Andys Photographic
Replying to @newbie_tog @CllrJMcNicholas and 3 others
Wednesday, 10 August 2022
from Stop the War Coalition
This week our Vice President and founder member Jeremy Corbyn has once again come under fire for standing up for peace. He said in relation to the war in Ukraine that...
"Pouring arms in isn’t going to bring about a solution, it’s only going to prolong and exaggerate this war...This war is disastrous for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Russia, and for the safety and security of the whole world, and therefore there has to be much more effort put into peace.”
He's right. And we must further his call for peace and negotiation.
Friday, 5 August 2022
Greedy bosses v suffering migrants and the poor
I do hope we put migrants and the poor at the top of our agenda in tackling the cost of living crisis. My plea in my last email that more of us bombard the decision makers to take their responsibilities more seriously does need to be followed up - PLEASE!
I heard Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show at noon yesterday and was flabbergasted to hear that the nine greediest bosses of nine water companies, receive a total of £15 m every year of income and bonuses. Yorkshire Water boss gets over £1 m/year and CEO of United Utilities gets a trifling £2.9 m income every year! Check me out on
and 5:55 from the start.
We need to start a non-violent war on how money is stolen from the poor and migrants to reward greedy bosses who come up with far too many wrong, foolish and also very expensive climate decisions - like grandiose HS2 and flash to impress, immoral Metro and Sprint.
Invite a speaker from WMCA so that we can then question him/her about their truly eccentric, their weird and wonderful priorities. I suggest Bob try and get their CEO, Laura Shoaf who needs to publicly defend her annual income and, certainly decisions. And we need to attend and lobby at Andy Street's public meetings, too. I shut up at the last one but will not remain silent at the next.
Tim
Wednesday, 3 August 2022
NOW IS OUR CHANCE to end the idiocy
Dear friends - Left Unity
This is what I mentioned near the end of our meeting last night. Last month, I was told by a fellow pensioner at our Halesowen meeting that TfWM/WMCA was postponing the construction of the second half of the 10.7 Kms, £550 m tramline on mainly a railway "of national strategic significance". The second half is still planned to run from Dudley town to Merry Hill but now is our chance to get it permanently stopped for housing and nature, instead. Only public pressure can make the postponement permanent.
PLEASE SEND THIS (select, copy, paste as you wish or, just tell them what YOU want) TO: customerservices@wmca.org.
Put v low, finite fossil fuel apartments for those most badly housed (including those seeking refuge from war, famine and climate breakdown) on ALL of High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre. Plan here:
This means permanently keeping Metro "bus on rails" trams off High Plateau.
Save nature at Merry Hill by permanently keeping the trams off the 400 m canal embankment with the planned £100m double track railway viaduct.
Let it be naturally rewilded with NO MORE MOWING to allow plants, shrubs and trees to sequester CO2 on the embankment, instead of the climate damaging concrete and steel viaduct to make our prospects even bleaker.
STOP £0.55 billion, 10.7 Kms, Metro trams destroying the UK's only mothballed, principal, mainline railway "of national strategic significance" in the heavily congested, densely populated Black Country.
THANKS, if you do write to tell them what you want!
Tim
ALL WE CAN DO IS KICK UP A FUSS but calmly and rationally to educate and persuade
Dear friends
At last night's meeting, Sandra was so right in saying that sending an email or two to a councillor is an ineffective, failed policy/strategy - or words to that effect. I am suggesting targeting the seven councillors who are the leaders of the WMCA, with Andy Street as their mouthpiece/PR man. Plus, their seven CEOs, together with Laura Shoaf, CEO of the Combined Authority. These top VIPs/decision makers are all listed here with their addresses and are all responsible for what is going so wrong:
What I am asking for is a call to arms, a proactive, an up and at 'em, persistent, never ending onslaught on all the authorities, as I have so enjoyed doing over the last 25 years, when it comes to railway destruction for tram construction in Brum, Coventry and the Black Country. The pen is mightier than the sword of defensive weapons to Ukraine and, possibly now, to Taiwan. I even turn up at some of their ever so important meetings to try and nobble them - it is so much fun to take them by surprise with a polite, pleasant but pertinent question before they hurriedly excuse themselves!
Left Unity must hit the headlines with our press releases of positive, practical and helpful actions for the bosses to take to improve our prospects. In 2020, Mike sent our resolution on the idiotic destruction of our 120 Kms Black Country Mainline railway to the VIPs and media outlets. I think more must follow if people are going to sit up and take notice. I'm very slowly working on the SWP, the BTUC, the WMPC (Pensioners) and friend Stuart Richardson & co. XR, too. But LEFT UNITY MUST TAKE THE LEAD and show how it's done!
