Cycling through public projects/funding we may oppose

As a generality, we tend to oppose the spending of public money on things we don't/won't personally use. The NHS used to a rather obvious exception but, of course, Reform say they want an insurance-based health service and as that party is seemingly quite popular presently then their supporters must, I guess, be opposed to public funding of the NHS.

Anyway, I digress as this posting is about spending on transport infrastructure. In my part of the world Sefton Council is presently building cycle/pedestrian facilities along a section of the A59. The works and the reasons for them don't seem to have much public support, at least as far as postings on a local Facebook Community Group are concerned. Are community Facebook Groups representative of much, much wider actual communities though? There’s a whole piece of research to be done there of course.

 

 

Disruption (road works) during the construction is obviously unpopular, probably even more so than the end result, although people who virtually never walk or cycle probably just see the whole project as being a waste of their money. Do they also disapprove of public money being spent subsidising buses or trains as they rarely, if ever, use them?

I cycle, walk and drive but I try not to use my car on short trips around my community, so I'm probably in a pretty small minority. I've tried the new cycle paths through Lydiate and they're fine but just a mile up the A59 the same but very long established cycle tracks (in Aughton, Lancashire) are very poorly maintained. They're rutted, have clumps of grass growing in them and the parallel pedestrian paths are pretty much impassable in parts. Will this brand new section become the same in the future?

My other gripe is that cycle facilities/infrastructure projects, at least on Merseyside but I suspect countrywide, are usually limited to what I'll call big/grandiose schemes with the many smaller changes required within communities to make cycling safer and to encourage more folks to get on their bikes never happening.

So yes, I'm happy with the A59 cycle paths, although I do know a fellow cyclist who disapproves of the works, I might add. 

 

You petrol heads can now shout at me as your taxes are being spent on a project you'll probably very much oppose, but which is fine with the minority group I belong to.

 

Has Starmer ‘Clegged’ his own Government?

 

You remember Nick Clegg who did really well with voters in the run up to the 2010 General Election particularly in the then TV debates that are pretty much no more, in that format, because he did so well. ‘I agree with Nick’ became the response from Cameron and Brown and both Tories and Labour have been against debating with a Lib Dem leader ever since.

OK Clegg was charismatic and likeable, a rare combination in a leading politician, but his wheels came off spectacularly days after that election because voters felt he’d not been straight with them and they subsequently turned against him and his party big time. Tuition fees was the obvious policy issue where he promised one thing but then backed off in the Coalition Government deal. The pros and cons of what he did don’t really matter. What did matter was that many voters felt they had been taken in by Clegg and were furious with him when he did not follow through in their eyes. The dye was cast and Clegg took quite a few years of stick on a regular basis before he existed the political stage unwillingly in the 2017 General Election.

So what’s all that got to do with Starmer? Well, if you think about it at the 2024 GE voters were utterly sick of the Tories after years of mismanagement of the country and its economy. Johnson and Truss had holed the Tory Party below the waterline and voters wanted to enlarge that hole!

Keir Starmer had emerged from political obscurity to become Labour Leader; a man with precious little political experience but he’d held down a high profile job as Director of Public Prosecutions. He seemed a bit grey and uncharismatic but looked a reliable chap in comparison to PM’s before him. Come the 2024 General Election he was always going to win a majority and what a majority it was! However, the number of voters putting their crosses next to Labour candidates was only around one third of all those who voted; hardly a ringing endorsement.

But the utterly despised Tories had gone and this new chap would do the right things to make us all feel much better about our country, fix our broken public services etc. etc. Like Clegg though, it did not take long for the political wheels to start falling off. Starmer’s big Clegg moment was obviously cutting pensioners winter fuel allowance; a ham-fisted policy gaff of huge proportions and after a lot of internal Labour Party trouble he was forced to row back on much of it.

No sooner had this gaff seen a hastily fudged fix than his government went off on one again; this time hitting the welfare benefits of people with disabilities. That also went down like a lead balloon and another internal Labour rebellion was required to fudge another policy fix.

The point about Starmer is that whilst voters thought he’d be a boring/grey PM they believed he’d put a stop to all the austerity and divisive governance. With the winter fuel and disabilities cuts they took the view that whilst the Tories had gone they were seemingly still pulling the new government’s strings!

Electors have became very angry and in a similar way to how they reacted to Clegg. The rights and wrongs of the policies are irrelevant to them, the big issue is one of trust and, like with Clegg, voters have come to the conclusion that Starmer has failed them. When a leading politician gets into such a hole it does not really matter about the good things they may well have done because it’s only the bad things that voters think about. 

Starmer has indeed ‘Clegged’ his own government.