As the FT notes this morning:
The US can lead nations in seeking to keep open the routes for cheap oil and products from China.
It cannot unite to create safety for the innocent victims of war in Gaza.
And that is all that you need to know about the values of some of the world's supposed leaders.
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Exactly. All you need to know.
I click the ‘heart’ at the end of your posts because I find them stimulating, informative and/or educational. Often what I actually feel is rage that such things are not only happening but tolerated by our politicians. Can we have Facebook type options to express our true feelings? (Having said that, they too can be misleading.)
I am not sure that I have that option within the apps that I use for such things.
Sorry to wander off thread, but BBC Scotland GMS have interviewed an SNP Minister on the A9 upgrade problems. The questioning are those the Conservatives would use; they are running very late, far behind their promises and have failed (they are also starting on complaints about the A96 as well*).
The A9 upgrade is failing, but BBC Scotland is so amateurish, it doesn’t even ask the right questions. The right questions surround Contract Price Fluctuation Clauses. This is not surprising, given we are in the middle of a price inflation mire, and contractors are terrified of signing up to major, long term public works engineering contracts and taking financial risks in an inflationary environment that almost none of the have any experience or knowledge. The Scottish government problem is that the ferry contract led to political reputation damage. The Scottish Conservatives made political hay with the ferry contract**. This has made the Scottish government ultra-careful about contracts. How do we know this? In the A9 Tomatin-Moy phase, only a single bid was offered, almost certainly because the contractors didn’t like the inflation risk profile. How could the Scottish Government accept a single bid? If it proved to run over cost the Conservatives would attack them for a second contract failure. When they didn’t sign, they are blamed for failing to build fast enough.
The issue of Contract Price Fluctuation Clauses and how these are handled for government contracts (anywhere in Britain) is a serious one, for serious people. Neither the Scottish Conservatives, nor BBC Scotland consist of serious people. Both operations peddle cheap sound-bite politics.
Sorry for the off-thread comment; but I am heartily sick of this destruction of our public discourse, which could scarcely sink any lower.
*A bad road, but in England it is easy for Conservatives to brush off such complaints – there is no money (the Scottish Government does not have this excuse, however because it is of course drowning in the surplus gifts of money from the English taxpayer even in this cost of living crisis; you catch the unspoken drift…
**£150m overspend. HS2 is curently £25Bn spent, and it was cancelled; and costs still to be added. HS2 alone represents 0.6% of the HS2 cost. The only people to receive any value out of both messes is the toxic political benefit the Scottish Conservatives and their media friends have made out of the problem. The cost to Scotland is it is paralysing infrastructure decision making for very bad, reprehensible reasons.
Thanks
“The ferry contract alone represents 0.6% of the HS2 cost”.
HS2 has splashed £25Bn for precisely nothing at all. HS2 was never, ever coming to Scotland; but here is the relative significance. The £25Bn blown by Britain, for absolutely nothing on HS2 represents around 40% of Scotland’s total annual budget. There is the reality of Unionist politics.
Empathy – a total absence.
It is as if the Greek playwrights never wrote their tragedies – which were aimed at developing citizens empathy. Alain de Botton in Status Anxiety covered the subject and profiled the play: Oedipus Rex. He noted that the plays makes the point that any of us could have been Oedipus, making all the wrong decisions.
Crushingly, he notes that, moving to modern times, headlines in trash newspapers covering the subject would be along the lines of “Sex with mum was blinding”. Thus has collective empathy been eroded and we look on, mutely, as 20,000 people (and rising) are murdered. Depraved.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/israel-killing-rage-fuel-conflict-50-years-warns-ex-uk-defence-secretary-ben-wallace
“If he thinks a killing rage will rectify matters, then he is very wrong. His methods will not solve the problem. In fact, I believe his tactics will fuel the conflict for another 50 years. His actions are radicalising Muslim youth across the globe.”
It’s hard to know what to say.
We seem to be addicted to making enemy of our future.
“The US can lead nations in seeking to keep open the routes for cheap oil and products from China.
It cannot unite to create safety for the innocent victims of war in Gaza”.
Yes it can, it chooses not to, it is an important difference. I would argue that the recent vote to call for a ceasefire agreed by 153 countries at the UN suggests considerable degree of unity. It was of course defeated by US veto, the same US veto that has been used many times to defeat attempts by the international community to publicly declare Israeli occupation of lands taken during the 6 day war illegal, in line with international law.