Calling time out

One major benefit that the World Wide Web affords is for individuals to post their views on anything under the sun in a public place that is accessible to many millions of people. Some, like me, go the whole hog and post blogs, having adequately inflated egos to think that one or more people will be sufficiently interested in what you have to say to actually read the thing. Others find that they can say all they need to in 140 characters and are happy to tweet; oh how I envy them their ability to be so concise – some talented people have even written “novels” in this format.

I have to admit, however, that my favourite of the ways that people express themselves on the Web is to comment on other people’s blogs or against newspaper articles. I find these can be a fascinating read, and what a wide assortment of such efforts can be found. Of course the quality of such comments varies considerably: spelling and grammar often fall far short of the mark, and comments can be badly expressed, or ill-informed, or even, at times, be total gibberish.

Some are just plain rude, crude or otherwise abusive. For certain, the anonymity that the use of a nom de plume provides encourages such rude behaviour; I much prefer it when people use their real names, particularly when commenting on this site. But then, of course, you can’t always be sure that what looks like a real name is not, in truth, a nom de plume.

However, there are some real gems. For example, you may have heard the Transport Secretary trying, with characteristic bluster, to gainsay on BBC TV News the damning verdict of the National Audit Office on the HS2 business case (video):

“Yes, it would be the easiest thing in the world for the Government to do, not to build this.”

If you want to see that particular example of disingenuous pomposity deflated, you need look no further than our own Stop HS2 website and a comment made by “kingsnewclothes”:

“McLoughlin said cancelling the scheme would be the easy thing to do. No it wouldn’t. It would be the hard thing to do because it would admit they had got it wrong. No politician likes to do that.”

By the way, I think that the tactics employed by the Department for Transport’s ministers to handle the NAO crisis were totally inept. Where some degree of acceptance and accommodation was clearly called for, the stance of totally rejecting the NAO position made McLoughlin and Burns look shifty, shallow, uncomfortable and clearly insincere. The NAO is authoritive and well-respected, for heaven’s sake. No one is going to believe a politician trying to rubbish the findings of such an eminent body. If you want a clear example of this, just look at the female presenter’s reaction at the end of her interview with Simon Burns on the ITV Daybreak programme (video); it is hard not to agree with her obvious verdict on a dismal performance by the Rail Minister.

A fellow campaigner recently put me on to another apposite comment on a website. The trigger for the comment in this case was an interview with Professor Andrew McNaughton – Technical Director of HS2 Ltd and no stranger to pomposity himself – that was reported in The Engineer last year. The article reports one of Professor McNaughton’s claims as being:

“We optimised between speed, energy use and impact – the faster you go, the straighter the track has to be – and we settled on 225mph for our business case, but it’s possible to engineer the line with very little extra impact for 250mph.”

Amongst a number of negative comments posted below the article is this little gem from “Anonymous”:

“Could Prof McNaughton explain how he ‘optimised between speed, energy use, and impact’? If going faster doesn’t do much for journey times, and energy goes up as the square of the speed, and the straightness of the track goes up with speed, surely the optimum solution is to remain stationary and do your business on the internet.”

Although this comment is meant to be amusing, it does expose a very pertinent point. The good professor may think that he has come up with the optimum solution, but who is he to be the sole arbiter of this? What consideration, for example, has his “optimisation” given to the severe environmental consequences of his choices?

Now I do realise the irony that both of the examples that I have quoted were posted under noms de plume, but I will have to live with that. The reason that I have brought them both together is because I think that, were the HS2 design to be commenced now, our current state of awareness could lead to a very different route design. I don’t think, for example, that anyone in their right mind would make the design choices that required so much tunnelling, including a virtually continuous run of 21 km of twin-bore tunnel under London.

So what is desperately needed now is for the Transport Secretary to do the really difficult thing and call “time out” on HS2 to enable a full and open review of the choices that have been made so far, and which have led to a design that many find unacceptable. Whilst they are at it, perhaps the Department for Transport can plug all those gaps in the thinking that the NAO has so ably identified.