Readers' Letters Of The Day

From the FT:

... With regard to compensation, many affected residents feel that the "preferred [High Speed 2] route" has been chosen precisely because the government believes it can minimise pay-outs on the simple premise that the fewer the number of houses deemed to be affected, the less will have to be disbursed.

They contrast this extensively rural "preferred route" with the route chosen for High Speed One (formerly the Channel Tunnel Rail Link). The latter was built almost entirely along its length directly beside high-capacity transport corridors – the A2, M2 and M20 – which generate a correspondingly high level of noise.

The same criterion was not applied to the choice of route for HS2. The effects of 225 miles per hour trains almost every two minutes will be far more acute in a rural setting rather than adjacent to a busy motorway...

Marilyn Fletcher, Great Missenden, Bucks.
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Also from the FT:

Sir, John Kay's article On guard against the robber barons of the Rhine (Comment, August 18) was clever in the tactful way it raised important questions. Are the hedge funds toll collectors or value creators? One feature of the toll collectors of the Rhine was that the travellers had no choice but to use the Rhine and pay up.

Hedge funds may be the ultimate "heads I win big, tails I do OK" contract for the manager. But we don't have to use hedge funds, so we can't call them robber barons...

Martin White, Chairman, UK Shareholders' Association.
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Correct - hedge funds may well fleece their investors, but nobody is forced to invest in them, so AFAIAC, they are neither toll collectors nor robber barons.

But it's a useful analogy...

The first letter turns all logic on its head. The area between London and Birmingham is nigh uninhabited anyway, so if you just drew any old straight line, only a few hundred buildings would need to be demolished. But all things being equal, is it not better to put a few curves in so that only a few dozen need to be demolished? Isn't it reasonable of the government to try and minimise disruption - for its own sake and to minimise compensation claims?

The idea of running the line along the M40 motorway (or using the old Great Central Railway) is not entirely without merit, but again, this goes closer to existing towns and villages (which in turn have grown up around the junctions), so it would require thousands, rather than hundreds or dozens of buildings to be demolished.

So I think we can dismiss the first letter as special pleading - what the lady wants is extra 'compensation' from the people who want to travel from A to B. Using the analogy in the first letter, put yourself in the position of somebody who wants to travel from A to B - what do you call people who demand money from you along the way?

Toll collectors, robber barons or even highwaymen? I'd hardly call them 'value creators'.