Alan Johnson - Phillip Hammond Should Resign
Alan Johnson speaking on Sky News Adam Boulton Sunday Live - has hinted Transport Secretary Phillip Hammond should resign over the travel chaos caused by the snow.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Politics/Snow-Alan-Johnson-Hints-Transport-Secretary-Philip-Hammond-Should-Consider-Resigning/Article/201012315860605?lpos=Politics_Carousel_Region_2&lid=ARTICLE_15860605_Snow%3A_Alan_Johnson_Hints_Transport_Secretary_Philip_Hammond_Should_Consider_Resigning
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Did he cause the snow. Maybe he should have been at Traffic Link and other places to see what is happening. Maybe some MP's should grab a spade and help, without coming on TV and throwing out the blame game.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Politics/Snow-Alan-Johnson-Hints-Transport-Secretary-Philip-Hammond-Should-Consider-Resigning/Article/201012315860605?lpos=Politics_Carousel_Region_2&lid=ARTICLE_15860605_Snow%3A_Alan_Johnson_Hints_Transport_Secretary_Philip_Hammond_Should_Consider_Resigning
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Did he cause the snow. Maybe he should have been at Traffic Link and other places to see what is happening. Maybe some MP's should grab a spade and help, without coming on TV and throwing out the blame game.
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Comments
The only major thing he appears to have done is told everyone to clear their own snow. No doubt his road will be well gritted.
I don't mind him myself - no major muck-ups because of the snow
Hang on a minute.;)
I presume that Johnson has read all of the text books that Ed Balls lent him and mastered economic theory and is now moving on to master Transport. Lucky Ed Miliband to have such well informed people on his team.
We want the Transport secretary sorting the mess out - not distracted by silly resignation nonsense.
Phil Hammond was interviewed a day or two ago and said that all major road and motorways are passable and that what is being prioritised now is gettng all trains to the correct start points for tomorrow for commuters. There is sufficient grit and salt. Airport authorities are doing all they can to get planes off the ground. Planes are in fact taking off from Heathrow today.
He pointed out that local roads are solely the responsibility of local councils.
He wasn't even in the House of Commons to take questions from MPs, being Lord Adonis (it was Geoff Hoon MP from October 2008 until June 2009).
It's shameless political opportunism from Johnson, he knows full well that it wasn't any better under Labour.
The question that both this Government and the last one have to consider is whether it's worth throwing serious money at a problem that only affects the UK for a few weeks of the year, when that money could be used for something else.
That's a point that Phil Hammond made in his interview. He said that in countries which have to cope with snow for several months of the year they have invested in a great deal of machinery and equipment. Here the snow lasts a matter of days at a time and so we have less eqipment.
In other Europen countries they are facing similar problems to ours and even in Germany the trains are not running on time.
What an idiot, what happened last year Johnson you clown? The same thing :rolleyes:
However.....
Aren't a few people forgetting the even worse travel chaos that existed earlier this year then LABOUR were in power!
At least this time around main roads are gritted. I can remember back in January how bad it was with even the local bus service having to stop services due to the state of the roads.
This time around the buses are still running.
This time around is a huge improvement to what we saw back in January under a Labour Government.
If not, then they must be doing a better job than Labour was.
Perhaps he'd like to tell that to all the people stuck in a 20 mile queue on the M5 yesterday.
As for councils' responsibility, there's no point in having major roads usable if no-one can get to them. It needs a co-ordinated approach and councils (yes, East Sussex CC, I mean you) that can't get their act together should be given a snow plan to comply with by the DoT.
Local buses here haven't run here since about 5pm on Friday.
The Labour government commissioned a report on "snow resilience", which was published in July. The chair of the transport select committee said on the radio yesterday that almost none iof its recommendations had been implemented.
Local authorities who have the responsibility of dealing with the roads have just had their budgets cut by millions by central government so they can't simply pass the buck if there's not enough resource to deal with the problem.
If they hadn't bought their salt and grit by now (before any cuts) then they are not very good Councils
Couldn't agree more, the man is a moron as are most of his party. Of course everything worked perfectly last winter when they were in charge!!:rolleyes:
They all had to spend far more than budgeted last winter because they had to use far more salt and grit than in previous years. The same will happen this year - the government cannot blame local councils if they can't afford to buy more to deal with the extreme weather.
I have no argument with that if we were at the end of winter but we are only at the start
I'm not sure what your point is. Mine is that even if authorities have planned well for a cold winter they may struggle to push the resources towards an even colder one than anticipated because those resources are much more stretched than they expected. Most authorities had planned for a 6 to 7% cut to their grant but have had more like 10 or 11%. They are now having to work out how to keep essential services like gritting going while making even bigger cuts elsewhere.
In winter it snows. It causes inconvenience not mass deaths.
It not unusual.
It has been happening almost very year for as long as I can remember.
-17.5C - Magherally, County Down, January 1 1979
-23.3C - Rhayader, Powys, January 21, 1940
-26.1C - Newport, Shropshire, January 10, 1982
-27.2C - Braemar, Aberdeenshire, January 10, 1982
-27.2C - Altnaharra, Highlands, December 30, 1995
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339937/UK-snow-weather-update-Temperatures-set-hit-low-26C.html#ixzz18a0nuRN1remember.
Johnson didn't call for Hammond to resign. He questioned why Hammond hadn't acted on a report published in the summer which might have helped planning for winter. It is reasonable for the opposition to ask the government why they haven't acted on advice commissioned after last winter's problems.
I wonder why Maria Eagle wasn't doing this interview. She is supposedly the Shadow Secretary for Transport, though her appointment hasn't made it to her own website, so perhaps she missed the email.
Eagle was spouting absolute rubbish on TV this morning, one would have thought hearing her that Labour had bought dozens of snow ploughs and thousands of tons of grit and the coalition had sold them off.
What the hell did Labour do in all the years they were in power did THEY provide the infrastructure for this snow. There is a limit to what any government can do when only been in power just over 6 months Labour had 12 years. When did YOU provide us with the snow ploughs Eagle, when did YOU stockpile grit. The Government have enough problems sorting out Labour's last minute trying-to-grab-votes give-away policies.
I could even understand Eagle and the rest of the Labour dunderheads if the coalition government had been in power 3 years, they open their mouths far too much blaming the present problems on the coalition when most of the problems were of their own making.
As for the remark by the ex-postman union man Johnson, why if Labour were so damn clever and know what the coalition should be doing now, why did everything go wrong last winter then, so much so they called an inquiry, when the weather was nowhere near so severe as it has been.
May have got the weather wrong for the South. Apparently the snow could return during rush hour on Monday.
Instead of waiting for the scientist then they will have to invest. Thats the problem the Government will have to try and find the money to pay for these things. I suppose they could come up with a plan to pay for snow ploughs over a few years. It's really got to be done. There must be emergency reserve money somewhere? I bet there are snow ploughs already built, and ready to go.