Alistair Darling should do the decent thing and SCRAP Crossrail now! – the Muhammad Haque daily economic commentary 1558 GMT 18 September 2007

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By©Muhammad Haque
1315 GMT
London
Sunday 23 September 2007

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By©Muhammad Haque
1558 Hrs GMT
London Tuesday 18 September 2007

UK Finance Secretary Alistair Darling is reported today to have admitted that his job was on the line, in the wake of the globalising financial market collapse as typified currently by ‘Northern Rock’ in the UK.

Darling has never publicly admitted to having feared for his career over the role he played in ill-advisedly introducing the seriously flawed Crossrail holes Bill in the UK House of Commons in February 2005 when he was fronting the transport basket in the Blair regime. Darling defiantly held his insulting gesture towards the UK’s Treaty obligations to provide a fair and proper scrutiny of the contents of his ‘Crossrail Bill’, thus disenfranchising thousands of people seriously affected by the scheme from having the right to independently and comprehensively scrutinise before the formally set up ‘Crossrail Bill ‘ ‘select committee’ the proposals as contained in the Bill.

As an oft referred to ‘lawyer-politician’, Darling’s defiance of the constitutional obligations may yet land him in court as a defendant!

That is to do with the fact that he has not said sorry for his disrespect to the constitutional duties.

He ought to have bee saying sorry every day.

If not on every occasion that Ken LYINGSTILL Livingstone peddles the CRASSrail mantra.

As the Khoodeelaar! Campaign against Crossrail has been pointing out since end of January 2004, the plan, as it has been in the Crossrail Bill [House of Commons] is a financially flawed and fundamentally uneconomic scheme and should be scrapped, the realisation is only now dawning on some of Livingstone’s most [hitherto] entrenched co-propagandists for the scheme that Crossrail is not only going to be insupportably expensive for the UK Treasury [where the same Alistair Darling is now installed, derailed to perform some of the most banal and contradictory of about turns and retreats while providing a shied for his predecessor in post the increasingly exposed Gordon Brown] but that the current costs estimates [of between £10 Billion to upwards of £20 Billion] are likely to be proven to be far too unrealistic!

In other words, the Crossrail holes scheme promoters and propagandists have been lying for years in their zealous and false
Claims around the costs of constructing the currently set out Crossrail scheme and the benefits that its promoters say it will bring.

Indeed, one of the Construction conglomerates’ in-house promotional web sites confesses today [Tuesday 18 September 2007] as follows:


But the signs are that if the private sector wants to see the railway built in good time it will be called upon to supply a large slice of the capital cost, estimated at £16 billion. The cost is bound to be more, probably quite a lot more, if the Crossrail Bill receives the Royal Assent next year.

But the government is wary of the mounting costs.

In three short sentences, they have confessed the essence of what all those who have objected to he Crossrail hole project have insisted was the problem with the
Scheme…

They are saying that it is the ‘private sector’ that has been the main clamourer behind the Crossrail scheme.

They are also admitting that the Crossrail scheme is linked with a timetable set by the private sector!

They are admitting that the costs that the peddlers of the flawed Crossrail scheme have cited – and changed without any rational regard for the integrity or the authenticity or the accuracy or the legitimacy of their oscillating estimates – are going to go up quite a lot. [“The cost is bound to be more, probably quite a lot more.”]

To a prudent [self-described] former Finance Minister and to a would-be prudent incumbent in the post, these admissions should be enough to convince that the current CrossRail scheme is CRASS. In every relevant way. And the sooner it is scrapped the more likely it is that a rational and honestly drawn up and more relevant scheme can be drawn up and all of us can be spared being eternally lumbered with a CURSED rail project!

One Response to “Alistair Darling should do the decent thing and SCRAP Crossrail now! – the Muhammad Haque daily economic commentary 1558 GMT 18 September 2007”

  1. Why is the ‘Rupert Murdoch’ Times, London, and the only ‘heavy’ newspaper telling the truth about CROSSRAIL? Why are the other British [‘mainstream’] media [including the ‘communist’ !!!! ‘Morning Scar’] and typified by Says:

    […] When I said ‘Get Cross with Crossrail’ at the end of one of the very first meetings of the movement that soon afterwards became known as Khoodeelaar! even I didn’t think that my phraseology would get such wider currency. As has happened quite a few times in the past 18 months with external publishers and commentators appearing with their views on the project under the headline ‘Cross with CrossRail’. This has happened once again, today [Tuesday 18 September 2007]. My first campaign poem was published on the internet on 31 January 2004 under the heading, “Getting Cross with Crossrail’.It has taken almost 4 years for the ‘mainstream’ ‘transport economics’ commentators to catch… […]

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