Both our own Combined Authority and Edinburgh City Council love to boast, in press releases, of "the largest concrete pour ever" for their "bus on rails" tram schemes at the most colossal and immoral expense when each £ spent = lb weight of GHG emissions, such is our addiction to rather finite fossil fuels. I have just tweeted back this:
"The largest concrete pour means the largest pour of greenhouse gas emissions to help turn planet earth, eventually, into planet venus." Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect, according to Wikipedia.
This is from my blog:
Sunday, 31 July 2022
Each of us must walk the talk on climate - and do what we can to help
“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99
Tim
MICK LYNCH speaking - was this the man who ...
... said a few years ago that his railway union would take industrial action to raise the wages of nurses and care workers but, ... nothing ever happened?! (not Mick but certainly one male rail union boss interviewed on TV, I remember)
On 19 June 2022 on Radio 4, 'Broadcasting House' extracts:
"There are so many people in this country who are vulnerable ... living a life where they don't know where their next bill is going to be paid from. And now we have a working class working full-time hours having to go to food banks and take state benefits. We are not going to go that way as a railway workforce. ... I would take a general strike if we could get one. That means that working people are fighting back for equality in our society. We have a society that is completely skewed. There are more billionaires than we have ever had. Profits, dividends and the stock market are in a very healthy position while working people with full employment (under 3% unemployment) are having to take state benefits. That means the rich are doing too well compared with the working class.
"We are 40,000 people fighting this struggle on behalf of railway workers under attack. I'm not in a political party. I'm a political person but I'm not driven under an agenda given me by a clique or a faction. I'm an independent person and my only responsibility is to RMT members at this time and the broader trade union movement. But it is clear that the only way that working class people are going to get a better deal is through united industrial action because it appears that the traditional politicians are not up for that fight ...
Paddy O'Connell said, "You think the Treasury are the nanny, the mummy and the daddy of Network Rail. That there is no real independence for Network Rail. Can you prove that?"
Mick: "Absolutely. They are not operating as an independent corporation. They are taking their orders directly from DfT officials and they have Treasury officials sitting at the table. That is true for the tocs as well. They are all waiting for their orders from Parliament and from Westminster. If they were free to negotiate and were unshackled and they have told the press this week that that is the case, I think we could get a settlement this week. It is Shapps, Johnson and Sunak who are stopping a deal being done this week."
Anthony Smith, Chief Executive of Transport Focus, an independent watchdog but sponsored/funded by DfT, said, "We need a reset of industrial relations on the railways ... the Treasury must keep investing in the railway so passengers can book and rely on the railway.
We want a transport system that operates for the benefit of the people, for the needs of society and our environment – not for private profit.
We call on our members to stand firm, support the action, mount the pickets and demonstrate their willingness to fight for workplace justice. RMT, as reported by the 'Canary', 20 June 2022
'Defensive' weapons sent to Taiwan - nice euphemism!
Liz Truss is now reported as saying that we should consider sending defensive weapons to Taiwan, as well as more to Ukraine. I think this is more provocation, boosts instead of lessening the climate emergency and is the exact opposite of building a more compassionate, safer and socially just world.
Sunday, 31 July 2022
Each of us must walk the talk on climate - and do what we can to help
“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.”
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99
President Putrid's new naval doctrine
Vladimir Putin has signed a new naval doctrine that casts the US and Nato as the biggest threats facing Russia, Reuters and AFP report.
The 55-page document, signed on Navy Day, sets out the broad strategic aims of Russia’s navy, including its ambitions as a “great maritime power” which extends over the entire world.
The main threat to Russia, the doctrine says, is “the strategic policy of the USA to dominate the world’s oceans” and the movement of the Nato military alliance closer towards Russia’s borders.
Russia may use its military force appropriately to the situation in the world’s oceans should other soft powers, such as diplomatic and economic tools, be exhausted, it adds.
Quote from comment section in YouTube - Maximilien Robespierre
"If you cut off all 'legal' routes and make it as difficult as possible for desperate asylum seekers, you can then claim that you have the right to block them when they have no choice but to try and get here anyway. It's deliberate and pointless cruelty: These people are in need and could contribute so much to our country by doing the jobs we need filling. Racism is always self defeating."
SELF: We spent centuries treating these people as commodities, as products, just like cows and sheep that can be shipped about as supposedly insentient objects. We then DID pay compensation, that's true. However, not to them or their descendants, but to the very people who enslaved them. How stupid is that? How bizarre and eccentric to reward the most disgusting behaviour imaginable. And this was under monarchs who, at their Coronation, swore to uphold the morality and law of the Bible as the very "living oracles of God" that must be obeyed. And God said to His Chosen, the Jewish people that they must "welcome the stranger in their midst". NOT to treat them as little better than dirt.
