Politically Correct by John Warnock

After six years of weak Government pandering to the elite and wasting tax payer’s money, we see two projects with an amount of accountability linked to our local MP Paul Maynard.

The world’s most expensive white elephant, project Hinkley C Power Station which was approved whilst Paul was at the now defunct Department of Energy & Climate Change and something we will never finish paying for.

Now, he is at the Department of Transport that is over-seeing the vanity project HS2 which is seeing estimates soar from £40bn to as high as £90bn - we await their next move.

I challenge Mr Maynard to push to scrap HS2 and spend the money more wisely on local railway infrastructure projects, across the country.

Maybe a dream, but how about a Lancaster to Liverpool line crossing the two Fylde rivers so opening up the cul-de-sac we live in.

Sadly cost is the powerful driver of bad decisions. I had to make a 420 mile journey that cost £50 in petrol, as the train price plus connection at both ends was £196.

If it had been in my affordable price range, I would probably had a more pleasant journey.

Instead I spent one hour 15 minute s on the M6 travelling 12 .7 miles – nightmare!

As ‘decade zero’ (the last decade to get to zero emissions) draws to a close, political agreement on ‘climate chaos’ seems as far off as ever.

Our government is building more and more roads and public transport is becoming more and more unaffordable, due to privatisation.

Who would want to be a World Transport Minister when the task that needs doing now, is to agree to close half the world’s airports and reduce the world’s shipping by 50 per cent.

All of this with the world’s economic lobby on your back saying the exact opposite, that we need to expand and we need to grow.

Will we get to where we need to be in the time line we have left?

Schools ‘messed around’

As the next generation in education now become the custodians of a dying planet, their education will have to prepare them for healing the planet from this unstable, unsustainable economy we live in.

It’s no surprise it’s privatisation of education that’s in the news again.

Ever since Labour introduced academies and the PFI to pay for them, our children’s education has been about tests and league tables, but not about what is necessary for this century.

Now the Conservative government wants a premier league, all about money for the rich elite, the reintroduction of the grammar school.

It’s not like we have not tested our children to destruction, that we need another exam, the 11 plus. If you fail it you will be stigmatised for the rest of your life.

Education has been messed around with for years, tweaked re-tweaked and tweaked again.

Yet it doesn’t serve the purpose of preparing our children for the future that’s coming.

All the changes are about justification of which private company is going to get which pot of money.

There has been no urgency in educating our children, as for the first time in history, the work force is over educated for the jobs market that exists today.

Only the Green Party has a full tool box to tackle the massive education problem we face.

The world is changing rapidly, we need to ask is education solely about employability? Or does it have to serve a greater purpose?

Labour and the other faction New Labour are stuck in the 1970s.

The Tories don’t care, they only work for the one per cent of the one per cent and that means business as usual, state handouts to the greedy corporates, not the needy.

Losing out to service debt

‘Women Against State Pension Inequality’ is a campaign about the state pension that you and your employer have paid into for over 40 years being removed from women, born in the 1950s and who now have to work another five or six years to get it.

So major question - how can it be called a state benefit now, when the state were only custodians of your savings for your retirement?

Answer ‘austerity!’ A word to justify theft. Let’s not forget it was the bankers and their mantra ‘too big to fail, too rich to jail’ and their recklessness, who created the debt we now face.

It’s to service that debt that we are losing everything we have worked so hard to build.

Theresa May has talked about families ‘just about managing’. This really is the new class in the making ‘the Precariat’ (living without security).

Global capital and the state serving its interests want a large precariat which is why it is a class-in-the-making, not an underclass.