By ‘Use Green Taxes To Subsidise Public Transport’ We Mean ‘Cram Even More Cash Down Brian Souter’s Yawning Gullet’, Admit MPs

This is the age of the train - it's 35

Shamefaced MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee reluctantly admitted today that when they called on the government to use fuel duty to lower the cost of using public transport, what they actually meant was hurling yet more billions of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash into the black holes of Stagecoach and FirstGroup.

Green taxes "cannot be all stick and no carrots," said the MPs this morning, and called for simple links to be made between taxing your car to high heaven and cheerfully throwing the revenue at what they fondly imagine to be more environmentally friendly alternatives - such as the clapped-out vintage diesel HSTs which First Great Western still employs to belch black, choking clouds of exhaust fumes into the rolling green pastures of Somerset as they pointlessly drag empty carriages full of unaffordable seats back and forth to London every hour, or the equally decrepit Leyland horrors they pulled out of scrapyards to squeal and clank their way around Devon’s picturesque branch lines.

“Admittedly, eye-watering subsidies on a scale undreamt of in the days of British Rail have not yet persuaded franchisees like Brian Souter - who have striven hard to turn Britain’s railways into a third-world system with out-of-this-world fares - to make a thousand-seater train a sensibly-priced alternative to a fuel-guzzling 50-seat airliner,” said aptly-named committee chair Joan Walley. “So the only possible solution to this problem is even bigger subsidies.”

“Sadly, another issue that won’t be addressed by throwing good money after bad is that, on the whole, your typical motorist doesn’t have to endure a howling, farting troupe of simian piss-artists whenever he goes for a drive,” noted BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin. “Or, if he does, at least they’re family.”

When Worlds Collide

Britain apparently experienced the world's first interplanetary pile-up last Sunday, it emerged, when a large, disc-like UFO crashed into a wind turbine in Lincolnshire, causing the alien pilot to lose control of his vehicle and collide with several other unearthly visitors.

Local police said the impact caused the turbine to shed a blade, while the UFO that struck it came down in a nearby field. Eyewitness Ed Straker, a passing film producer, was first on the scene.

"It was total carnage," a shaken Mr Straker told reporters. "This big saucer-thing was going far too fast, and completely ignoring the lights in the sky. It was just wobbling all over the place, like it was on a piece of string or something. He bounced off the wind turbine, narrowly missing a child on a flying bicycle, clipped an enormous illuminated mother-ship that was jamming with a guy on the ground with a synthesizer, and then he careered into the back of another big silver saucer full of angry jabbering Martians, who shot him down. Bloody maniac! Serves him right."

The alien visitor was seen to climb out of the wreckage with an eight-foot robot, which he left behind when he ran off into the bushes.

Mr Straker then drove off in some kind of furniture van on tracks for an urgent rendezvous with a giant submarine/jet fighter combination, which he claimed was a movie prop.

"We have traced the vehicle that was abandoned at the scene, and we are urgently looking for a Mr Klaatu to help us with our enquiries," said a police spokesman. "We would very much like him come forward and convince his robotic companion, Gort, to stop laying waste to Lincolnshire."

UFO experts say the incident is the worst interplanetary accident since the far side of the moon was blown clean out of the galaxy in 1999 by an explosion at an ill-considered nuclear waste dump, with the loss of 300 moonbase personnel.

Britain Liberated From Mumbo-Jumbo By Humanist Buses

Millions of people across the country - but especially in London, where the journalists live - have been joyfully casting off the fetters of their medieval religious indoctrination today after being told by a bus that there was probably no God.

"There I was at eight this morning, freezing my ass off, waiting for another number 11 because the first one didn't even bloody stop, and thinking, 'Please God, let the next one not be full,' and sure enough the next one shot by as well," said some shivering bloke who was too poor to own a car, so we didn't bother to ask his name. "Only this one had a poster on it saying: 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.' Those cheeky humanist bastards have certainly opened my eyes. Screw you, God."

"I wish I'd been enlightened by a bus thirty years ago," said an ageing vicar as he angrily tore off his white collar and threw it in the gutter. "If only this revelation had been publicised widely in my day, I might have had a proper career and paid for a decent house by now, with a worthwhile pension to look forward to. Bugger."

