LET’S FACE THE FACTS OF LIFE

Einstein put it well when he said that a sign of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. 

It’s the same with politics: we hear the same throngs over and over and there is a huge aversion to facing the facts. Listening to all the party conferences was like a broken record. 



Here are some old chestnuts trotted out by all political parties.

We will concentrate development on brownfield land and preserve the Green Belt. I think it was John ‘the pugilist’ Prescott who landed the first punch with this and still it is trotted out at every party conference.


We will regenerate the high streets. Hello. Have you ever heard of Amazon? On my High Street – up to two years ago – we had four banks and a post office. All gone replaced by fancy boutiques and coffee shops. The High Street will never be the same. Get over it.

Bye-bye to huge department stores. John Lewis is in real trouble and Debenhams, C&A and others are long gone. What will happen with these monoliths? In New York, they are converting old factories (brownfield sites – see above) into condos and they’re selling like hotcakes. Great article on this in last week’s (October 8) Financial Times. In one old factory they are getting 2,800 new homes.



We should invest lots more in rail. Work from home is here to stay so we should need fewer trains anyway for the TWATs – Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday commuters. Scrapping the next phase HS2 was the right thing to do. What a shame we ever started on the first leg. With the current trains. I can get from London to Manchester in just over two hours. That’s fine by me. Investment should be focused on what’s broken, which is more or less the whole system.


There is an irrational nostalgia for the past with the Hovis TV advertisement of the little boy pushing his bike up a cobbled terraced street. Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Blade Runner, Alien, etc) made his name with this advert.

Is he still making ads for bread? No. He has taken Einstein’s advice and is not doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. 



Maybe we should send some of our politicians to drama school and get them to stop churning out the same old nonsense. 

Or, as Einstein, said: are they all mad?



Have a good week!




Tom