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.

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distingui...

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 ...

Lib Dem v. Tory (Round 2)

The Liberal Democrats stand for a distinct political ideology. It is an ideology built around both socially and economically liberal precepts. In as far as our ruling Labour government can be said to have an ideology at all, it coincides with Liberalism only incidentally. Labour stands for pragmatism, and where it does not there is still a core of values that are collectivist and not individual. Sometimes people are prepared to claim the moral high ground for policies of social solidarity and redistribution of wealth. Liberals may argue in favour of equality of opportunity, we can not argue in favour- as Socialists do- of "and equal society". The reason is simple: Socialism does not work. If one places equality above freedom, then eventually we get tyranny. This is why, while we may argue in favour of a more equal society as being a stronger society, the tools that we may use to gain -in our view- socially desirable outcomes must rest upon freedom above all else. As PJ O'...

Cicero's Songs

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