Churches, mosques, synagogues and temples across the nation stood empty, as their newly-enlightened congregations flocked instead to their local bus stations and begged the atheist buses to tell them what to think instead.

Fundamentalist Christians, however, remain largely unmoved by the buses' message of liberation from the chains of outmoded deism.

"Where did these buses come from?" demanded one wild-eyed believer. "You can't tell me that these wondrous machines are descended from ugly, tree-dwelling stagecoaches. Look at the miracle of the self-lowering front suspension. Surely that didn't just 'evolve' by random chance? I tell you, it was designed by an intelligent being."

"Brothers and sisters, your faith is being tested," he proclaimed. "I urge you to resist Satan's weasel words by shunning these godless heathen buses and travelling instead only by faithful, believing trains or righteous, God-fearing taxis. Hallelujah!"

Meanwhile, Brian Souter and Ann Gloag - the devout, anti-gay brother and sister who own the caring, charitable Christian bus company Stagecoach - warned that any of their buses found professing unspeakable atheist heresies would be cast into outer darkness (i.e. put on the hellish night-bus run) for all eternity.

Train to Gain

Britain’s railways may see their first major expansion since the 19th century, as Network Rail commissions a strategic review of five mainline routes to see if there is a case for building new lines. Passenger numbers have risen by 40% in the last ten years, with around 22,000 trains running on weekdays.

“By 2025 many lines will be full up, especially those running to and from the north and west of London,” said chief executive Iain Coucher. “The way things are going, we might as well park one enormous, stationary train with its front end in London and its rearmost carriage in Birmingham, book southbound passengers in the front carriage and north-bound passengers at the rear and let them walk along the 165km-long train to their seats. They’d probably get there quicker that way.”

The usual construction companies were rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of huge amounts of taxpayers’ money flowing into their coffers. “Back in the Victorian golden age of rail expansion, the tracks were laid by vast hordes of Irish navvies, whose lives were cheap and expendable,” said an industry spokesman. “Nowadays, with all the health and safety regulations and a shortage of skilled construction workers, the sky’s the limit. Or rather, the ground is.”

This Country's Trucked

Britain’s road haulage industry is planning to bring traffic to a grinding halt in London today, to protest at rising fuel costs.

“We’d like to say we’re speaking up for every hard-hit motorist in the country,” said leading trucker Wayne Crowbar. “We aren’t, of course - because as usual we’re motivated purely by our own selfish greed - but it’s nice to think that all those silly sods who read the tabloids are behind us. And not just in 20-mile tailbacks, either.”

According to a tear-stained fax we received from Transaction 2007, who are helping to organise the protest, hundreds of loyal British hauliers are going out of business because wicked, scheming foreigners can buy their fuel at rock-bottom prices on the continent - where it is of course completely untaxed, and also strangely unavailable to UK-based companies.

“Our long campaign to utterly destroy the railfreight industry - which began in the fifties and has been enthusiastically assisted by every Transport Secretary ever since, apart from that villain Shirley Williams, who stupidly stopped Dr Beeching from completely wrecking the railways – is all but complete, and we thought we had everything nicely stitched up“ - sorry - “sewn up,” said the press release. “Now we’ve discovered to our utter amazement that using 20 lorries to carry the same tonnage as one train uses quite a bit of fuel. All we want is a gigantic bung from the taxpayer. If we don’t get it, you’ll just end up paying for it indirectly at the supermarkets - but at least our way you won’t notice it so much.”

Meanwhile, Eddie Stobart fans from all over the country with nothing better to occupy their lives were converging on London for an orgy of truck-spotting, and mayor Boris Johnson was gleefully planning ways to spend the unexpected windfall in congestion charges from hundreds of 18-wheelers converging on Downing Street to demand a rebate just for themselves.

City Bosses Want Idiot Politician - No Change There Then

A survey of 100 City bosses suggests that 64% of them want Boris Johnson as the next Mayor of London – nearly three times the level of support enjoyed by Ken Livingstone, trailing at 24%.

