naughty boys and girls

Well, we’re not getting a congestion charge and presumably we’re not getting the mass transit investments that were supposed to go with it. The Leader is cross:

"This was the only opportunity to get £3billion of investment in public transport over the next five years and 10,000 jobs to go with it. So far nobody has been able to put forward a credible alternative to get those levels of investment.”

“What the people of Greater Manchester need to do now, each and every one of them, is go to their rooms and think about what they’ve done.”

I made up that last paragraph, but it conveys the tone of the yes campaign, especially the constant reminders that “there is no plan B” made in order to chivvy the electorate into a yes vote. Public transport improvements are apparently important enough to spend billions on, and the congestion charge is so vital that a referendum has to be held on it. But if it produces the wrong result, then nothing will be done about either of these things. People of Greater Manchester, consider your legs well and truly slapped and your sweeties snatched away.

I ended up not voting. It was one of those political enterprises where participation seems too much like complicity. I’m beginning to feel that way about British politics in general, too.

Comments

[Fellow Traveller]

I'll bet he wishes that he could have instructed the public, like the de Menezes inquest coroner, on how they could vote so that they only return a 'Yes' or abstain.

[ejh]

What baffles me about it though is that surely they knew the votes was likely to be lost? And so surely they deliberately had a vote in order that they could avoid putting this plan into practice because they reckoned it would cost them votes at an election?

[Phil]

I don't know - two of the ten boroughs in the region are completely outside the M60, and two or three others are mostly outside. The inner ring is entirely within two boroughs (Manchester and Salford). The publicity has all been about how much better public transport would be (throughout the region), with a secondary theme of how most people wouldn't actually have to pay; they must have reckoned they had a good chance of appealing to self-interest, particularly in outlying boroughs. It's quite heartening that it didn't come off.

[redpesto]

I ended up not voting. It was one of those political enterprises where participation seems too much like complicity. I’m beginning to feel that way about British politics in general, too.

In suspect a lot of Labour voters have felt this way for years. Even if Brown/Darling come up with a plan that worked, that feeling won't go away anytime soon.