Money down the Tubes

Don't you just hate it when Ken Livingstone's right? Hizzoner was vehemently opposed to the so-called "part privatisation" of the London Underground all along. That may just have reflected his intellectual biases, but there were a lot of people who shared his sense that allowing private sector firms to manage the maintenance and refurbishment of the Tube might be either expensive or a failure.

It's turning out to be both. Today's Guardian reports that the cost overruns on the two contracts awarded to the so-called "Metronet" consortium could reach £2 billion. Metronet's banks are threatening to pull the plug, and the engineering companies that own the consortium are unwilling to put in more money, so it looks like Transport for London (TfL, aka the taxpayer) will either have to pony up more cash, or scale back the work.

There must be something I don't understand here. Everyone knows that the Treasury (G. Brown, prop.) forced public sector agencies like TfL to use "public-private partnerships" primarily to keep debt off the Government's balance sheet. But there was supposed to be another element: private sector management was supposed to keep costs down and deliver projects on time, with the private investors taking on the financial risks if they failed to do so. What's happened at Metronet is that the project is being delivered late or not at all, at hugely inflated costs, and the taxpayer is being asked to shoulder the burden of what looks like an abject failure.

I recall that when the Metronet partners were asked how long it would take for travellers to "notice the difference" once the consortium took over, they responded "about six months". They said that the first stage would be a "deep cleaning" of the entire system. I don't travel on the Tube as much as I used to, but I can't say I've seen any sign that this was ever done. I also recall that the first dispute between Metronet and TfL after the contract began was over who was responsible for cleaning up graffiti. I'm sorry -- what exactly were you talking about during all those months of negotiations?

It's disheartening but not surprising to find that Metronet is using the age-old excuse that the cost overruns are a result of TfL "changing the contract specifications" -- if there ever were any. It may take until the end of the year for this to get sorted out. I dare say it will take even longer than that for Gordon Brown to admit that the whole public-private thing has been an expensive scam.

I'm voting for never

Geri Halliwell said that the Spice Girls' reunion was a case of "now or never". It's a shame they didn't give the rest of us a vote.

Back again, naturally

Watched the Who closing the Glastonbury Festival on the tube last night. Despite the presence of a lot of musicians on the stage, the performance was so note-perfect that I almost suspected there was a backing track. Surely the Who are not turning into the Eagles, who have never been known to play an improvised note in public? In any case, it was a first-rate 90-minute tour of their back catalogue, spoiled only by a bit too much "Tommy" near the end. At one point a banner appeared at the bottom of the screen to advise viewers that they could switch to another channel to see the Chemical Brothers. It's hard to imagine that many people will have been tempted.

I thought of rooting through the old tapes gathering dust under the TV to see if I still have the recording I made of the Who's supposed "farewell concert" in Toronto. I recorded it on the first VCR I ever owned, some time in the early 1980s. It would have been interesting to compare the set lists for that show with the one at Glastonbury. I would bet there was something like a 90% overlap.

I don't suppose that the Who or anyone else imagined the appetite that baby boomers would have for geriatric rock acts more than two decades later. I have nothing against musicians of my age continuing to perform. In the last few years I've paid to see Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler and Bryan Ferry, among others. But there's surely a limit, and we may have reached it. No, I'm not talking about the Spice Girls reunion. The weekend papers contained an ad for a series of concerts by......Gilbert O'Sullivan! Now I'm more than happy to admit that "Alone again, naturally" and (even moreso) "Nothing rhymed" are pretty good songs of their type. But let's face it, the rest of his material, even when he was at his peak, was pretty thin, and like the Who, he hasn't had a whole lot of hits since then. With his reedy voice, I don't recall that he was ever much in demand as a live performer.

If Gilbert O'Sullivan can fill halls around the country, then it's surely true that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. But hey, maybe there's even an opportunity for me to cash in here. Coming soon: my Jake Thackray tribute tour.

Invasion of the Sassenachs

Back on April 3rd, I wrote a piece here ("Beware of the neverendum") comparing the latest moves toward independence in Scotland with Quebec's interminable quest for separation from Canada. A visit to Scotland this month shows that there is one more similarity between the two than I had realised.

I mentioned in April that after losing the 1995 independence referendum by the slimmest of margins, the Quebec separatist leader Jacques Parizeau railed that the defeat had been caused by "money and the ethnic vote". The same factors now seem to be at work in Scotland. The English are coming north with money, while immigrants from the rest of Europe are pitching up all across Scotland, as they are in the rest of the UK. I was constantly amazed to walk into small shops in out-of-the-way towns and find myself being served by people with a variety of English accents, and almost every hotel seemed to be mainly staffed by East Europeans.

Our Scottish relatives told us that their remote village in Argyll is attracting increasing numbers of English buyers, unable to get onto the property ladder in England and looking in desperation to rural Scotland as a place to buy and resettle. As a result, housing prices in that village have risen sixfold in the last decade, and the local builder has so much work that he has been unable to make any progress on the house he is building for himself for at least a year.

It's interesting to speculate what impact this may have on the SNP's plans to hold a referendum on independence. Rural areas across the UK are up in arms at the surge in property prices that "London money" is producing; just last week, a nationalist group in Cornwall threatened firebombings against outsiders (adding an explicit threat to damage the cars of people patronising Rick Stein's restaurants in Padstow!) The pressures resulting from the inflow of Sassenachs and Slavs may well persuade more Scots that they would be better off going it alone. But if Alex Salmond does press ahead with his referendum, these people will be able to vote too, and it's unlikely that they'll be supporting independence. Word to Mr Salmond: if you lose, try to be more gracious about it than Jacques Parizeau.

Lawyer needs a lawyer

Even before you know anything about the people involved, the odyssey of TB-infected American Andrew Speaker is pretty newsworthy. Speaker was diagnosed with a rare and dangerous form of TB in January. In May he met with the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), which claims that it warned him against travelling. Undeterred, he flew from Atlanta to Paris to get married, then headed over to Greece for his honeymoon, all the while breathing germs all over his unwitting fellow passengers. Speaker claimed he was never explicitly warned by the CDC not to travel, but the fact that he chose to return to the US by a very indirect route (Athens-Rome-Prague-Montreal) suggests that he knew he was doing something naughty. In a final twist, when he crossed back into the US from Canada at Pont Champlain, his named popped up on the INS computer --but the immigration agent waved him through on the grounds that he didn't look ill! After all this, Speaker turned himself in to the CDC in New York.

This looks like an everyday story of personal irresponsibility (Speaker) and bureaucratic incompetence (the INS guy, and maybe also the CDC), until you find out a bit more about the people involved. Speaker's new father-in-law works for the CDC, in a division responsible for....eliminating tuberculosis! He knew about Speaker's condition. Bizarrely, he has denied that Speaker caught the disease from him, when you would have thought his priority would have been to explain why he failed to dissuade Speaker from going ahead with the wedding to his daughter. And Speaker himself -- well, he's a personal injury lawyer, or as the less charitable would describe it, an ambulance chaser.

Speaker has thrown himself on the mercy of the hundreds of people now worrying about the risk of having caught TB from him over the past month: "I just hope they can forgive me and understand that I really believed I wasn't putting people at risk, because that's what people told me". You can just imagine Speaker's lip curling in disdain if one of the people he faces off against in a courtroom ever essayed such a statement. If there's any justice, Speaker may soon find himself getting a defendant's perspective on the US litigation system.