Alan Share's Podcast: Recent Episodes
Alan Share
Advice for Students - How to be Winners after Covid-19 - Brain ExerciseAvoid 19th and 20th Century Whammies in law, education, cycles, Ombudsmen,Equality
Student Podcast No 4 Part 2 exposes the cycling lobby, Sustrans, responsible for idiotic pop-up cycle lanes nationwide. It calls the £2bn spend on walking and cycling “Operation Titanic” – serious cycling accidents are the iceberg. RoSPA and the Department of Transport rely on police incidents for their stats – the top of the iceberg – when RoSPA says true figures may be two or three times more. Not surprisingly, over 60% of people believe it is too dangerous for them to cycle. Although billions of pounds have been committed to promoting cycling, the number of cyclists has flatlined over the last ten years and they are still about only 1 percent of all road journeys. Sustrans has become the executive arm of Government in road planning, in central and local government they are now part of the fixtures and fittings. In Newcastle, photographs illustrate the idiocy of their policy and the duplicity of its presentation. Sustrans are the media’s best kept secret. The next podcast will expose the Ombudsmen who aren’t and the lawyers who give them aid and comfort. PLEASE SHARE WITH YOUR FRIENDS & COLLEAGUES
City pop-up cycling lanes are bad news for everyone including cyclists. Especially bad when they are not segregated, not continuous, or on one side of the road only and lead to tailbacks with toxic fumes from slow-moving traffic. The more cyclist the more serious injuries. DfT and RoSPA's stats should come from NHS not the police to show how many. The rights of the man on the Clapham omnibus and the patient in the Clapham ambulance are totally ignored. See a pop-up cycle lane on a walk along Gosforth High Street in Newcastle. Even cyclists don't want to cycle on this cycle lane! Part 2 - Sustrans, cycling lobby, the bull in charge of china shop. Part 3 Who lets it happen?
“What we call the beginning is often the end … The end is where we start from.” TS Eliot ‘Little Gidding’ The Four Quartets. Provide opportunities for all, not just those going to University. And they do not need to be equal. The national curriculum for the “brainy” who need three or more years in a University, plus an alternative curriculum for the “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” who might welcome a 1-year course. This would include Design, DIY, healthy diet and cooking, drama, and poetry, human rights, the world’s faiths, and mutual respect, the environment – Greta Thunberg stuff. It would be open-ended. This is what the late Sir Fred Robinson urged, sadly to deaf ears: “Creativity is essential to the success and fulfillment of young people, to the vitality of our communities and to the long-term health of the economy.” Opportunities for all. Bring back State Scholarships for scientists, doctors & nurses with a graduate tax not on graduates but on those who will employ them – banks, insurance companies, legal and accountancy firms &c. who can either pay tax or provide their own scholarship awards for university applicants. And gap years for students, not from university but from SME’s in the private sector, on one-year courses where students’ fees would be a business expense and an additional skill of value. There should be an end to the public sector, the private sector, and Academia each thinking they were the important bit. And end to “You and US” in society. Instead, a team game to invest in the students of today and the future of tomorrow, and not at their expense.
Student loans are a bad good idea. A false prospectus. A bear trap. Interest rates will rise with inflation. And debt slavery. If you have a job, you can't afford to leave it if you don't like it. Better ways to get social mobility. And Rishi Sunak should give students two thousand pound credit off their loan to compensate for money they could have saved by studying on line at home. Introduce more scholarships and bursaries many funded by the private sector.
How to be a Winner in a world of Winners & Losers. The road blocks. The danger of Dream Merchants and Human Rights lawyers who create without benefits. Success stories in the public and private sector. The dynamic of capitalism with competition the spur and profit sine qua non, without which nothing. Karl Marx knows as much about 21st Century Capitalism as the Man in the Moon knows about the Apollo Project. A ongoing challenge to students.
This is my first Death of a Nightingale International Student Podcast. I draw on lifetime's experiences as a barrister, right hand man to the Secretary of the Liberal Party in London in the fifties, unexpected business success in a company now a plc and, in retirement, as chair of governors of a special school successfully fending off closure and chair of a residential care home for the elderly. In a world where there are winners and losers I can help students be winners.They are the future and, post Covid-19 and Brexit, every country needs winners in highly competitive, fast changing world. I too lost a full year when I went to Uni when I was diagnosed with TB. My own crystal ball that was cloudy at Oxford was subsequently shattered to smithereens with totally unexpected results. Essentially today people may have to lockdown their bodies, but they lockdown their minds only if they build their own walls round them. I urge people to exercise brain as well as body and in future episodes I will provide some strenuous exercises. More of my writing can be found by clicking www.deathofanightingale.com/blog. It comprises the play Death of a Nightingale staged in London, a play Everyone has a Mountain to Climb awaiting stage performance or broadcast, a Blog, and Kafka's Cycle, slow death of a complaint. This is criticises the Local Government and Legal Ombudsmen "like wrestling with a jellyfish" and human rights lawyers who were unhelpful. I dare not publish this book. I sent a copy of the book to the solicitors. They refused to read it but said that if I published "disparaging, libellous or defamatory statements of any kind " they would sue. None of this is boring!