Category Archives: London

Ah, London.

But not the London of old.

Not the ‘turn again Dick Whittington’ London.

Not the London of the 50’s, 60’s or even the relatively uncluttered 70’s.

London of today:

Crime levels beyond belief

Failing schools

A public transport system that is so wholly unable to cope with the daily commute that it is an international joke.

That the very worthy TfL manages, either directly or through its contractors, to shift the same number of people home and back, as the entire population of a small Scandinavian country, almost every day and without incident, is staggeringly awesome.

But the reality is that most of London’s commuters struggle and sweat their way to work; shoehorned in to train carriages, charged hyper-inflationary fares and dehumanised to such an extent that invading the personal space of at least half-a-dozen other passengers somehow becomes the accepted norm.

That’s not right.

Meanwhile, over on the road, cyclists partake in the daily lottery that they call ‘alternative transport’, and anyone with a grain of common sense would call ‘stupid’; so caught up in their routine bid to survive are they, that a significant number of cyclists ignore the rules of the road in their bid to outpace road traffic.

The streets of London are no longer paved with gold; they are filthy, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested and cursed with more pot-holes than the inhabitants of most third-world capitals would believe.

The systemic decay of the city is visible to any discerning eye.

The urban population of London live in ghettoes, where the cultural subdivisions are stark and uncomfortable.

When ‘this area is Bangladeshi’, ‘that is a Romanian district’ and ‘over here are the white middle-classes’, there’s something evidently diseased with a city.

London has out-of-control elements of the population who seem to be able to operate beyond the law with impunity; only suffering a relatively minor crackdown when a five-year-old girl gets shot on the street.

Oh, I appreciate that London makes small contributions to the nation, but I put it to you that London’s contributions are outweighed by its parasitic tendencies.

Londoners claim that the city produces wealth beyond our wildest dreams, yet the true cost of that wealth production; the vile waste that spews from the arse end of the temple of Mammon, is dumped elsewhere for others to deal with.

The alleged ‘wealth-producing’ Londoners want their toys, their electrical-powered gadgets, their gizmos. The supposedly ‘green’ motorists of London want their recharging points.

Yet every single one of the places that produce London’s electrical power are elsewhere in the country.

The nuclear generating stations that power the bloated capital are in Wales, Scotland and the prettier parts of England, as are the gas-fired and a significant number of the coal-powered electricity generators.

And yet the vast bulk of these power stations exist to serve the parasite that is London.

Electricity is ferried across the country, through the national grid, to the electrical black-hole that is our national capital.

So while Londoners preen themselves and crow about how great their city is and how much wealth the city produces, the true cost of their existence is a suffocatingly enormous daily drain on the English, Welsh and Scottish countrysides.

Because, to put it another way, nuclear power stations – and all of the other generating stations – are a tax for having London, and this tax is being paid not by Londoners, but by the residents of the countryside.

London sucks people in, the gravitational tug is difficult to withstand, I appreciate this. But the dazzling five card trick hypnotises people in to overlooking all of the ills of the city.

But the truth is that London cannot sustain its continued population growth.

The water system continues to provide clean drinking water to the population, yet millions of gallons are lost through leaks.

Millions of gallons. Why? Because digging up the capital’s roads wholesale – what is needed to fix the problem – is unpalatable to the local population and the politicians alike.

So the waste continues, pretty much unchecked.

The sewage system was built by Victorian engineers who had no idea that the small population of London would grow to today’s levels.

The hundreds of tons of daily landfill is taken away and buried in the precious green and pleasant English countryside.

London’s roads are a joke; barely able to cope with off-peak traffic, the ‘rush hour’ consists of up to two hours of near-paralysis.

The trains are amongst the most expensive – yet, conversely, the most heavily subsidised – in the world; consisting as they do of rolling stock that, for the most part, is substandard and unable to cope with passenger demand.

London’s underground system is, if we’re honest, overcapacity to the point of being criminal.

Am I the only person who remembers the damning reports on tube overcrowding, that were published in the wake of the Moorgate disaster?

Am I the only person who thinks that if the tubes of the Moorgate era were dangerously overcapacity then, how would a Health & Safety enquiry view today’s passenger levels, should we have another disaster?

It’s the transport elephant in the room. And that is sitting beside its larger sibling, the transport infrastructure elephant in the room.

And yet the workforce and the local population continue to put up with Third World living and travelling conditions on a daily basis.

So here’s the big question.

In the 21^st Century, when almost every household has the capacity for speed-of-light communications via the internet, is it really necessary to inflict the degrading, dehumanising, cattle-transporting-qualities of Big City life on the public?

Is it really necessary to cram so many employers, employees and even unemployed in to such a small space?

Really?

No, of course it isn’t.

Students are revolting.

Today has seen the second student revolt in a couple of weeks.

The first student revolt didn’t go down too well. There was bad behaviour, wanton destruction, mindless vandalism and mob rule.

Yes, the police were caught with their trousers around their ankles; they admitted as much.

But for today’s revolt, the police were prepared for a violent, rampaging mob of uncontrolled thugs, vandals and violent protesters.

Anyone who thought the police would not come down hard on today’s protest is clearly devoid of all common sense.

Let’s ask a question.

Do you:

1. think the police would, as happened last time, paddle about ineffectively, whilst fires are set, public buildings are ransacked and private property is wantonly vandalised? Or do you
2. believe that, at the first validated report of serious crime, the police would assume full riot mode, and come down hard?

If  your answer is 2. welcome to planet Earth. If your answer is 1., you’re wasting fresh air, please leave now.

And let’s stretch things even more: what do we imagine is going to happen at future protests?

I have seen 400,000 protesters – get that kids, at least four times the number of the people you have turned out with – peaceful protesters turn out for the Liberty and Livelihood march in 2002.

I have seen one million peaceful – I’ll say that again – peaceful protesters take to the streets of London for the StWC march.

And yet less than 100,000 students, who expect to be taken seriously and treated like adults, are incapable of organising, policing and passing off a peaceful protest.

In what I can only take as a sign of irony, various Tweets are being pulsed around the internet this evening.

I’ve seen several people retweet the thoughts of @josayoung:

• Wish Teen Son would come home from protest. Last time he got kicked in the shins by a policeman for getting too close.

What? Last time out he got so close to a policeman that he got kicked in the shins? And this time you *let him go out again*? Really? See question 2. above. Where was your common sense? More importantly, where was his?

• They were kettled immediately, even though to begin with they were simply and peacefully protesting. They are all young students

Young students who caused damage assessed at hundreds of thousands of pounds. Of course they were contained! How dim does a person have to be to imagine that riot procedures *would not* be enacted?

• Young were not trying to cause trouble, just making their views known. Education is lifeblood and leads to jobs and social order

There has been no evidence on this, or the last student revolt, of education or social order. Well, maybe in your world, but not in that of anyone else.

• The protesters are not revolutionaries, quite the opposite. They want the right to eduction (sic), development and jobs. They are very worried.

I’m worried too. I’m worried at the obvious lack of common sense and intelligence of the protesters. I’m worried about the lack of common sense and intelligence of the parents of the protesters. And also, not wishing to contradict you but… these little thugs are behaving *precisely* like revolutionaries.

Therefore they’re going to get their arses kicked.

I appreciate that @josayoung was concerned for the welfare of her sons during the riot. But a person with just a smidge of foresight would have been able to see what was probably going to happen.

I see no evidence of ‘learning by repetition’ here, not by the parents, not by the offspring.

As examples of of dumbed-down Britain, I don’t need to look any further.

But, just to refresh the collective memory: