This is why - by Richard... Monday, June 27, 2011

This is why - by Richard... Monday, June 27, 2011

... we cannot work with the old order. By hook or by crook, we are going to have to get rid of them ... all of them:

The leader of Edinburgh council sparked fury yesterday when she dismissed the capital's tram fiasco as a "small glitch". LibDim council chief Jenny Dawe played down the soaring cost of the project despite admitting it would hit services in the city.

Speaking on the BBC's Politics Show, she said: "I don't think Edinburgh is a laughing stock. I think we'll get through this, we'll get a tram. In the run of things, this will be a small glitch on the way there."

Did I not write yesterday of "Scottish Practices", defined as "wholesale looting of the public purse on grandiose schemes, enriching contractors, consultants and officials, without care or remorse"? Well, there's your example.

Another one from the same stable is the M-74 extension, which opens tomorrow. With a price tag of £692 million - or £2,000 an inch - it is Scotland's most expensive road. Yet the Scottish Government has trumpeted the £445m construction contract - which excluded the cost of decontamination and land purchasing - as being completed early and under budget.

In fact, it should have been finished three years ago, and when initially given the green light in 2001 was estimated to cost £245m.

You cannot deal with this by rational argument – these people are not rational. And a political system that allows this cannot be salvaged. The decay has gone too far. We have to start again.

COMMENT: SCOTTISH PRACTICES THREAD

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MoD "bloated and dysfunctional" - by Richard...

MoD is bureaucratic, bloated and indecisive, warns report ... The "bloated and dysfunctional" Ministry of Defence leaves ministers "in the dark" about key decisions, an official review will say today.

I'm aware of it, and I'm really shocked! But I'm not going to play the MSM game of rushing to publish until I've seen the speech and then read the report. Already we are gathering more clutter than enough, much of it singularly ill-informed, so it doesn't help to add to it.

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Blown it! - by Richard...

It starts off so well. The Guardian editorial tells us that, "Discussions of the Greek debacle commonly assume that it's a disaster made in Greece that now requires the rest of the Europe to step in and sort it out".

"Wrong", it then says. "This is a crisis of the eurozone, in which Athens is not a leading actor but merely a stage set. The catastrophe that has been unfolding in Greece over the past year is merely the starkest incidence of long-running flaws within the eurozone".

The meltdown goes wider, says that paper, "as a glance at Dublin, Lisbon or even Madrid will confirm: it is the inevitable product of the design faults of European monetary union". But then we are told: "Unless those flaws are fixed, the single currency will remain under existential threat". It's blown it!

The "flaws" cannot be fixed – they are inherent to the project – an integral part of it. Unless you are going to get political union on a Bismarkian scale, monetary union ain't going to work. And the longer the "colleagues" take before they recognise that simple fact, the worse it is going to get.