What would your Question time question be?
Discussion
Ganglandboss said:
Unless you are a leftie tosser, you won't get a chance! 
Could say he's going to ask:"Why are Tory MPs corrupt, dishonest liars who never do any good for the country?"
But actually ask:
"Why are you MPs corrupt, dishonest liars who never do any good for the country?"
Sucker Punch the BBC.
moanthebairns said:
why is fuel tax so high?
what happened to this great fuel tax levelling system you Tory
s promised us?
This, again and again until we get some proper action on it.what happened to this great fuel tax levelling system you Tory
s promised us?I have a nasty feeling CMD is appealing far too heavily to the urbanite notion that we're all city-dwellers now, and that inner-city London/Manchester/Leeds etc just goes on forever until you get to the sea, and all you need to get by 'these days' is an iPhone and a bus pass. I have no desire to live in some kind of THX-1138-style self-contained glass-and-steel 'utopia'. The majority of people in this country live in suburbs and are reliant on their cars, and I don't want to see the urbanite mindset or model of living spreading any further than a few square miles.
Also, there is something that I've wanted to ask, but as a question it's a bit long. It would amount to:
'A standard-class return ticket on the train to Manchester from Peterborough costs £70. Doing the same journey in my Mercedes costs £35 in petrol. Since when was train travel a luxury?'
Seriously though - we really do pay through the nose for rail travel in this country, and yet what do we get? The incessant '...this is due... to engineering works...'; trains still advertised as 'on time' next to clocks proving they're already ten minutes late; a labyrinthine ticketing procedure which means in some circumstances returns are cheaper than singles and some reasoning whereby if you specify precisely which train you're going to get on it costs half as much as getting an open ticket; a daft tube ticketing procedure whereby you can't leave the station you're changing at if you get a 'direct' ticket, but a more expensive 'travelcard' means you can; Rails that someone decided to weld together in the name of smoothness, at great expense and disruption, but that now buckle in the heat, slowing all the trains down in summer... Need I go on?
Compare that to the trains in France. They go at the kind of speeds that would cause Middle England to go all Victorian and assume that human heads would explode and cattle would mutate should a train pass at that kind of lick. They cost about half as much as the British trains. The tickets are simple 'single', 'return', 'peak' and 'off-peak' jobbies, and they're rarely if ever late. Nor are they always being delayed by 'engineering works', mainly because they were engineered and built properly in the first place.
Thing is, unless you go everywhere by bus (in which case, given that they're so sluggish, there would be no point in travelling any kind of distance, which renders them kind of pointless if you have any sense of urgency or any reason to get anywhere on time), travel of ANY sort is becoming incredibly expensive in this country. At a time when the Norman Tebbit 'get on your bike and look for work' message has been wheeled out again, and people are expected to travel further to work for comparatively less.
And why? As far as I can see it's because the treasury is addicted to the high-take reliability of fuel tax, and because the railways have been ballsed up on a regular basis since Dr. Beeching hoved into view (backed by Eric Marples' roadbuilding money).
Twincam16 said:
Also, there is something that I've wanted to ask, but as a question it's a bit long. It would amount to:
'A standard-class return ticket on the train to Manchester from Peterborough costs £70. Doing the same journey in my Mercedes costs £35 in petrol. Since when was train travel a luxury?'
That's not that long a question. I'd be interested to hear their responses. My issues with public transport costs aside are the lack of trains at peak hours, extra costs at peak hours, utter madness at paying what amounts to double costs to go what would be a simple route in the car. For eaxmple I want to go from Basingstoke to Newbury. 30 mins max in the car. By train I have to go Basingstoke - Reading - Newbury and pay the appropriate costs. Fair enough they don't have a line to take me where I'd like to go but I fail to see the idea behind pricing what is in effect someone elses flawed business model......... Ok I understand the costs involved but as a customer I want to go A-B I don't care if you have to divert via D-E-J etc. In reality I think sod it and drive. Fraction of the cost fraction of the time. 'A standard-class return ticket on the train to Manchester from Peterborough costs £70. Doing the same journey in my Mercedes costs £35 in petrol. Since when was train travel a luxury?'
