CITY AND SUBURBAN
On the rails, up in the air dear Lord Mayor, don't change the price, change the package
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
The City of London built railways all over the world — from Antofagasta to La Paz and from White Pass to Yukon — but is in trouble with its own. Happily, I am able to help. Its most pressing need is an airport link, and the Chancellor, tantalis- ingly enough, now offers half of one — fast as far as Paddington, but thereafter, as now, by all stations on the Circle Line. My counter-offer is based on the first rule of bargaining: don't change the price, change the package. The Lord Mayor should have a word with BAA, the ovine airport owners, and agree to relaunch Stansted under a new name: City of London International Airport. This would at once give the City a superb modern airport with ample capacity and its own purpose-built rail link, already up and running all the way into Broadgate. Like the Paddington-Heathrow link, this should be hived off into the joint ownership of BAA and British Rail, topped up (I would hope) with commercial investment. Check-in desks at the station or, even bet- ter, on the train, and complimentary cham- pagne in first class. A ready-made market in business travel from an uncrowded air- port with low fees would suffice to lure the airlines and transform this part of BAA's business. It is, after all, quicker, cheaper and easier to move an aircraft than to build a railway — which is one reason why there is no link, built or planned, to the funny lit- tle airstrip in the derelict Royal Docks. Forget it. CLIA is the winner.
State of the Union
SIR ALASTAIR MORTON, the great Euromole, ought to have his eye on Stanst- ed. He could always go back down his tun- nel and keep on digging until he gets there. Now he must hope that Union Railway (same idea, new name) will carry his cus- tomers to London on 20th-century metals. With a bit of luck it will be ready in time for the 21st. It is certainly the best shot yet. It is meant as a railway, and not a device for digging up the pot of gold that BR thinks is under Kings Cross goods yard, ready for the next property boom, if there is one. It recognises that its best chance of enlisting the Kent lobby and getting money from the Treasury is to call itself a North Kent line, not a Channel .Tunnel extension. Setting up Union as a separate outfit within BR (and at odds with the board) has paid off, and getting it out from under BR's wing, as will happen in the autumn, should pay more. Even so, the sums that will be decisive have yet to be done. Once the route is settled and the railway has a statute behind it, then will come the share-out or shoot-out between public and private sector money — and however plausibly Union may put values on social benefits, the test will, I suspect, be the state of the public finances and the length of the Chancellor's thumb. Sir Alastair should keep his Stanst- ed option open.
Reinforce success
THE FIRST test case will be Crossrail, tun- nelling east and west under London — to City eyes, the missing link to Heathrow, or Circle Line bypass. In his Budget speech, Norman Lamont called it a suitable candi- date for private sector finance, making this sound all too like a new label on a familiar Treasury pigeonhole. The City Corpora- tion's own study,,out this week, would not send private inveitors rushing into Cross- rail. It must, though, be a better bet than the other tunnel looming under London, the Jubilee Line extension. Crossrail would go where the customers are, most of all in the City, the Jubilee would go where they aren't — beneath the malodorous wastes of the Lea estuary and the tenantless towers of Canary Wharf. Crossrail would reinforce success, the Jubilee would seek to rescue failure. A Government facing a £50 billion Budget deficit has got to find new ways of project finance, and necessity has thus far overborne the doctrinaire objections of the Treasury. However, the Treasury has a way of laughing last.
Poisoned pound gambit
I LIKED the joker who offered 10 million German marks as a stake for the world chess championship, to be played in his local church hall. Owning to a warped sense of humour, he explained that he meant pre- inflationary Reichsmarks, treasured more for their typographical merit than their monetary value. Successive British govern- ments have played a far more cruel joke with the pound, which since those Reichs- marks were printed has lost 98 per cent of its value. My advice to Short and Kasparov is to accept nothing but gold.
More than human
A FRIEND of mine has just been fired by her company's Director of Human Resources. This unctuous euphemism has crept into business life by a process that would have been familiar to Parkinson the Lawgiver, now departed. Just as a Director of Corporate Affairs is a public relations man with another PR man to do the work for him and a PR agency on an expensive contract, so a human resources supremo is a jumped-up personnel officer whose per- sonnel policy is to employ more. They in turn will need their personal personnel assistants in numbers that will place new demands on the department, which must expand to meet them. Companies thus develop elephantiasis of the hindquarters, which causes their teeth to fall out. They find it harder to afford to pay people at the sharp end. That is where the axe falls, for a personnel department (still more, a human resources empire) has never been known to declare itself redundant. That has to be done for it. One of the High Street banks — where the idea has certainly been can- vassed — would be a good place to start. Until then, it will be worth remembering that Director of Human Resources is a title properly belonging to Almighty God.
Cold comfort
GRACELESS — and not Feckless, as I thought last week when ruminating on the Budget — was the Cold Comfort Farm cow that had lost her leg and was managing as best she could on three. It occurs to me that the Cold Comfort milking herd, Feck- less, Graceless, Pointless and Aimless, must have been named after the stages of the British budgetary cycle. We are now on the cusp between Feckless and Graceless.
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