From the BBC:
"Government is all about taking difficult decisions. It's about balancing the benefits to the nation as a whole, to the economy, with the burdens that individuals and communities will suffer. And the challenge is to get the route which causes the least possible damage for the maximum possible benefit.
Now that can never mean that nobody suffers. Our job is to make sure that we fairly compensate those who are disadvantaged by the decisions taken."
Saturday 21 August 2010
Philip Hammond tries to explain Government to NIMBYs
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5 comments:
This really is the country of no joined-up thinking. I remember when HS1, the Channel Tunnel link, was announced, at the same time as the missing part of the M2. The government was proposing to build a railway line and a motorway between the same two towns and each one followed a different route. Little, it seems, has changed.
What he is really saying is:
Poverty is inevitable, a law of nature
It has nothing to do with the unequal distribution of wealth from unearned incomes
There is not enough of everything to keep a growing population alive
All wages a paid from capital already available.
It is social darwnisim. He doesnt know it. But he has accepted a pre-assumed theory without bothering to think about it with car as do most people
CRUNCH!
@Robin Smith
Is that really what he is saying? I thought that was a rather good explanation of how governments make decisions (or ought to, anyway). How would you suggest the winners and losers from the construction of a railway line should be dealt with?
H, quite right.
Admittedly, governments take decisions that are more likely to get them re-elected than things that really benefit people, but as a statement of principles, Philip H is pretty much spot on.
It sounds nice in theory but it's nothing like what a government actually does, particularly not a Tory government. Governments tend to take decisions that benefit the interests they represent and those they wish to influence.
In the current economic "crisis", no one actually "needs" to suffer, any more than serfs "needed" to suffer. It's just that if they don't, some very rich people have to be slightly less rich, and no Western government is going to permit that.
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