A failure of Ambition?

As always when coming to France, I am struck by the deliberate way the state has invested in infrastructure. It is not just that their Railways work so well, which is -frankly- a standing rebuke to Britain, the country that invented them, it is also the way in which grands projets reflect a vision of France. It may seem sometimes an overblown, perhaps even bombastic, vision to a more cynical Anglo-Saxon eye, but it does unquestionably reflect an ambition for France.

In a country half as densely populated as the UK- especially its South-East corner- it is obviously easier to build straight high speed rail lines or such huge statements as the Millau viaduct in France. However there is also a far greater will to do so. In Britain we spend billions on invalidity benefit and call it "investing in people"; in France they genuinely do "invest" in infrastructure. It is an investment that allows the French to travel across the country in 2-3 hours. To live in Mid France and still work in Paris: the equivalent of living in Sheffield and working in London, with only a one hour travelling time between the two. By contrast, it takes hours to simply cross London. There are no high speed RER trains in London, which make travelling in Paris so much faster. Cross Rail, which would be RER 40 years later, remains a distant dream, while in Paris there are already 7 or 8 RER lines.

The British economy is choking under the weight of the need to concentrate so much in London and South East England because it takes to long or is too expensive to travel if one is based outside that region. Paris and the Ile-de-France have far fewer problems because of the vision and the ambition that they showed in fixing up their infrastructure. Sure, not all of it works: the Mitterand Library is a poorly built, ugly shambles. Yet still one can not fault the idea. The Nimby-ism and catastrophically expensive real estate market in the UK are impoverishing the whole country.

And there is no-one to even start the national debate about what we must do.

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...

Cicero's Songs

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