Following pressure from the public, the Brighton to Ashford service, seen here at Brighton, is to continue. However, the potential of this useful route will not be realised until there are two trains an hour between Ashford and Hastings, the diversion into Eastbourne and out again is eliminated, Eurostar stops more trains at Ashford, and passengers getting on and off Eurostar trains at Ashford are not charged the same as if they had travelled all the way to London.
This means that the Ashford to Hastings section needs to be upgraded and probably electrified, the missing link at Polegate needs to be reinstated in some form or other, and the immigration authorities need to get their act together so that passengers could use Eurostar between Ashford and London, just as they can between Paris and Calais.
The necessary improvements, which would cost a relatively trivial amount, will not be happening. This is an example of the many such unglamorous projects all over Britain which are being squeezed out by the obsession with high speed.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
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