You are in the
company of
Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
|
|
You are in the
company of
Roger Warren Evans |
|
| Part of www.LivePolitics.net < Back to Home Page |
NewLiving Diary Index
|
item0058D 886, 887 886 8 December 2003 My Mum was an asylum-seeker
At least, she was in precisely the same position. David Blunkett has brought the memories flooding back, for me. In 1940, with two children, aged 3 and 5 (my younger sister Eleanor and myself) my mother Mary braved the perilous North Atlantic to escape to Canada, evacuated from the threatened ravages of war. But in Canada, faced with unforeseen destitution, she was pressured to put us both into care or adoption, and to earn her living as a teacher. She refused, and preferred the awesome risk of bringing us back to the UK on a troopship, through submarine-infested waters, in 1942. We survived, although many died, on that convoy. Blunkett has yet again shown his profound lack of judgment in threatening "failed" asylum-seekers with the loss of their children. It will be an effective threat (at least, it was for my mother). But it demeans the Labour Party, the UK Government and the man who makes it.
Any "asylum" episodes in your family? Tell us about them. Drop me a line
15 December 2003 Wrecking our Streets
Government is intervening to reduce the bewildering range of highway obstacles, inhibiting traffic movement on our roads. But the constant disruption of traffic by utility works (gas, telephone, electricity, water) is the direct result of reckless and incompetent privatisation, in the 1980s.
I am, by trade and occupation, a property developer. My particular skills relate to the design and implementation of new urban projects, which inevitably includes extensive roadworks. And I still remember the despair experienced by the development industry, during the late 1980s, as the Thatcher Government raced ahead with the mindless privatisation of all the great utilities.
But to no avail. The juggernaut of privatisation roared through the economy, carrying all before it. The extensive powers of the former state utilities are now exercised by profit-oriented private companies.This was an historic error of judgment, for two reasons. Powers designed for use by a public service agency, informed by a public service ethos, should not be simply transferred to the private sector, without modification or constraint. New checks and balances, new timetabling and consent requirements, should have been introduced. The new private companies ruthlessly exploit their favoured market position to maximise their profits, as one would expect. And they revel in their arbitrary powers to execute works in the public highway - causing maximum disruption, to maximum profit. They are licensed to create chaos, for their own purposes, without requiring the consent of anyone. 
Second: Most of the statutory utility powers were created in the 1930s/40s and were due for positive reform anyway, to accommodate the avalanche of vehicular traffic which submerged our highway system in the 70s/80s. By 1980 they were due for radical reform. Instead of that, Maggie Thatcher merely passed the "old" powers over to the new private corporations, for them to use at will.I wish the Government's jam-busters well. But they are, for the most part, solving problems which ought never to have been allowed to arise at all.
What do you think? Drop me a line
|
|
|
| Created by GMID Design & Communication COPYRIGHT
NOTICE
|
