Public consultation, I certainly don’t think so. It’s like war-time propaganda out there on them streets. I keep looking upto the skies expecting leaflets to drop from planes telling us how the congestion charge is the only way for the inhabitants of the Independent Republic of Mancunia to survive a sure but painful death. I swear I saw a tank ploughing it’s way up Portland St, with Cllrs Richard Leese & Pat Karney in full military garb addressing pedestrians via megaphone.

“Stop what you are doing, return to your homes immediately and vote yes or spend ten years solitary confinement in Liverpool”.

How many pro-congestion campaigns can there be? The latest one, United City (nice and clever that, I get it, just!) contains the usual self-proclaimed champions of industry aka Manchester business leaders getting their names in print, spouting about Manchester this, Manchester that. It’s all great stuff but most of the businesses supporting it have little genuine passion for the greatest city the world has ever seen. Without shaming and naming loads of them I would really question the true intentions of the majority, especially those who operate out of London. Are their hearts or wallets in 0161?

Most of the rationale from this crew for public transport improvement, hiding behind a thinly veiled environmental argument is to make Manchester bigger, greater, better business infrastructure, more economically powerful, world class city blah blah blah. Yeah ladies, coz bigger is always better.

Sorry chaps, I’m a Mancunian, not a wannabe Londoner. I love the place. I love the fact that whenever you go out you bump into someone you know and equally find yourself speaking to people you don’t know like you’ve known them for years. Yes, this is Manchester, a historical centre of political and social reform, industrial revolution, women’s rights movements, canals, railways, the computer and best of all, Vimto. Home to the Peterloo Massacre, the Busby Babes and more recently the IRA bomb. You see this city doesn’t simply lie down and die. It fights back everytime. These are world class attributes you can’t ever copy – quite frankly £zillion per sq ft prime office rents and the number of 5 star hotels simply won’t be talked about in the same way a hundred years on.

So please just leave Manchester as it is. The airport is already busy enough and provides more than enough pollution to the surrounding areas – and we’re talking noise here as well as other stuff. If you really, really want somewhere bigger to live then just move to London.

Though the idea of a vastly improved transport system is appealing to everyone, myself included, the bottom line is that we shouldn’t be subjected to this form of political blackmail. To provide a context, the government was able to find close to a billion pounds to form a limited shelf-life southern-centric tourist attraction called the Millennium Dome. Now they are telling us that to give Manchester the £1.5bn funding that by rights we should have had drip-fed into us in the past, we’ve got to stump up the other half. Hmmm, doesn’t sound that fair to me.

Maybe I’ve got the Mancunian Way running through my veins a little too much but if it was upto me I’d wheel out Jack Duckworth and tell them to shove it where the sun don’t shine. Tell them it’s a disgrace how the North West of England has been deprived of much needed funds in the past and that we’re not going to be some form of urban guinea pig for the rest of the country.

After all, we’re mancunian, we’ll cope won’t we?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 10:09 PM and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.