Ah, London.<\/p>\n
But not the London of old.<\/p>\n
Not the ‘turn again Dick Whittington’ London.<\/p>\n
Not the London of the 50’s, 60’s or even the relatively uncluttered 70’s.<\/p>\n
London of today:<\/p>\n
Crime levels beyond belief<\/p>\n
Failing schools<\/p>\n
A public transport system that is so wholly unable to cope with the daily commute that it is an international joke.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the reality is that most of London\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
That’s not right.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, over on the road, cyclists partake in the daily lottery that they call \u2018alternative transport\u2019, and anyone with a grain of common sense would call \u2018stupid\u2019; 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The systemic decay of the city is visible to any discerning eye.<\/p>\n
The urban population of London live in ghettoes, where the cultural subdivisions are stark and uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
When \u2018this area is Bangladeshi\u2019, \u2018that is a Romanian district\u2019 and \u2018over here are the white middle-classes\u2019, there\u2019s something evidently diseased with a city.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0Mammon, is dumped elsewhere for others to deal with.<\/p>\n
The alleged \u2018wealth-producing\u2019 Londoners want their toys, their electrical-powered gadgets, their gizmos. The supposedly \u2018green\u2019 motorists of London want their recharging points.<\/p>\n
Yet every single one of the places that produce London\u2019s electrical power are elsewhere in the country.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And yet the vast bulk of these power stations exist to serve the parasite that is London.<\/p>\n
Electricity is ferried across the country, through the national grid, to the electrical black-hole that is our national capital.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Because, to put it another way, nuclear power stations \u2013 and all of the other generating stations \u2013 are a tax for having London, and this tax is being paid not by Londoners, but by the residents of the countryside.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the truth is that London cannot sustain its continued population growth.<\/p>\n
The water system continues to provide clean drinking water to the population, yet millions of gallons are lost through leaks.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So the waste continues, pretty much unchecked.<\/p>\n
The sewage system was built by Victorian engineers who had no idea that the small population of London would grow to today\u2019s levels.<\/p>\n
The hundreds of tons of daily landfill is taken away and buried in the precious green and pleasant English countryside.<\/p>\n
London’s roads are a joke; barely able to cope with off-peak traffic, the \u2018rush hour\u2019 consists of up to two hours of near-paralysis.<\/p>\n
The trains are amongst the most expensive \u2013 yet, conversely, the most heavily subsidised \u2013 in the world; consisting as they do of rolling stock that, for the most part, is substandard and unable to cope with passenger demand.<\/p>\n
London\u2019s underground system is, if we\u2019re honest, overcapacity to the point of being criminal.<\/p>\n
Am I the only person who remembers the damning reports on tube overcrowding, that were published in the wake of the Moorgate disaster?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the transport elephant in the room. And that is sitting beside its larger sibling, the transport infrastructure elephant in the room.<\/p>\n
And yet the workforce and the local population continue to put up with Third World living and travelling conditions on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s the big question.<\/p>\n
In the 21st<\/sup> 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?<\/p>\n Is it really necessary to cram so many employers, employees and even unemployed in to such a small space?<\/p>\n Really?<\/p>\n No, of course it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}