Observer editorial on Lovelock, 31 July 2022
"Mavericks such as Lovelock who look beyond the confines of their laboratories and who reject attempts to restrain their activities are becoming a worrying rarity. An example of Lovelock’s broad-ranging thinking is provided by his studies, while working for Nasa, of the harsh, carbon dioxide atmospheres of Venus and Mars. By contrast, on Earth, nitrogen and oxygen dominate, he noted in the 70s. Together with the biologist Lynn Margulis, he argued that early lifeforms that began to extract carbon dioxide on Earth eventually led to the evolution of a biological system that manipulated atmosphere and water to its own advantage. Gaia had been born.
"Gaia was a major influence on the green movement, though Lovelock was suspicious of its claims and aspirations. “Too many greens are not just ignorant of science, they hate science,” he argued, and likened them to “some global over-anxious mother figure who is so concerned about small risks that she ignores the real dangers”. Such a judgment is perhaps a little harsh, though it also reveals an independence of mind that was the hallmark of a great scientist whose vision and creativity will be sorely missed."
Friday, 29 July 2022
The earth can do perfectly well without us humans - oh, no!
Not the system but WE all exploit the planet for its finite resources. There are vast disparities in the income and wealth in the rich industrial nations but an even bigger chasm between the rich and poorest nations of the world.
I want the powerful railway unions to do what one boss said last decade on TV and to take industrial action to boost the salaries of our nurses and care workers.
And, the union bosses to give themselves a wage no more than 20 times that of their lowest member.
We all need to tighten our belts for the sake of those truly poor and future generations that will have a less fertile and rich world of untapped resources and wonderful abundance.
There is no right to have ever rising standards of living and economic growth/greed/GHG emissions.
We just can't go on living infinitely on a finite planet and living so unnaturally on a natural planet.
JAMES LOVELOCK on Desert Island Discs in 1991:
Evan Davies said, "The inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, named after the Greek goddess of the earth. It stated that life on this planet is a self-regulating community of organisms and their inanimate surroundings.
He's been an enormous figure in the environment movement over the decades and died today at 103 years, actually on his birthday", said Evan Davies on 27 July 2022 on Radio 4's 'PM' programme.
Lovelock:
"The fact that earth lived for 3.5 billion years, if lived is the right word, is I think ample proof that it can do without us and run very well without us whatever we do. I don't like the idea of stewardship that applies to humans because I don't think we have reached that state of grace where we are capable of being stewards."
Sue Lawley:
"But conversely, from not being in charge in that way, it would be possible for the whole of planet earth to stop being in a place where man could live. To slip into some other mode where it would be too hot for him or too cold for him or too much water for him."
Lovelock:
"That's right. Well, the rules of the game are very like the rules of the old goddesses - Gaia (Greek goddess of the earth) and Kali. They were feminine and kind and all the rest of it. But if you broke the rules you would be zapped without doubt and eliminated. And it's just the same with Gaia. Any species that adversely affects the environment will not succeed. It will be eliminated. Where those that favour the environment that favour it for their progeny will automatically be rewarded."
Wednesday, 27 July 2022
Union/Management Incompetence and Guilty Silence
Thanks, Carol who wrote, "I have discovered that one of the main arguments being put forward for metro vs rail is the number of stops where people can get off and on. Increasing footfall and revenue compared to rail???"
The wasted, still unused, principal mainline railway bridge built when the motorway opened in Dec 2003. Built for slow "bus on rails" invisible ghost trams? :-
The up line nicked by metal thieves! :-
More tram stops than train stations over the same distance makes the tram much slower than the train - average speed of the tram is 22 mph between Wolverhampton and St Chads tram stop in Brum on a former mainline railway between Shrewsbury and Brum. Therefore, flash, over indulgent "bus on rails" trams are more suitable to replace diesel buses than trains. In fact, to end up foolishly duplicating the bus service as we see on Hagley Road and Broad Street in Brum (for a scandalous, corrupt £110 m/Km construction cost).
Yet, it is not buses but regional and commuter trains that are getting mostly replaced by trams! This is stupid, foolish and incompetent. Two mainline railways have now had or having this treatment of trams on part to prevent, for ever, the regional and commuter trains being able to return on the full length of mainline commuter railway. This is complete idiocy!
The UK Tram HQ at our Transport/WMCA HQ at 16 Summer Lane (vested interests at play here to corruptly influence decision makers) argues that trams are "buses on rails". This was said by tram promotion group Director, Andrew Brodick in November 2016 when 7 passengers were killed and many tens of people had serious injuries when the Croydon tram crashed in a morning rush hour. They should have just kept to the trains and buses, of course and the 7 would still be alive today.
Wealth flaunting "bus on rails" trams are totally unsuitable for a former principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" as they are doing in the case of WBHE. Sheer stupidity!
