As car parks go, this one is pretty magnificent. From the air it looks like a racing car circuit; ring roads and avenues, bus shelters and walkways and acres of neatly painted lines waiting for cars. Except waiting is what they’ll be doing. For a very long time. Because this £51 million car park, a 19-acre, 850-space scheme in Eynsham near Oxford, is not and cannot be connected to the main road.
The programme of improvements to the A40 dual carriageway, as it courses through Oxfordshire, has been curtailed, in part, due to planning problems and cost issues. Which means the car park stays as an island of car parking paradise but with no access to the main road which is literally metres away.
And it will remain thus until at least 2027 when there’s the prospect of further funding and an ease to the planning log jam. Nice big idea, but it’s on hold while the council tinkers around the edges, shuffles papers around, convenes meetings and looks around for people to blame.
Sound familiar? Well of course, it’s all the rage didn’t you know? This is how stuff gets (or rather doesn’t get) done these days.
Bluster, blame and tinkering are the modus operandi and if you need something to do, an actual policy to progress, then soak the rich, or the perceived rich, who are mostly the already relentlessly squeezed middle.
The new Labour government is fast becoming a master of this art, of shallow interference and with a nudge and a wink at socialist ideology without the bravura to state it.
With breath-taking meanness, they withdrew the winter fuel payment for older people citing as the reason the phantom of a £22 billion financial black hole inheritance. Realising how unpopular and foolish this is, they are now scratching around saying that there are some 800,000 pensioners who qualify for pension credit but aren’t claiming it.
So, the argument follows, they should be logging onto their smartphones or laptops, entering appropriate codes into the government website, along with their username, password, National Insurance number, date of birth and current gender, entering their bank details, entering a verification code that was sent to their mobile phone, and clicking on the squares that show a motorbike, but not the bits of a man on the motorbike, to prove that they’re human.
And if they slip up on any of those above elements, they can call a number and join a queue.
Funny how 800,000 older people can’t, won’t or would rather they were in the grave than go through all that malarkey. It’s why sometimes it works out easier and cheaper to jettison your purist political ideology and just issue blanket payments to segments of society. And anyway, quite why HMRC – which surely knows the financial status of most of us non-criminals – can’t just link up with the DWP and issue appropriate payments automatically is beyond me. But then if we can’t build a 20-metre slip road from a car park to a dual carriageway, it’s not surprising we can’t fit a cable between the computers of two government departments.
So on goes the tinkering: putting out stories about banning smoking in public spaces, for example. Which is literally none of the government’s business and, in my experience, more about respite and flirting than inhaling tobacco. I don’t smoke so I have often been deserted at restaurant tables while the naughty lot take a break from my hilarious chit-chat and go outside to puff, vape and chat up people from other tables. If someone wants to smoke in a pub garden that’s up to them. As is their choice of ale and the number of pork scratchings they wish to consume. But the government wags its finger and tuts and wants to grab the vapes and stub out the fags. But will they have the gumption to look at the bigger picture, to attempt to reform our food manufacturing industry to arrest the relentless growth of ultra-processed food in our diets? Of course not, that’s way too big an ask.
So it’s back to tinkering, now also with the cost of concert tickets, in light of the Oasis fiasco. Lisa Nandy, Culture Secretary, is appalled at, what she calls, “vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans from having a chance of enjoying their favourite band live.”
That is a serious suggestion to intervene in the pricing of tickets by rock bands and ticketing operators. The free market is none of her business. “Things get more expensive with more demand (capitalism)”. “No it doesn’t, we’ll fix prices at levels we think are acceptable (socialism)”.
Then they tinker on arms to Israel, just a little bit, mind you. Some flim-flam on 30 export licences citing violations of humanitarian law. “Our hands are tied, it’s the law,” they cry. And it’s nothing of the sort; merely a weak nod to the wing of their party and supporters who are pro-Gaza.
Angela Rayner is back from her Ibiza holiday (and more power to her elbow for that, even lefties deserve a good break and nice rave) and back rapping on the Today programme. “Remediation acceleration,” chuntered DJ Ray (Stormzy would be impressed). But there’s not a squeak from her Government about the fatalities at the Notting Hill Carnival. And all the while quibbling over small boats.
Labour have earnt the right to govern after the shambolic last few years of the Tories and their huge election victory. But tinker and they’ll just splinter, squandering their chance to think and act big. Like that car park: nice loos, glossy tarmac and charging points – but not an actual car in sight.
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