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 got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
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