Scorched Earth

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Picked up on a piece in yesterday's i Paper about Ernest Marples, the transport minister under the Conservative government headed by Sir Alec Douglas-Home,  having served as a minister in the previous Tory government under the leadership of Harold Macmillan. An example - exemplar, even - of what my friend David so pointedly characterised 'working-class Tories', as in "... do you understand fookin' working-class  Tories, Kelvin? Do you? ..."; then as now, I fucking don't.  Marples was the eyes, ears and mouthpiece of the road transport lobby, despite his often reformist and reforming policies regarding roads and traffic law, many of which were sound then and remain so to this day.

Nevertheless, the combined effects of his influence and infrastructural ideology, along with Doctor Beeching's proposed - and accepted - 'reforms' to the British rail network, led to the effective destruction of any serious alternative to the hegemony of the road transport lobby's influence. The effects of this are still with us today, with congestion, poor maintenance and underinvestment in a crumbling road network buckling under the weight of traffic unforeseen and unprepared for by the high priests of transport in the 1960s. 

They opened Pandora's box of nasty tricks, and are not around now to face the consequences or even suggest how we address the problems they created. As far as I'm concerned - and always have been, from a very young age - the only solution is to get heavy freight off the roads and back onto rail - even back onto the canal system for some things - and leave the roads to lighter traffic, as they were hitherto. This means a massive re-investment in the rail - and possibly canal - networks going forward; and definitely state-managed and not placed in the hands of the private sector, whose [track] record is woefully short of the mark.

Heritage railways have managed to rescue some good few miles of old, hitherto defunct trackbeds; it's time that government grasped the transport nettle fully and got on with reinstating what we had when I was growing up: a transport network that actually worked, for those gloriously few postwar years... 

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