At the same time, however, 63% said that the blond-haired Henley MP did not “seem serious” and 65% thought him “too much of a buffoon” – yet 55% think he would present a good image of London.

We asked our resident statistician to make sense of these apparently contradictory figures - but he just laughed, threw us a calculator and invited us to find the ‘accounting for human nature’ function. Reading between the lines, it seems that many of the best business brains in the world want an idiot running London.

Mr Johnson has come under attack over the weekend from the incumbent Mayor over his plans to reintroduce Routemaster buses and conductors. Mr Livingstone claimed the plans were wrongly costed, and would lead to a 15% fares increase, or £2 on a weekly pass.

Boris was unrepentant, however, and stoutly maintained that bendy buses were unmanouevrable, dangerous and, above all, unspeakably foreign. He said that once he had taken buses back to the 1950s, he would put steam engines and open carriages back on the Tube, replace the city’s taxis with horse-drawn hansom cabs, and tear down London’s bridges and bring back the traditional waterboatmen.
”Er, yes, quite,” said Mr Johnson. “Umm, steam engines and wagons and smoke and all that – pooh, crikey! Terrific stench, soot everywhere - peak-time congestion down, though, er probably. Of course! Er… right…er… where was I? That’s it, waterboatmen, yes, that’s the stuff! Rowing, that’s the chap, no pollution to speak of at all, you see? Jolly hard work, too - get some of these layabouts back to work - chop, chop, no standing about there! Horse-drawn cabs, indeed, very good for the environment, all that nonsense, votes in it though - also job creation, all that you-know-what, horsey stuff, draw a discreet veil over the details, needs to be swept up post haste, and very good for the roses too, say I. So… crumbs… er… yes! Vote Conservative! Carry on.”

And we hope to bring you a translation of Mr Johnson’s speech in plain English in tomorrow's bulletin.

Star Truck

The European Space Agency has successfully put the Automated Transfer Vehicle - its largest ever spacecraft - into orbit around the Earth. The giant ‘space truck’ was launched from French Guiana using an Ariane 5 rocket, on a mission to resupply the International Space Station.

The 20-ton vehicle, must, however, wait for the space shuttle Endeavour to uncouple from the space station before it can complete its mission. It is currently reported to be looking for a lay-by somewhere near the A21, after a satnav routing error sent it through several narrow village streets in Kent.

HM Customs and Excise are also keeping an eye out for the ATV, as several illegal immigrants were reported to have been ejected from the vehicle’s cargo bay as it hurtled through Dover at 12,000mph.

All Roads Lead to Carbon Emissions

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has warned the UK government that there needs to be a “modal shift” from road to rail if the country is to meet targets for cutting emissions in the transport sector.

"We have ambitious government targets for transport emissions, but transport emissions are static," said Cliff Perry, vice president of the Institute's railway division. "Eighty-five percent of transport emissions come from roads, so if we are serious about doing something, we must hit road transport."

Comparisons between emissions from different modes of transport are not straightforward, as engine efficiency, passenger numbers and generation methods for electric trains need to be factored in. However, any idiot except a government minister can see that, on the whole, one 5000hp train carrying 1000 passengers ought to be generating about half the pollution of two hundred 50hp cars each carrying five – or indeed considerably less than a thousand cars containing just the driver, which is what usually happens at peak time.

However, an idiotic government minister pointed out that private rail operators were making an awful lot of money by providing unreliable, overcrowded services, and any attempt to encourage more people onto trains would require them to actually spend some of their huge piles of cash on improving their services - which for some reason they were all unaccountably reluctant to do.

Odd as it may seem, no mention was made of the almost complete abandonment of railfreight services - despite the huge number of lorries clogging up the roads by hauling goods from the four corners of Britain to centralised depots and then redistributing them all over the country again. But presumably that would upset the Road Haulage Association - and Shirley Williiams, the only Transport Secretary to upset the Road Haulage Association since the war, was sacked after calling a halt to Dr Beeching’s wholesale destruction of the rail network in the sixties.

Although that was no doubt a complete coincidence.