Skinflint's City Diary
No doubt it is my mean and nasty mind, but when I open my Sunday papers and see that the Prime Minister is telling the readers of the Sunday Express that the economic outlook is good and that he has seen nothing to shake his conviction that the prospects for sustained economic expansion are better that at any time in the last twenty-five years, and when I turn to the Sunday Telegraph and see that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is telling its readers that he believes we have a unique opportunity now to sustain a fast rate of growth and that he does not believe there is general overheating, then methinks perhaps they do exult too much. My City filends growl like bears; the Government bellows bullishly.
I expect Prime Ministers and Chancellors to put the best gloss they can upon events. But it must be more than chance coincidence that Mr Heath and Mr Barber allowed themselves to be interviewed by two Sunday papers along the same lines in the same week. To this mean and nasty mind, it looks as if the two men in charge of our economy put their heads together and concluded that they must speak out to stop the rot.
Quite right too. What they need to do is to restore confidence in the pound; and that means, for a start, restoring confidence in the Government and its policies.
Paris post
Everyone knows that the postal service steadily gets worse as it inexorably gets more expensive. Still, our Post Office is not quite so bad as the United States's, and is far better than France's. 1 received a postcard posted in central Paris.on July 11 on July 23: twelve days. At its worst, the British end could only have taken two days of the twelve, leaving ten days for the French to get a postcard from Paris to London. No doubt the deeper we sink into the Common Market mire, the slower will our postal services get, until, when we are fully integrated, no one will bother to send postcards at all.
Maplin go-ahead
am delighted at all the signs that the Government intends to press on with Maplin. Unlike many governmental projects, this is one which will produce very definite and visible and permanent assets, including 14,000 brand new acres we never had before, reclaimed from the sea, a major new port, and — at last — a fast road exit out of London to the east coast. These are additional benefits to the powerful environmental ben
efit of diverting new traffic away from Heathrow, and concentrating aircraft over the sea.
If I have read the signs right, the Channel tunnel news is not too bad, either. The Government shows signs of having second thoughts. It is not rushing ahead, simply to please the French. The more the Chunnel is considered, the more foolish an enterprise it becomes. People like to stay in their cars as long as possible: they will all want to drive down to Folkestone and Kent will become an appalling funnel. The new idea that the tunnel terminus should be in London rather than near the tunnel exit is logically sound; but psychologically all wrong. Car drivers won't want to have their cars put on trains in London if they can drive themselves to east coast and Channel ports and embark upon ferries and fast hovercraft.
The latest objection to the tunnel comes from Mr Lionel Hill, who in a letter to the Times ridicules the notion that the tunnel will cope with trains rushing through at a hundred miles an
hour every two and a half minutes. The weight of air that has to be pushed ahead of the trains make this almost impossible, and if it were achieved then howling air would come out of the tunnel at hurricane force at one end, and be sucked in with equal vigour at the other. Mr Hill reckons that trains would operate at an average speed of 33-35 mph with a frequency of not more than three an hour. If he is right, then the Chunnel will not only be an environmental disaster, but the biggest white elephant of all as well.
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