Flipflops.org

Untitled 2006.01 (2006)

Wood, Paint, Ceramic, Vinyl

One of the governments best ideas this parliament is to bring on a system of road pricing where each of us pays for each mile we travel. The twin justifications for this are that it is part of wider strategy to tackle global warming and the transport crisis.

It isn’t there are far better ways to address both of these issues, road pricing is just a shortcut to a divided society where only the wealthy can afford to travel.

Sign the 10 Downing Street petetion against road pricing at: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax/

Just trying out a new plugin to let me put a bit of Flash into something without pain.

This is supposed to be a randomly generated string of DNA that I built for an art project called Intercede a while back. Unfortunately I have lost the .fla file (Duh) and so the SWF is much too big for the blog page - still it only took my a couple of minutes to go and alter the plugin to put a max size on the SWF and resize it if is too big - that is what is so good about Wordpress.

I really do need to work on my personal filing.

I wanted to link to YouTube and embed a film  of a couple of guys called Coyle and Sharpe called the Human Vegetable Farm, but it doesn’t appear to be up on YouTube and infact I have just found out they have redone thier website and I had real trouble finding it.

I think it is one of the best short films ever.

Rod Eddington is a F***er. In fact he deserves to be described in far worse terms. Last week in the Eddington Report he called for a national system of road pricing to tackle congestion and climate change.

Systems like the proposed charge per mile travelled are very crude tool, and are an attack on our freedoms. A road pricing scheme will have a disproportionate affect on the poorer parts of our society. Infact the only people who will not be affected are the greasy corporate parasites like Mr Eddington himself who will sail past in their chauffeur driven vehicles (paid for by the company, of course), oblivious to the belt tightening and trouble caused by the members of our society who are not the recipients of six figure salaries (plus bonuses). But clearly if people are going to suffer it is their own fault.

Our current government (both local and national), are ever eager to address inequality and create a fairer and less divided society, and have fallen in love over many years with taxes targeted directly at the less well off.

• Congestion Charges
• Fixed Penalty Fines
• Parking Permits
• etc.

I have been writing this post for a very long time now, just this week there has been a lot of talk about how there is a deliberate policy of raising train fares to discourage people from travelling by train in an effort to tackle overcrowding. I don’t doubt that its is true in part.

Don’t you just love joined up government?

The other thing that made me want to laugh (and cry) was Richard Branson talking about we should all travel by train in the UK rather than fly. The fare for an open return from London to Manchester is now over £200. Go Richy Boy Go.