Alan Williams

摘要

Although never admitted, it is a widely-held belief that Alistair Darling was sent to the Department for Transport as a safe pair of hands in the wake of the Stephen Byers fiasco with a brief to avoid taking any decisions if at all possible, and to say 'no' to those he could not avoid. In this, it has to be said, he has been remarkably successful, and he will no doubt be well rewarded in due course in his chum and fellow Scot Gordon Brown's first Cabinet reshuffle when he eventually takes over from Uncle Tony. But the years of inaction will have done horrendous damage to Britain's entire surface transport infrastructure. Or, more correctly, England's. Because ironically, as the two Scottish Mafia in the Cabinet keep the door firmly shut on any new surface transport projects in England - there are no new motorways being built, either - Transport Scotland, the Scottish Executive's new agency for transport north of the border which came into being at the beginning of January, is powering ahead with £3billion worth of new work, including line reopening and station redevelopments (p30).