Peter Rhodes on shelving a railway, death by smoking and big profits for the finance industry
A reader points out that if Whitehall tries to encourage young people to get vaccinated with “prizes” such as cut-price pizza and taxi rides, it may tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, but what will it do for the obesity epidemic?
Quietly, so quietly that you may have missed it, all work has been stopped on the eastern 2B branch of the high-speed train network HS2. Experts say that without this £32 billion branch, heading from Birmingham to Nottingham, Sheffield and Leeds, the entire project will never be viable. So where do we go from here? It is probably too late to halt the main London-to-Birmingham line but how about re-designating the Birmingham-Leeds section as a cycle route? It would probably carry more travellers than some fiendishly-expensive railway, and think of the international green prestige we'd win as 99-year-old Greta Thunberg declared it open.
No surprises at all in this week's research from Cancer Research UK showing that smoking causes nearly twice as many cancers among the poor as the well-off. As far as I'm aware, there is not a single medical condition that is not made worse by living in poverty. As Joan Baez told us all those years ago in her hymn, All My Trials: “If living were a thing that money could buy / You know the rich would live and the poor would die.” It is. They do.
With the demand for new homes, second homes, holiday homes and escape-Covid homes, some building societies have done very nicely out of the pandemic. The Skipton Building Society this week announced a rise in underlying profits from £47.9 million to £122.4 million. My own building society has also revealed a most healthy year. It admits that rates for savers are still low but is about to unveil a “new member loyalty account” which will “reward members who’ve been with us for a certain period of time.” Why do I suspect that the qualifying time period will be rather longer than we hope and the interest rather lower? Across most of the finance industry the terms “loyal customer” and “mug” are interchangeable.
And amid this flurry of big profits, my bank unveils a new sort of current account which, according to the bumf, is “just like your existing account.” Apart from the tiny difference that my current account is free while this new account costs £15 a month. The Mug Account.
