Monday 20 December 2010

Heathrow

After three days of Heathrow closure, I rang Putin to ask him how Moscow airports manage to stay open despite Russian winters.

Putin started with a few not very friendly remarks about baby cameron. "You see, this is not a job for Cameron," he said, “we used to have similar problems in Moscow until one year, I sent the army to clear the snow at the airports. Ah, yes, also important, I told army to bury the directors of the airports under the snow.”

I asked him what happened to them “If you lie under more than two thousand tons of snow not much happens anymore.” Those directors were sorted, he explained, and since then, the new directors know better than to work “the English way.”

Drastic as always but he may be right. Unfortunately, all we will get are lots of explanations and no action. They will blame it on the weather, wrong kind of snow, unfriendly wind etc. No one will pay the price. No one will lose their job for screwing things up.

BAA, the owners of Heathrow, should lose their contract. If Cameron, doesn’t sort it – so should he.

3 comments:

  1. It is such a pity the dictatorships are both so sexy and appealing (particularly from a geographic distance and with myopic historical perspective) and in the same time dreadful and horrible (in the converse settings).

    Prime examples: Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao and Hitler were all idolized by quite a few for quite a while... the sad thing is that some people did not get over this till today, but that's another story.

    The problem with our democratic system which mass produces small, petty, uninspired and uninspiring politicians is that the alternatives are worse.

    E.



    ps.
    I know you were being ironic.

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  2. Accountability must be part of the deal and that is serious no irony.

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  3. I totally agree. The only problem is that 'they' write the terms of the 'deal', and we sign the deal (and the bill) once every 3-5 years by actively not-voting or passively voting to the lesser of two evils or something like that. It's not that we don't read the fine print, we don't even read the title...

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