Tim Weller 0791 380 4363
Tuesday, 26 July 2022
To Ben Godfrey of 'Midlands Today'
Hi Ben - and copied to the Mayor's Office for them to confirm Andy's support for trains back on the tracks (my blog's name - timweller1.blogspot.com).
Thanks for the email. Is there any link you can send me, please to the "news in brief segment" and the details of the WMCA public meeting that I may have missed. Many thanks.
Please keep my contact details on your database. Please take account of what I sent you on Sunday. For fair reporting, I would like to suggest that you need to have a rounded picture of what has been going on for over forty years as regards Metro. As here:
Over the 25 years I have been involved in this tortuous saga, I have sent Midlands Today countless press releases and emails. Only the wonderful Peter Plisner has shown any interest.
Peter heard about me soon after he arrived on 'Midlands Today' (in the 90s?), via Brum FoE and, occasionally, included me in his pieces to camera on the issue of Metro taking over the two Black Country mainline railways and thus preventing commuter and regional trains from returning to the full lengths of both lines - still to this day!
I always write on my own behalf, above my own name but, I am a life member of national FoE and Stourbridge FoE agree with me and have included my recommendations in our Stourbridge FoE Climate Action Plan for Dudley Council to implement. My widely supported recommendations are for trains back on the 106 Kms in Brum, Black Country and in South Staffordshire that are either freight only or mothballed. I think I can say that Andy Street agrees with me. Do check it out with him for he knows me and I attend most of his public meetings to support him. I voted for him in 2017 and 2021. Last year I was an Independent candidate for Mayor up until the time came to pay the deposit, that I then gave to three international charities - and still voted for Andy.
I have many people who agree with me, of whom the most notable remains the current train driver, Dave Parsons who lives in my own constituency of Halesowen and Rowley Regis and is worth interviewing.
I would welcome any questions you might have for, if I am wrong, I would like to be told!
Many thanks, Ben
Sunday, 24 July 2022
Zelensky is supposed to be a comedian
Dear Jonathon and Alastair
Would you like to comment, please with your own opinion? This is my pathetic, wishy-washy, plant and cheese-eating surrender monkey stance for no killing, even of invaded, occupying, foreign armed forces in my country. Do put me right.
Zelensky is supposed to be a comedian, not a great military conqueror of Russia with armaments supplied by the American-led West. As a result, humanity is accelerating downhill even faster to ecocide and catastrophe.
My action as President would not have had my armed forces fighting an impossible to win with violence one of two super-powers. The only realistic option left for me, if I was Zelensky, is for none of my citizens to be slaughtered but to use non-violence, non-collaboration with the invader, occupier and, flight if living under Russian control is so impossible. One death is not worth violent resistance but only non-violent resistance and non collaboration, including humour, satire and protest if I thought I could get away with it under President Putrid!
Such is our almost 100% reliance on finite fossil fuels, we have to reckon that every pound cost of armaments sent to Ukraine to beat Russia is a pound weight of GHG emissions warming the world and denying the poor and future generations their wealth and even their food as grain, oil and gas shortages hike prices.
Best wishes
Saturday, 23 July 2022
Preferential treatment for migrants of all colours and all places
Would you help this cause of mine to welcome migrants and others badly housed in our borough by asking the authorities to give preferential treatment to "the stranger in our midst" by putting small, highly energy efficient and very low fossil fuel dependent apartments on High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre? Plan here to show you where High Plateau is:
HELP SLOW THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY
PLEASE SEND THIS (select, copy, paste as you wish) TO: customerservices@wmca.org.
Put v low, finite fossil fuel apartments for those most badly housed (including those seeking refuge from war, famine and climate breakdown) on ALL of High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre.
This means permanently keeping Metro "bus on rails" trams off High Plateau.
Save nature at Merry Hill by permanently keeping the trams off the 400 m canal embankment with the planned £100m double track railway viaduct.
Let it be naturally rewilded with NO MORE MOWING to allow plants, shrubs and trees to sequester CO2 on the embankment, instead of the climate damaging concrete and steel viaduct.
STOP £0.6 billion, 10.7 Kms, Metro trams destroying the UK's only mothballed, principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" in the heavily congested, densely populated Black Country.
Best wishes
Peter Hennessy on B Johnson Esq
This today from Peter Hennessy the historian, now Lord Hennessy who is a “cross bencher”, neither Labour nor Tory nor any other party.
Johnson "has sullied" the office of prime minister "like no other, turning it into an adventure playground for one man's narcissistic vanity and ….shredded the ministerial code".
"The Queen's first minister is now beyond doubt a rouge (rogue) prime minister, unworthy of her, her parliament, her people and her kingdom, I cannot remember a day when I have been more fearful for the wellbeing of the constitution."
from Quora
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