Wiser Heads

One of these articles is by Peter Hitchens, and the other is an editorial in the Morning Star. Can you guess which is which? Here is the first:

We don't have a Transport Ministry in this country. We have a Ministry of Roads, Cars and Lorries which has for decades waged a dedicated war against trains, trams, pedestrians and cyclists. That does not mean it makes a good job of the roads. Far from it. They are terrible. But it often needs to curry favour with one group of voters by annoying other groups.

This is one of the reasons for the petty, stupid gestures such as 20mph speed limits, congestion charges and ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’, which do no good and annoy so many. By inflicting misery on drivers, the Roads Ministry tries to pretend it is fair to all means of transport. It is not. These measures do nothing to help those without cars or who, like me, prefer not to use them.

The Government assumes that most important journeys will be made by car and that freight will go by road. It ignores 90 years of research which shows that the more roads they build, the more they fill up with traffic. Every motorway, every bypass, every inner ring-road just makes the problem worse and will carry on doing so until the end of the world.

If you want to reduce traffic, build more trains and trams. Meanwhile we have yet to recognise that it was a mistake to close thousands of miles of railway lines and rip up hundreds of miles of tramways, which were far greener, safer and better suited to our landscape than the California-style freeways we keep building.

So from time to time a futile gesture is needed. The latest is to pretend to renationalise the railways. The resulting shambles is to be called ‘Great British Railways’ (GBR) as if it is a TV baking contest.

It is always wisest to let other people decide whether you are ‘Great’ or not. I once worked for a newspaper which boasted for years that it was the world’s greatest, when it was not. This bragging did not save it from shrinking to its current sad level, so sad that I will not name it.

Then there is ‘British’. Thanks to the Blairite folly of devolution, GBR will only run in England. Passenger services remain devolved.

ScotRail stays under Scottish government control and Transport for Wales rail under Welsh government control. Freight trains will stay private but run on taxpayer-funded rails. So will the notorious Rolling Stock Companies (Roscos) which lease carriages and engines to operators. I am not sure the headquarters of these highly profitable bodies are reachable via GBR trains.

This crass mess is beautifully summed up in the garish, cheap red, white and blue livery of the new GBR trains, revealed to us last week.

It looks to me like the railway of some newly-independent Balkan statelet. British trains, when they were great, used to be beautiful and dignified, their engines in glorious shades of green or deep red, their coaches similar. This is not a proper state railway – as the slandered but generally efficient British Rail once was – and I predict it will become another bad national joke.

And here is the second:

‘Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies,’ says Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte. ‘We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.’

Why do people say these things? It’s as daft as saying (as people do) that there were ‘pro-democracy protests’ in Kiev in 2014. Actually a key part of these crowds overthrew Ukraine’s freely-elected president in a violent, lawless putsch. People are constantly saying the opposite of the truth and getting away with it.

Those who desired and financed the horrible Ukraine war (don’t get me started) chose it as the battleground precisely because it is not in Nato.

They were pretty sure it would not escalate into a nuclear war, for that very reason.

Nato members remain immune from it and will stay that way as long as they don’t openly join in.

If Mr Rutte and people like him are stupid enough to want the sort of war my parents endured, then they need to be talked out of it by wiser heads. If they don’t, why do they ceaselessly talk like this?

Russia is poor, its armed forces are rusty and crude. In conventional terms, Europe hugely outweighs Russia in money, ships, aircraft and guns.

But nations can fall into danger through self-neglect. It was King Charles II who said: ‘It is upon the Navy under the good Providence of God that the safety, honour and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.’

In 1667 he quickly found out how true this was when, with the Navy unprepared and neglected, the Dutch stormed up the Medway, towed away the fleet flagship and occupied Sheerness.

Our current Navy, conked out, ancient or immobilised, is not much better, its resources swallowed up in absurd vanity aircraft carriers with no known purpose and in a vast, tottering ‘nuclear deterrent’ that probably does not work.

The sea has for centuries spared us from having to train and pay a giant conscript army, as our continental neighbours often must. But the sea only keeps us safe if we have a Navy to protect and defend it. And we haven’t got one now.

Instead of shouting about war, we should quietly and firmly prepare strong defences, the best way known to man of ensuring lasting peace. Which is surely what we want.