A load of hot air

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

Just when you think it might be safe to start watching the news again, it all kicks off.

It’s Party Conference Season, so that means there’s plenty of food for thought coming out of Bournemouth and Liverpool and Manchester. Not least the fact that the Prime Minister canned one of his predecessor’s flagship plans to aid the ‘levelling up’ of the North – namely the second stage of the HS2 rail link. And he did so whilst standing at a podium in one of the cities that was meant to be the main beneficiary. That takes some chutzpah.

Do we need the travel links between London, Birmingham and Manchester (and the rest of the North West) to be improved. Hell yes. Do we need to spend a gazillion pounds on building a new line that that will end up being part of a two-tier system: the fast, expensive, sleek new option for those on business expenses, and the normal, slow, rickety option for normal people. See also: Gatwick Express; Heathrow Express; HS1. Far better to spend the money ensuring that more people and get more places more reliably. And ‘levelling-up’ between London and the North West would be a lot easier if there was decent WIFI on Avanti. Actually, that goes for most trainlines. If you can work efficiently on a train journey, it is a solid reason not to drive, which has to be a good thing surely?

Ine the meantime, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to build 1.5million homes, and ensure economic growth that way. Doing so whilst covered in glitter, thrown by a political protestor. Not that it fazed him, any parent of a pre-teen girl knows that stuff gets everywhere. I’m guessing Starmer is just thankful it wasn’t a Just Stop Oil protestor. The 1.5million homes sounds great on paper, but governments have been pledging to build 300,000 a year for the last few decades, and it’s not happened yet. So, good luck with that one, Sir Keir.

The trouble, that after this weekend, all this seems like a load of inconsequential hot air, spouted by those who are lucky enough to live in a first world country where they don’t spend the time wondering when the next blow will fall. I’ve written a lot here about the war in Ukraine and its devastating effect on the people there. Now we seems to have gone through a time-warp and we are back in the 1970s. Exactly 50 years after the start of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli citizens, and Israel has responded with devastating effect. Hamas knew this would happen, in effect, they knew that they were sacrificing innocent civilians. Civilians who are effectively imprisoned in Gaza, under the air, sea and land blockade. This isn’t the place for a discussion on the rights and wrongs of what is happening – and they are many, and they are on both sides – nor do I know enough about the history of the conflict to be in a position to comment. The issues go back many, many, many years – and Britain had its part to play in messing things up during the First World War.

There have been  a number of attempts to secure a lasting peace in the Middle East since the Yom Kippur War: the Geneva Conference, the Camp David Accords  the Egypt–Israel peace treaty ,Madrid Conference of 1991, the Oslo Accords ,Israel–Jordan peace treaty  and the 2000 Camp David Summit. That many attempts, and still we have the heart-breaking scenes we are seeing on the news.

So many lives senselessly lost, both in Gaza and, of course in Ukraine, all through man’s inability to live peacefully with man.