Why Politicians Should Keep Their Sticky Fingers Out of Government Projects
The aircraft-carrier fiasco is a classic project, where politicians have tried to be all things to all men and quite a few women as well.
Surely, if France can make do with just one carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, then why do we need two. And surely, we should have an Anglo-French aircraft manning both,as quite a few projects between the two countries work well.
But that more affordable option would have been bad for NuLabor in its Scottish heartland.
The Scots are good at many things, but over recent years they have shown that they are not very good at politics with an English dimension or one with a great amount of project mangement.
I’ve just read this piece from Robert Peston’s blog. The highlight for me was a comment from Wee Scamp, who as you see describes himself as a non-voting Scot.
As a non Labour voting Scot I am quite sure that Gordon Brown set up the carrier contract to ensure Scotland – and particularly Glasow – would vote Labour in the May election.
My logic for believing this is quite straightforward. Most importantly, the design of the new carrier is very badly flawed in that they’re not nuclear powered, do not have an angled flight deck and aren’t equipped with either a catapult or arrestor gear. In other words they are limited to using VSTOL and/or helicopters but couldn’t carry a conventional jet and will be limited in range due to their dependence on needing a refuelling tanker or access to dockside refuelling facilities.
In other words, if we really needed these carriers they would have been properly designed. In fact though they are just a job creation exercise and Brown couldn’t have really cared less what they were or weren’t capable of.
Indeed, politically the only error he made was ensuring the contracts can’t be broken. If they had been then both carriers would have been cancelled and the boost to Labour would have been huge. Not surprisingly though he couldn’t even get that right.
Yet again Prudence shows himself to be an even worse Prime Minister than Lord North.
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