Dear Philip - very good of you to engage and to disagree.
WE ALL HAVE FEET OF CLAY AND EVEN BLOOD SOAKED HANDS DOWN THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Very many thanks for your email that gives the conventional, official, 'our side is wholly right, our No 1 Sworn Enemy since 1945 is wholly wrong' line. I feel, sins of commission and omission are not confined to one side and we all need a little repentance and forgiveness from time to time!
Do you also call the Ukraine war, 'The War of Dignity', like the 'Revolution of Dignity' that started it in 2014?
I think we all need to try and see into the mind of Putrid, to stand in his shoes, and attempt to understand decades of our side ruling the roost, of missing opportunities to be less expansionist at his expense - as he sees it. He also wants his own sphere of influence, just as we do. Pity that Putrid is going about it in all the wrong ways, just as we do - called human nature that means humanity will, very likely, have great trouble in outliving the 150 million years of dinosaurs in charge on Earth!
Never mind. Our wars and arms trading to fuel them are all good for employment and economic growth. The more the merrier, I say. Live it up today and to hell with tomorrow; the philosophy of too many but certainly not your good self, Philip!
Would you feel able to help over this, please?
This piece, below is about the cross party, financial scandal that your government has been complicit in with enthusiastic funding since 2010 and has never opposed even when you were the official Opposition from 1997 - 2010.
A SCATHING BUT SAD DENUNCIATION OF OFFICIAL ACTIONS (my weekend email to an Express and Star reporter):-
Our incompetent politicians, senior officers and trade union/faith leaders have left the poor out in the cold with a forty year old obsession with Metro trams that destroyed two mainline railways and their stations. The first was Snow Hill, Brum to Wolverhampton, when the tram was put on the mainline railway to Shrewsbury/Crewe in 1999, when the tram opened. We heard on Friday that this has cost hundreds of millions of pounds leaving an overspend of £171.1 million in the WMCA transport budget, mainly on tram projects that should never have started, incomplete.
The Dudley Tram has destroyed the former, highly successful for 100 years Oxford, Worcester, Wolverhampton Railway Co line and destroyed the recently intact but unused 120 Kms Worcester, Black Country, Derby railway "of national strategic significance"
The Dudley Tram, aka Wednesbury Brierley Hill Extension or WBHE is also due to obliterate the only public open space at Merry Hill Shopping Centre, a nature site and part of the 23,000 sq metres of land designated for housing but wasted for decades. This is called High Plateau between Next, Primark, M&S and the Dudley No 1 Canal. Obliterated because a 400 metre concrete and steel viaduct will carry the tram on a standard gauge double railway track, over the steep, high canal embankment and my guerrilla garden developed since the 1990s.
Cost for the viaduct and two canal bridges, alone must be in the order of £100 m when the tram could stay on the mainline railway from Dudley town and then connect with Stourbridge Jct and the national railway network.
THE EVIDENCE
The route of the tramline:
This shows the 120 Kms Black Country Railway and the missing middle section:
The official leaflet showing the grossly extravagant, financially irresponsible and totally unnecessary scheme:
Railways in our area and railways converted to tramway idiocy:
The scandal of trains and buses sidelined and even destroyed to give top priority to extremely expensive Metro trams:
Your photographer meets me at the clock tower, here - please. 1 pm on Wednesday, 21st. Road is called 'Embankment'. Everything on the other side of the road, up to the towpath, gets the massive viaduct treatment:
Thanks, Lisa for any write up you can do, please. Mark Andrews can vouch for me. He has written pieces over the years that have included what so simply and obviously needs to be done and quoted me.
Tim (Weller) 0791 380 4363
PS bonus of 3 photos, 2 cartoons to entice:
PPS: Only one wonderful trade unionist has supported me over the years. Excellent man and train driver, Dave has now resigned from ASLEF, with its hopeless, do nothing, Deputy/Assistant who shares his surname with me!!
Best wishes
Tim
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