The Sprint corridor, Walsall to Solihull is being upgraded to allow the operation of articulated buses (aka Sprint). Much of this work is complete and existing bus users are benefiting from this infrastructure. Funding for the vehicles has been allocated, with procurement subject to final approvals. Service operating patterns will be integrated with wider bus services as part of bus franchising.
Thank you for writing to us regarding this matter.
Kind regards,
Geraldine O'Sullivan
Why is it so impossible to expect a professional, competent and ethical, quite apart from lawful, foreign policy?
Our foreign policy is so incompetent and duplicitous that we have made enemies out of many Middle East countries, left them in chaos and, with their people slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands. This is scandalous! In addition, this immorality boosted the survivors fleeing the chaos left their countries in and fled to the safe Western European nations, including the UK. Unlike Gazans, at least they can use small boats to cross the moat from the Europe mainland to England. There is never any attempt by Europe to share out equitably the asylum seekers.
We have sold WMD (chemical weapons) to Iraq and then attacked them for having WMD (nukes). This is typical British duplicity, known for centuries by our French neighbours as "perfidious Albion".
We sold Iran a whole host of arms and armaments because from 1980 to 1988 they were fighting our big Middle East enemy, Iran. Even so, we failed to win the war and it ended inconclusively. "During the conflict, Iraq received an abundance of financial, political, and logistical aid from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and the overwhelming majority of Arab countries." (Wikipedia)
Counter-terrorism is overseen by judges.
Should the Islamic system be preserved?
2009 it had disputed elections
What should Iran's response be to bombing raids?
We have a foreign policy of making enemies of being dominant and triumphant and - rubbing it in, too! Any sense of an ethical foreign policy, as Robin Cook MP and a former Foreign Secretary, is as absent as snow on an African beach.
Balance and fairness in foreign policy is also rare or unheard of. In fact, torture is also used as Richard Moor confirmed with MI6 feeding questions to American torturers earlier this century.
From my research, it seems irrefutable that since 1945, my Christian faith and my nation has consistently funded the fight of the Zionists and Jews to have and hold land gained by aggression.
My taxes have funded this one sided aggression for every year of my life since 1948 when I was born.
Outside of the 12 years of Nazi industrialised slaughter by a Christian/Western nation, Palestinians and Arabs have died in much greater numbers than Jews, especially from 1945 but, in truth in greater numbers throughout the British Mandate over Palestine.
Throughout the Mandate, my side and adherents of my Christian faith showed clear favouritism towards Jews/Zionists and were not even handed.
Was this because our Bible contains, in the Old Testament, the history of the Jewish people and therefore Christians know more about them and, which the Bible makes clear, the Jews alone are God's Chosen People.
I say one sided because since the close of the 2nd World War, Zionists and Jews banded themselves into three terrorist gangs to gain the land of Palestine.
One of those gangs, Haganah, merged into the Israel Defense Forces in May 1948. The other two were Irgun and Lehi or Stern Gang, I understand.
Under international law, the Palestinians have always had the right to defend themselves from attacks by other groups and nations.
It seems clear that there has never been any kind of agreement between Arabs and Jews as to how the land of Palestine should be divided out between the two warring Children of Abraham, Muslims and Jews.
The Zionist/Jews used their American/Western funding to seize Palestine by coercion, force, violence and declared the State of Israel in 1948.
Not surprisingly, ever subsequent war funded by the most powerful Judeo-Christian bloc of nations the world has ever seen, has either been successful with yet more land gained by Israel and the West or, the outcome was inclusive but maintained the status quo.
To this day, Likud the governing political party in Israel has in their Charter that their ultimate aim is to have and to hold all the land of Palestine from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.
International bodies call what my country, my side has done since 7 October 2023, as genocide.
My own politicians and people are unimpressed and the genocide of Palestinians and of Hamas fighters defending their land is not recognised as such.
Indeed, perfectly justified because we think we have every right to wipe out terrorists, as we call defenders of Gaza.
In other words, we have every right to use violence and slaughter because only our righteous, greater violence can wipe out, forever, the lesser violence of Hamas fighters.
The overwhelming acceptance of our unethical Christian teaching is one of using massive evil to utterly destroy evil. This is palpably absurd and, as we seen for over one hundred years since the unfortunate foundation of Zionism by Theodor Herzl, is counter-productive and gets both/all sides absolutely nowhere.
The solution is clear. The rather more ethical teaching seen in the Gospels of Jesus Christ of Nazareth two thousand years ago. Sharing, generosity and non-violence. All as applicable today and, rather urgent!
