Wednesday, February 04, 2009

We need to do better - striking because times are hard is counterproductive

I was talking to my mum today about the shameful price of public transport versus using your car. It costs more to get a bus pass than it does to use your car. But the most shameful thing is train tickets. I ordered a train ticket from Leeds to London - three weeks in advance, off peak (leaving at 15:00 and returning at 21:30). Guess how much? £132. For that money I could have gone to Europe to rhaatid.

I also checked out a ticket to Bolton. Journey takes 1hr and a half hours, a half hour longer than the London trip. Price?£11. It's about demand which should play some part in pricing but not in something so important to the environment for goodness' sake! Mum said we should protest and boycott the trains until the prices are reasonable.

I agree. But I can't see the British public doing any such thing. We've reached a level of comfort that we can't be bothered. Trouble is the way things are going I think the pain will reach the point that there will be a great deal of civil unrest soon unless the powers that be step up to the plate. The fact that banks etc. STILL gave out bonuses for 2008 though and the fact the govt. won't force the banks to behave makes me pessimistic. More and more stories in the press are speaking about the fact that our population is under skilled and has serious social problems - there's a fatal sickness in our culture and if it isn't fixed we won't be able to compete with the rest of the world. I mean look at those idiots WITH JOBS striking over the Italian workers. It is an embarrassment. A tender was issued and the business was duly and fairly won by this company. They (like us) are part of the EU and so there's no problem with Italian and Portuguese workers doing what they're were contracted to. It is a shame that we are in a recession and jobs are scarce but these companies haven't taken jobs away from any British person - it's just how things go sometimes. But instead of looking for fairly won work of their own, British idiots seem to think they are entitled to work fairly won by others just because they are British and the work is being done here. They cannot grasp the concept of a global economy. I mean they can go to Italy and work too if they like and there are jobs. (But this would probably mean learning another language, not something our lot are keen on eh? I mean the rest of the world should bloody well learn English right?) But they lack the intelligence and the knowledge about basic business and our membership of the EU to process this information. We are sorely paying the price for encouraging our people to be ignorant and stupid (i.e unable to reason and think things out). If this isn't fixed quickly the UK will not even be what someone I know calls 'a third world country with a strong currency' - because the currency is screwed, we will be a third world country period.

Come on people - up your game. Give Big Brother a miss and pick up a newspaper, talk to some people, google a few current affairs that affect you and most importantly, haul your ass out of bed on election day and vote - either for someone you admire or against someone you don't.

We can do so much better than this. We must.