Newport traffic hell gives Blue Route warning

 Closure of the Brynglas Tunnels created gridlock hell in Newport last week. Queues were everywhere. Tailbacks jammed car parks and junctions.

It’s a warning of our future if the gimcrack blue route bypass ever happens. It would cram all the M4 and SDR traffic on two routes. The Black Route will provide traffic relief and pollution reduction with its three routes.

 

Remember the damage done to Gwent for 70 years by the perception that we are a traffic bottleneck. The Black Route is the only choice.

 

 

Confused on the Severn Bridge Tolls?  

 

You are meant to be. That is the Tory Secretary of State’s master plan. Last December Alun Cairns told me he would cut the tolls by 50% to £3.70. I told him that’s not £50% of £6.70. In January this year he changed the promise to £3.00.

It’s still a rip-off because the tolls’ contract says they should end altogether in January 2018. All changed in May. The Tories produced an election bribe promising to cut the tolls to nothing. But they did not say when.

In January next the Bridges will be owned by us like all other roads and bridges. It will then be illegal to charge VAT of £2.00 . Cairns claims that the new charge of £5.60 will be a ‘cut’, It’s not. He has no choice. It’s a forced reduction.

The Tories are behaving like fairground snake-oil huckster salesmen. Cairns’ ‘Cut’ will increase tolls, to £2.60 MORE than his promised £3.00 of January 17th.

No charge is necessary after January 2018. We have discharged our debt. It is no longer a toll, it’s a CAIRNS TAX. Remember that when you cough up £5.60 in January. It’s enough to make you cynical about political promises.

 

·        The most beautiful modern Church in Newport gained an interior Garden of Eden last week. Bethesda Baptist celebrates their 275th anniversary. The Newport Floral Society filled the Church with wonderful flowers enhanced by the group’s creative artistry.

Bethesda has an impressive record of good works from the streets of Newport to Africa where they Cariad Kenya work is a practical success. They campaign with others to protect persecuted Christian communities in Syria and Iraq. Elsewhere the persecuted have now become the persecutors.

The flower arrangements are named ‘Acts of Kindness’. A refreshing change from a world infested with acts of brutality, inhumanity and worse.

 

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Comments

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Good to see solidarity there. What the eff do ambassadors do though? Is it all about money? The worst villains prospering and supported by that circumstance?

This foreign policy establishment is at the behest of MPs, the Commons. They run errands. So do they give a damn beyond business opportunities and smooth talking with all manner of nasty 'regimes'. I say 'regimes' because it is overused and ours are complicit.

It seems to me, even more so than domestic issues, that they are unaccountable. For capital the world is small, for justice and the interests of its people it is very big and awkward to deal with.