As the trains are privately owned for the most part I fail to see what the Goverment can do about it all.
My question would be what are the Goverment doing to attract big business to the UK?
Miguel Alvarez said:
As the trains are privately owned for the most part I fail to see what the Goverment can do about it all.
I think that's the nub of the problem. There was nothing completely wrong with privatisation per se, but it was done in a godawful piecemeal way, with the separate train services, track maintenance, station staffing and so on all sold off in bits.And of course the problem with that is that you end up with contracts going to the lowest bidder. They're the lowest bidder because they'll do everything as cheaply as possible, with as fewer staff as possible, so you never get the best service.
Combine this down-to-a-cost approach with a profit motive that sees increasingly inefficient railways (I do wonder quite how much our inefficient, overpriced railways cost the economy in lost hours and disposable income) lumping on incredible price increases to run a very loose group of firms who are dependent on each other but don't talk to each other, and you end up with a total nightmare.
The privatisation of the railways in the form it took was a total mess. It should have been sold off as one single going concern, and any bidder should have been able to prove they could run the whole thing properly.
Beeching was just as bad in accelerating the London/city-centric concentration of business too. Had those branch lines been upgraded rather than killed off, then you would have been able to base a business pretty-much anywhere there was a station, knowing that anyone could get to you from anywhere else there was a station, within reason. OK, so the problem Beeching had was several lines, many running parallel, being operated by competing firms whose tickets couldn't be transferred, but what was really needed was co-ordination, not destruction. Unfortunately Eric Marples had personal financial interests in roadbuilding, and so wanted motorways to replace railways wherever possible for the sake of lining his own pockets.
Problem is, the car isn't some universal mode of transport. There are things for which the train is far superior (going from town/city to town/city as the crow flies and without faffing about trying to park at the other end, for example, or being able to work on the move) to a car, and on which the economy depends.
Buses, on the other hand, are a poor substitute for cars. Also, the notion that they can somehow be made cheap is a fallacy given that their running costs will forever be chained to the cost of fuel and the inflation driving the company's wages. Compare that to electrically-powered trains - ever-more efficient methods of generating electricity are always in the pipeline. A national grid powered by a combination of tidal, wind and nuclear power would technically reduce train operating costs quite considerably.
Twincam16 said:
I think that's the nub of the problem. There was nothing completely wrong with privatisation per se, but it was done in a godawful piecemeal way, with the separate train services, track maintenance, station staffing and so on all sold off in bits.
And of course the problem with that is that you end up with contracts going to the lowest bidder. They're the lowest bidder because they'll do everything as cheaply as possible, with as fewer staff as possible, so you never get the best service.
Combine this down-to-a-cost approach with a profit motive that sees increasingly inefficient railways (I do wonder quite how much our inefficient, overpriced railways cost the economy in lost hours and disposable income) lumping on incredible price increases to run a very loose group of firms who are dependent on each other but don't talk to each other, and you end up with a total nightmare.
The privatisation of the railways in the form it took was a total mess. It should have been sold off as one single going concern, and any bidder should have been able to prove they could run the whole thing properly.
Nail / Head. This. A one off company would make much more sense. And of course the problem with that is that you end up with contracts going to the lowest bidder. They're the lowest bidder because they'll do everything as cheaply as possible, with as fewer staff as possible, so you never get the best service.
Combine this down-to-a-cost approach with a profit motive that sees increasingly inefficient railways (I do wonder quite how much our inefficient, overpriced railways cost the economy in lost hours and disposable income) lumping on incredible price increases to run a very loose group of firms who are dependent on each other but don't talk to each other, and you end up with a total nightmare.
The privatisation of the railways in the form it took was a total mess. It should have been sold off as one single going concern, and any bidder should have been able to prove they could run the whole thing properly.
We live in the 21st century. I can order a watch from Tokyo on my netbook; I can transfer money to my relatives in NZ in seconds; I can call pretty much anyone in the world from anywhere else in the world.
And yet, I can only express a political decision once every five years by putting a 'x' on a bit of paper.
Time for a new system, surely?
And yet, I can only express a political decision once every five years by putting a 'x' on a bit of paper.
Time for a new system, surely?
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