Tripped up by endless stream of gibberish
APPARENTLY, to be a “savant” is to be one with an exceptional aptitude in a particular field.
There’s also a less complimentary-sounding category of “idiot savant”, a description not implying personal insult, but rather an identification of an equally impressive aptitude in a particular field, despite significant impairment in others.
There’s a jolly example of this (idiot or otherwise) in HS2’S “Full Business Case” publication of April 2020. This is the one hurriedly crafted after Parliament gave a few stuck-up thumbs for the disaster-in-waiting to continue. As normal when it comes to HS2, it’s a struggle to understand what the Department for Transport is banging on about, and these 134 pages are no exception. It’s as if the document has been composed by entities with special abilities.
Whomever the anonymous beings are who assembled this verbose, circuitous and bandy discourse, they succeeded in scaring off anyone who wanted to read it.
Being terrific at written gobbledygook could be one of those exceptional aptitudes after all.
Interestingly, this publication only supplies the jumble about the London to Birmingham section of HS2 (Phase One). Phase Two (including the stretch that would come through this region) wasn’t treated to the same fanfare back in April 2020, despite the new Secretary of State for Transport having only been in office for six weeks, and it was a time when new, young egos took the helm in matters of which they knew nothing.
The new star on the block was Andrew Stephenson MP, and who is still there today (HS2 Minister no less) for reasons that remain unfathomable.
A confessed railway devotee from a family of railway devotees (his full name of Andrew George Stephenson is a bit of a giveaway), he is yet to be noted making direct reference to any of those 134 pages of which he seemed so proud.
With his portrait photograph headlining a page of worn-out, repetitious balderdash headed “Ministerial Foreword”, persons unknown had already ambushed the meat and spuds of the matter and the wordy convolution was complete.
Astonishingly, no publication about the strategic, economic, financial, commercial or management case for Phase Two of this scandalous project has been published since 2013.
Eight years on, it’s hard to imagine how one could be cobbled together at this stage anyway, with the cash tap long since dried up, and the queue of discredited pro-hs2 politicians and quangos already stretching back twice around the block in desperation.
Back in 2013, when the first HS2 scrolls were written (the ones that did include Phase Two), those employed to daze us must have had a bad day at the office. Footnoting the “Seven Strategic Goals” (worth a read if you like secondary school business studies) is the only sentence within this folly of undecipherable claptrap that makes sense.
In very small print we can read; “This analysis is indicative and assumption-based, and is subject to the uncertainties inherent in long-term forecasting.”
Not much else to add really, is there?
David Briggs
Kingston on Soar