Sibthorp

[webofevil]

*Pathé News theme*

“The Foreign Secretary, Mrs Beckett, set off today on her trip to meet her new American counterpart. The journey is expected to last three weeks, during which time she hopes to improve her shuffleboard skills.”

In the interests of balance, and because the experience is such a novelty, it is only fair that I mark the occasion when I find myself standing four-square behind our Prime Minister. We can’t uninvent long-haul travel, and it’s unrealistic to expect us to try. Nor should we make it once again the preserve of the super-rich. We have to find a way to make this all work. The solution honestly shouldn’t be too hard to develop, either; it’s just that there’s never been an incentive before for manufacturers to try. Meanwhile, fair enough, we should be offsetting like crazy.

Bizarrely, there are proposals to price people off short-haul flights to get them on to the railways, which ignore the fact that people are already being priced—and physically jostled—off the railways into their cars. Car travel in turn will become unaffordable to most in time, if current plans for tolls on major roads eventually come into effect. Should we stop travelling significant distances at all? Fantastic news for xenophobes and hermits, but what about the rest of us?

Has someone quietly been carrying on the work of Colonel James Sibthorp?

The coming of the railways provided Sibthorp with the subject which grew obsessive during his later years. Beginning with the announcement that he had no intention of ever riding in the “steam humbug”, he opposed all railway bills in principle and detail. The new “degrading form of transport”, he foresaw, would bring all sorts of disasters to its patrons, from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter... One of his few successes was preventing the Great Northern Railway from extending its line through Lincoln, to the distress of the town’s more ambitious citizens.

Whenever Sibthorp spoke of railway proprietors it was to denounce them as “public frauds and private robbers”, but the day came when, for lack of alternative transport, he was forced to go back on his vow and travel in their humbugs. Yet he retained to the end of his life the firm conviction that railways were a mere nine-day wonder. In one of his later speeches he expressed himself “of the decided opinion that these nefarious schemes would ere long appear before the public in their true light—that all the railway companies would be bankrupt and that the old and happy mode of travelling the turnpike roads, in chaises carriages and stages, would be restored”.

John Michell, Eccentric Lives & Peculiar Notions

Comments

[strictlytrue.livejournal.com]

We can’t uninvent long-haul travel, and it’s unrealistic to expect us to try. Nor should we make it once again the preserve of the super-rich. We have to find a way to make this all work.

I was thinking of doing a post on this myself, but I'm glad you have, because it's more credible coming from you, as an independent web commentator of some renown, than me, as a well known Blairite lickspittle and nuLab fellow traveller.

It does occur to me that saying "people shouldn't fly" isn't much of a long-term solution to anything. I can see how there's an argument for not using short-haul flights (is there any reason why anyone needs to fly to Paris, for instance, now we have the Eurostar?) but if you need, or even want, to get to Tokyo, it's simply impractical to get there by any means other than flight. The only solution is to find means of propulsion that don't pollute, or don't pollute as much.

I find the attitude of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to those who tout scientific developments as the only real long-term solution to humanity's impact on the planet rather frustrating. Yes, it is sometimes used as a smokescreen by those who have no interest in tackling climate change, but some of us really mean it.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

> a well known Blairite lickspittle and nuLab fellow traveller

You love him. You want to marry him.

It is quite funny watching the press try and use this story as another strand in their “Blair: worst prime minister ever” narrative when in this he is honestly no worse than his predecessors or his foreign peers (as opposed to his foreign Peers).


> an independent web commentator of some renown

My true qualifications as an independent web commentator are amply demonstrated by the fact that what most perturbs me right now is the way that on my work PC the asterisks surrounding the phrase “Pathé News theme” look like the aliens from Space Invaders.

[strictlytrue.livejournal.com]

when in this he is honestly no worse than his predecessors or his foreign peers (as opposed to his foreign Peers).

See also: loans for peerages - where by comparison with his predecessors who actually used to simply give peerages to those who donated money to their party (money which they didn't have to declare, natch), he actually comes off slightly better, or the Ruth Kelly business.

AFAIK Blair is the first PM of any party to send his kid to state school, and I think it used to be quite common for Labour Ministers to send their offspring to public schools.

[percyprune.livejournal.com]

Peak oil may make much of this moot, anyway. As prices rise over the coming decades it seems likely that demand for flights will plateau or even settle at a lower level. One of the interesting features of aviation fuel is that the paucity of duty paid on it means that the ability of the airlines to absorb fuel cost increases is marginal. Unless governments decide to subsidise fuel costs prices cannot help but rise.

[psychonomy.livejournal.com]

Is is just me, or did everyone get George Monbiot's Heat for Christmas?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Nor should we make it once again the preserve of the super-rich.

Out of interest (not saying that I don't agree with you, but) why not?