Government bollocks

The Trouble with Traffic Planning…

| Richard

…is that it’s an oxymoron, much like the old joke about “Military Intelligence”.

Transport for London, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to fix a problem that it thinks might exist (see the quote below) in the Rotherhithe Tunnel by adding more solid bollards to restrict the width of the approaches to the tunnel down to 6′ 6″, i.e. tighter than a gnat’s chuff.

What this means is that on the approaches to the tunnel, both northbound and southbound, traffic – understandably – slows to a snail’s pace at best to negotiate the width restrictions and this leads to long, long queues of traffic and not just at peak times.

The justification?

“The narrowing of the width restrictions on both northbound and southbound approaches to the tunnel will significantly reduce the risk of vehicle collisions, spillage of flammable materials, and fires in the tunnel.”

So a complete lack of a quantitative analysis or justification. Are they saying that narrower vehicles don’t crash or spill flammable materials or catch fire? Evidence?

No.

And what is to become of the vehicles that cannot enter the Rotherhithe Tunnel? Well they are required to use either Tower Bridge or the Blackwall Tunnel, both of which are well-known for traffic queues, so they’re just creating more travel problems or adding to the severity of existing ones.

Utter fuckwittery!

Still, I suppose they need to justify their fake jobs by coming up with these ludicrous schemes…

I’ve written to TfL to ask them about this issue, copied to my MP, so we’ll see what, if anything, they have to say.

The Trouble With Charity…

| Richard

…is that it only shifts the problem geographically or delays what is sadly the inevitable.

“The UK is the world’s third largest donor from countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), following Germany ($14.5bn) and the US ($30.7bn). But as a percentage of gross national income (GNI), British aid spending was 0.56% in 2011 – far greater than the US equivalent of 0.20%. Only five OECD countries – Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, and the Netherlands – have already met the 0.7% commitment.

“What does this mean for the UK taxpayer? With a population of about 62.6 million, last year’s £8.57bn spend works out at roughly £137 per head.”

Source

Now I don’t have a problem with spending money to help others. I earn decent money. I tip. I buy the occasional Big Issue. I give to charity.

But I do wonder if all I’m doing is helping people with the best of intentions try to hold back a tsunami with a couple of bits of plywood.

The world’s population doubled between 1960 and 1999 and reached 7bn in 2012 with growth rates of around 1%. We can’t feed the world as it is.

Humanitarian aid helps solve short term issues but merely postpones the inevitable: we can’t feed the people we have now, but by keeping the babies we see on TV, breaking our hearts, alive, we are condemning them to a life of hardship and suffering, surely?

That 1% growth rate is the average: in sub-Saharan Africa it’s more than 2.5%, in the areas where the environment is less able to support its present population.

The way to feed more people is to grow more crops and to do that we need to invest in developing the ground conditions to allow sustainable agriculture. But even if we could cultivate more areas of Africa, where do all the people go? It’s just not going to work. Instead, we throw aid as a form of Band-Aid over a severed limb. Sometimes that aid gets used as a weapon by those involved in civil wars or otherwise corrupt.

But it makes us in the first world feel less guilty when we Do Something to ‘help’ the third world. And I reckon by doing so, we do more harm than good. The more people we save, the worse it gets. And it won’t end unless we have a complete rethink.

What’s Your Beef with the NHS?

| Richard

So two stories have dominated the news recently: horse meat in cheap beef products and failings in a hospital trust.

The supermarkets’ pressure on prices will always mean quality will suffer and sourcing meat from the cheapest source was bound to cause problems. If you want to guarantee quality, use a local butcher with locally sourced organic meat. You’ll taste the difference and help keep small businesses and your High Street alive.

The NHS story ignores the main problem with the NHS: fake management jobs. These layers of middle management with people doing nothing of any use to patients cost a lot of money – money that would be better spent on front line nursing.

I know of someone who skived off work for many months on a couple of occasions on full pay. Her work? Well there wasn’t any work to do in the first place so no-one missed her and nothing needed to be carried out by others working longer or harder.

It’s one of those jobs created for someone they can’t actually sack. They give it a job title with words like ”lead’ or ‘manager’ for someone who doesn’t actually lead or manage anyone. At most these people do reports about stuff that’s completely irrelevant and they sit in meetings to discuss producing these reports. Fake jobs. They report to Assistant Deputy Directors and the like. How many more tiers?

What is needed is a clear out of people who don’t actually contribute to patient care. Everyone should have to write a job description for their own position. What they do, the value that adds and how detrimental it would be to patients if they were sacked. Anyone with the term ‘lead’ or ‘manager’ should be able to show who they actually lead or manage and the benefit they bring.

And the people carrying out these reviews shouldn’t be other NHS Trust managers with vested interests like justifying their own jobs.

But no-one in Government has the balls to do it.

UK Border Agency

| Richard

Entering the UK via Humberside Airport (or how to piss off 200+ UK citizens) with the capable assistance of the UK Border Agency.

I recently travelled through Humberside Airport on holiday. This is not a busy airport: they say they are:

“…a key national and international gateway to Northern and Eastern England, connecting over half a million passengers to 30 destinations every year.”

On the day I returned to the UK, they were handling roughly one incoming flight per hour. Which was just as well, as it took the UK Border Agency over an hour to actually allow me back into the country along with all the other pissed-off passengers on the charter flight.

The UKBA say:

“With tougher checks now in place at the border you may have to wait a little longer to get into the United Kingdom, especially at peak times. We use scanners to ensure that passports, visas and other official documents are genuine. Our officers are trained to detect forgeries and check that people have the right to enter the United Kingdom.

“An officer will check your passport and give you permission to stay, if you need it. We aim to see you within 45 minutes.

“If you are a national of the EU or EEA, you can use the separate EEA/EU channel, where we will usually check your passport or national identity card more quickly.”

ORLY?

Well at Humberside there’s one channel for non-EU travellers and there’s the main bit. The two numpties on duty when I came through looked as though they were on day release from an old folks’ home and clearly relished the opportunity to have a chat with each and every passenger. Presumably these two are what the UKBA refer to as “scanners” because they didn’t actually use any equipment other than their reading glasses and mouths… So after an hour’s queuing, I finally got through their vigorous entry procedures. Just as well it’s not like this at the UK airports I usually travel through on business…