Southport’s Rotten Rail Link Caused
by Grayling Misspending Billions
Tory Transport Secretary Chris Grayling (above) has just poured £33 million down the drain over his Brexit ferry deal with a company with no ships. And, according to a Sputhport local councillor, this massive wasted cash in the Transport Ministry could have brought Southport a decent rail link to Manchester, new rolling stock, a better timetable and even the re-opening of the Burscough curves to provide a half hourly service to Ormskirk and Preston.
Councillor Tony Dawson says that Transport Secretary Chris Grayling would have been sacked three times over under any other Prime Minister at any other time in history. But he has survived a humiliating £33 millon out-of-court settlement with Eurotunnel over his botched Brexit ferry deal . Grayling was exposed for his award to a mysterious startup company ‘Seaborne Freight’ of a £14 million contract to open a new UK-EU ferry route in the event of a no-deal Brexit, even though the company had no ships, no port contract and no experience in this work.
The government reached the £33 million agreement with Eurotunnel just hours before a four-day public trial was due to start which would likely to heap more embarrassing revelations on Grayling.
So how does Chris Grayling survive when, in various top government jobs, he has cost the taxpayer over £2.7 BILLION, including £2 billion on the cancellation of Virgin’s East Coast rail franchise and £800,000 on consultants’ fees to assess the viability of Seaborne? Councillor Dawson says Mr Frayling’s serial failure and routine incompetence mean that “in any other situation he would have been sacked long ago”.
The National Audit Office has published a report which showed “disastrous decisions by Chris Grayling at the Ministry of Justice have wasted nearly half a billion pounds of public money”. The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has published a detailed report slamming Grayling’s “mismanagement” of the railways.
The fact is,” says Councillor Dawson, “that right now Prime Minister Theresa May needs this giant dunderhead. Critically, he is one of a handful of Brexiteers who have stayed with the beleagured Prime Minister even though her Brexit manoevering is not to their liking. Without the support of such peoiple she would be dead in the water months ago. They blackmail her to keep their jobs without having to raise a finger. ”
Grayling desperately tried to conduct large parts of his trial against Eurotunnel in private, against principles of open justice. But High Court judge Mr Justice Fraser ordered him to provide an explanation of why up to 10,000 documents relating to the contracts should be kept private and the Minister capitulated rather than have things all out in the open. Grayling’s settlement of public money with Eurotunnel now remains totally sealed and unavailable for press or public scrutiny.
Another monstrous cash lost, as well as a public safety disaster, was caused by Grayling’s privatisation of the Probation Service which is now having to be reversed at great cost. This move by Grayling was followed by the number of rapes, murders and other serious crimes committed by offenders on parole rising by more than 50%. Serious Further Offence Reviews – which take place when a convicted offender under supervision is charged with another serious offence – rose from 409 in the year before Grayling’s 2014 ‘reforms’ to 627 in the 12 months up to last April.
Amyas Morse, the National Audit Office chief, said that the Ministry of Justice under Grayling “set itself up to fail in how it approached probation reforms. Its rushed rollout created significant risks that it was unable to manage. Not only have these failings been extremely costly for taxpayers, but we have seen the number of people on short sentences recalled to prison skyrocket.”