In this short video, Evan Davis explains:
- Why you might want to build the best possible five year-old railway;
- The risk of the "paralysis of analysis";
- Why we're not as bad at engineering as we might think; and
- How sometimes you might have to compromise and just build a runway or a road
Evan was talking about his discoveries during the making of the BBC/Open University co-production Built In Britain.
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Evans programme was certainly flawed for insubstantial analysis which ill fits a programme supported by a university. I refer to the HS2 concept where he likened it to the M25 and expected objectors to support it when it was built. The difference is of course that anyone can get on and off the M25 almost at will so those who objected to it being built quickly became users when it was finished. A moments thought will tell you that the HS2 is only accessible at either end and no use to those people in the middle so those people who live along the route will endure all the pain of the construction and running noise for no benefit. Indeed the programme seemed to indicate that the cost of £33bn and saving of 20 minutes journey time was for the benefit of business people in the middle of Birmingham who might be able to build some new factories. Moreover by the time it is built, Heathrow airport may well have moved to the Thames Estuary and what is needed is an East Coast Railway to link the new airport with Edinburgh and Paris to create wealth for the newly independent Scottish nation. That truly will cove rth eNorth South divide but does Evan have the vision to see it or is he obsessed with large engineering?
I was really looking forward to this short series from Evan, but I was a little disappointed by the lack of hard questioning over the real problems that this country faces over the next 10 to 20 years. The BBC has consistently treaded lightly around the political reasoning and social ramifications of the placement into a "Set Aside" program of regions such as my own, the North East, the loss of basic skill level manufacturing work & the deliberate starvation of development to all but the South East corner of the UK.
Evan used the term North/South divide, yet it seemed to stop at Birmingham? The next line of course runs along the M62, although they still get so much more than those of us who live beyond the North Yorks borders! How about the story of the railway line linking Manchester to Liverpool; it would not have happened if the Quakers in Darlington hadn't built a line carrying coal to Port Darlington ( now known as Middlesbrough ) but of course we're not the North. Britain's problems stem from short term political decisions & corruption coupled to short term money lending policies by British Banks.