Seriously though, this is hilarious. Count the number of blame assignments in the article:
- council chiefs were blamed for not gritting enough.
- transport chiefs were blamed for being generally crap (my personal choice. National Express East Anglia couldn't even be bothered to keep a proper website up and running. I haven't bothered linking to their site as there's a good chance it won't be up. F*** 'em.)
- Boris Johnson was blamed for ordering the suspension of all London bus services, unprecedented since the Blitz.
- Boris blamed a huge volume of snow and a lack of snow ploughs.
- Local councils claimed the snow was too heavy for their snow ploughs to work.
- 'The wrong kind of snow' got blamed (resurrecting the classic British Rail excuse of 1991).
- One council leader blamed a lack of overnight traffic overnight followed by a lot of cars in the morning, which 'compacted the snow'. (??)
- Motorists blamed the Highways Agency for not gritting properly.
- The Highways Agency blamed HGVs for blocking roads.
- TfL blamed local councils for not keeping the 95 percent of the road network which they are responsible for, gritted.
- The chairman of the Local Government Association's Environment Board blamed 'other organisations' for scapegoating local councils.
- The Shadow Transport Secretary blamed the Government.
- Peter Mandelson blamed xenophobic strikers.
- I blamed Peter Mandelson.
- A worker at Waterstone's bookstore in Oxford Street blamed the rest of the world.
As Alan Partridge might have said: "this country..."
To quote the I Ching: "no blame".
1 comment:
Brilliant!
At work, I've got four Polish and one Canadian at my 'management level'. All were agreed on the essential hilarity of the situation, and that their countries would shut down if the response to the onset of 'extreme weather' were so inept.
Plenty of blame to go round, but one things for sure. It's the last thing the country needed when we're facing the worst economic conditions for more than 150 years!
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