the 10 year trend from 2001 to 2010 ... shows no warming whatsoever” proclaims Delingpole, in yet another act of flagrant dishonesty. He then loudly accuses anyone and everyone not in agreement of Himself Personally Now to be dishonest. This convinces the echo chamber, which dutifully agrees, in the style of nodding donkeys.

No change there, then.

[UPDATE: the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines, who styles himself Guido Fawkes, has copied the graphs from David Rose's Mail On Sunday piece and talked up the BEST versus GWPF "argument" into a "case of fakery". He then suggests that "the global warming racket is unravelling". The sound of ritual incantation is thus pumped into the argument in order to keep it inflated.

What also does not help Staines and Delingpole is that Prof. Judith Curry, who they both quote in support of their stance, has today stated on her blog that "this does not constitute a new scientific scandal in any way". She also suggests that David Rose was leading in his questioning]

Cynical Is As Cynical Does

Blustering Bunter of the Dacre press Simon Heffer has delivered his latest sermon on Europe. Entitled “The cynical lie that leaving the EU would destroy Britain: The majority of people now want out of this bloated dictatorship, we at least need a referendum”, it at least demonstrates a conjunction of rambling incoherence with irrational prejudice. But the cynicism goes beyond mere assertions.

Leaving aside the Hefferlump’s strawman proposition, and his amateurish attempt to tie the EU to some or all of the Third Reich, Italian Fascism, Francoism, The Regime Of The Greek Colonels, and the Estado Novo, this rant is merely another exercise in the cynicism which it pretends only lies with others. In Heffer’s case, this is the cynicism of frightening his readers to keep them buying papers.

But he is preceded by cynics in power, first and foremost one James Harold Wilson, who used the then European Economic Community as part of Labour’s election manifestos in 1974 (there were two General Elections that year), then claimed to be “renegotiating” the terms of the UK’s membership (in effect a fig-leaf), and then held a referendum on membership just to hold his party together.

Thus the cynical use of Europe was established, and has been growing recently, as both press and politicians have milked the issue for their own advantage. The Fourth Estate churns out reams of knocking copy attacking anything they dislike about the EU – and making up anything not based on fact – while using the European Project as some kind of convenient bogeyman.

Politicians are to a large degree worse: they, after all, are the ones doing the decision making and therefore guiding our future. Before last year’s General Election, Young Dave shamelessly used the EU as a way to garner votes. Then he’s talked tough on the subject while in office. He is as responsible as anyone for the bout of referendum fever.

But, as he wasn’t serious in the first place, Cameron now has to damp down referendum speculation, against a backdrop of misinformation – Heffer’s piece is typical – stoked by his own actions. Both hacks and rebellious Tories use the issue to paint Cameron as inferior to Margaret Thatcher, while managing not to notice that she never came even close to calling a referendum on the EU.

In fact, apart from Wilson, no Prime Minister has seriously offered a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. So pretending that Young Dave is soft by comparison is pure drivel. And so is the opinion poll frightener: now it’s 49% out versus 40% in. Before the 1975 poll there was a 2:1 majority for leaving. The vote revealed a 2:1 majority for staying. Go figure, assembled cynics.

Parish Notice – Comment Is Free, But ...

Zelo Street has allowed comments without moderation for more than two and a half years. That decision was made at the outset for one reason, and that was to make the blog accessible to anyone looking in, so that they could offer their feedback and have that published as soon as they had clicked Submit.

On occasion, there have been instances of trolling, but until recently these have been few and far between – and have subsided after being called out. Sadly, in the last fortnight, there has been rather more in the way of personal abuse and trolling, with no sign that those responsible have the intellectual capacity to take the hint.

So, regrettably, comment moderation has today been introduced on Zelo Street. I will try to check comments regularly and so pass them for publication. Paradoxically, this move will most likely cause the troll tendency to desist, but if moderation were to be removed, they would be back in short order.

My apologies to those – and that’s almost all – who stop by and comment, who will be inconvenienced by the change. In the meantime, on with the blogging!