CHARLIE WHELAN: Invest billions in rail links to Highlands and not …
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An LNER Azuma train crossing the Drumochter Pass but when will the Highland main line be electrified?
Following a surprise by-election victory for the Tories in an outer London suburb, the Prime Minister announced that he was a friend of the car – at least, that is if it’s a chauffeur driven one that takes him to his helicopter.
The ruling party won in Boris Johnson’s old seat because they persuaded enough people that the Labour mayor was about to clobber motorists with a tax on their polluting cars.
This was, as usual from the Conservative Party, a lie but in today’s political world nobody seems to care about the truth any more.
The Tories have always been in love with the car at the expense of our public transport system.
I never stop reminding people it wasn’t Beeching who savaged the railway network in the 1960s he was only obeying orders and the man giving them was Marples a very rich Tory transport minister who just happened to own a road haulage company!
Here in the Highlands the Scottish Nationalists seem to be copying their Tory pals down south with an obsession about building bigger roads and top of their list is the A9.
Now we all know there are safety issues with this road but it’s not the road that kills people it is other people who drive recklessly and too fast.
I’ve just spent a weekend in London and to be frank it’s totally embarrassing having to tell people that it takes eight hours to get up here because our main train line is not only single track nearly all the way north of the Central Belt but still hasn’t been electrified.
Instead of wasting billions of pounds on the A9 they should sort out Scottish trains first especially as we now own them. They could also try cutting the speed limit on the A9 to say a 50mph maximum. Everyone knows that speed kills so slow the speed.
The 20mph limit that we now have in our villages may not be universally popular but it does mean we have a safer space though judging by my daily walk down Skye of Curr with the dog most cars don’t seem to have speedometers.
n Did you know that the SNP has been ‘captured’ and is now under the control of the British state?
No me neither, but that’s the view of ex SNP MSP Campbell Martin and he’s not alone in thinking that.
Apparently the demise of the Nationalists has nothing to do with their dismal record of running Scotland or their finances but because the security forces have infiltrated the Nats forcing them to take unpopular decisions like their support for the gender recognition bill.
Apparently these ‘assets’ have risen to the top of the SNP and now run it.
I can assure readers I’m not making this up, nor is it just one lone nutter who makes these claims. Former leader Jim Sillars has similar views.
He has said that there are people at the top who are out to ‘do us in’ but he then says: ‘Who are they? Who employs them and what positions they hold we just don’t know’.”
Now we do know that British spies once infiltrated the old Communist Party, but they were at least a revolutionary organisation.
The SNP is far from that in fact it’s nearer to being Tartan Tories than anything else so why on earth would the British state see them as a threat?
They don’t, of course, and these utterances are just fanciful nonsense coming from deluded individuals who see their party falling apart.
n Charlie Whelan (Labour) is former spokesman for Gordon Brown
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