In the run-up to the UK General Election, spiked will publish a series of essays reposing political issues. The aim of the ‘Question Everything’ essays is to encourage people to rethink the past, the present and the future. In this fourth essay, James Woudhuysen explores the roots of the establishment’s neglect of scientific and technological innovation, and calls for the creation of new industries for the twenty-first century.
One morning recently, I found myself trying to board a Central Line on London Transport (LT) in the morning, during the rush hour. The platform was impossibly packed with commuters, and bare wiring stood out from the curved walls that encased it. People could barely walk, still less get on a crowded train. But once on, blaring announcements to ‘pass down inside the cars and use up all the available space’ came not just from the train’s intercom, but also – at the same time, overlaid on the first – from an LT woman on the platform with a loudhailer.
So great is the weakness of infrastructure in Britain today that any amount of crowd control is now deemed proper. Yet while more and more people use London’s tube, announcements and signs aimed at compressing and redirecting those people can only do so much. The fact is that, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Britain and its capital simply need more frequent trains, new and newly reliable signaling systems, roomier rolling stock, and new, fast-running railway lines. Technological innovation, not the elitist management of the plebs’ behaviour, is the way forward in transport services.
Further station instructions telling you what not to do can do little more than irritate. Worse, the authorities’ sloth in developing new, innovatory transport connections means that, today, it is not alarmist to see the Central Line during rush hour as a fire waiting to happen.
This is what the failure to innovate in a hectic modern society really means now. It means an unacceptable level of risk, endured by passengers who are provided no litterbins, but instead told contemptuously, as if they were garbage: ‘Take Your Litter With You.’
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