A Neat Summation of the General Opinion of The Canal & River MisTrust

Ian Hutson

…and it’s not me gasbagging on for a change.

Well worth a watch (or a listen) and captures the essence of the thing, methinks.

Dredging is Dereliction

Trimmed Vegetation is Slavery

Ignorance is Boating Bliss

Locks Lock Nothing

Big Brother is Watching You [this one didn’t need any editing]

It was a bright cold day in Hell, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Seriously, it really is time to get rid of this fake “charity” that has zero respect for the solid national wedge of history that is the canal system, preferring instead to run some sort of velodrome with added jogging and angling. A velodrome that has some sort of decayed, overgrown, post-apocalyptic canal-ish motif about it.

Maintenance Is Neglect.

Life Is Better By Water (But Not On Water).

1984 2021

11 Comments

  1. At least you’re singing from the same hymn sheet. It is just possible in the reviews starting next year your choir could be the best sounding one and find a voice in Government who likes boating. I wish you every success as you’re all right, the canals are a national asset not to be mistaken for a cow and milked.
    Hugs

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    1. I do wonder if the current attitude to the canals simply reflects the attitude to the whole country – it’s all regarded as a theme park rather than as a fantastic, solid opportunity based in phenomenal history. These days it’s all blue plastic gargoyles on Chatsworth and cut-outs of Henry VIII to have your photograph taken alongside.

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  2. Sadly this is all true, apart from the APPWG which meets more times than once a year, in fact NABO are now regularly invited to it (next meeting on Tuesday) but rarely are given the opportunity to ask anything.

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    1. It is enouraging that the APPWGs meet more often than I had thought, but it always sounds as though these quango-replacements perform no better than the quangos they “replaced” in name. It makes my blood boil to see the system treated as a playground instead of being taken seriously.

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  3. It is the nature of all well-meaning beginnings to deteriorate slowly, whilst nobody’s noticing, into self-serving, petulant right-wing endings. In science it’s known as entropy.

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    1. They do indeed, although I wonder whether perhaps C&RT wasn’t born in a laboratory in some tower on a wild and windy hilltop one stormy night, with flaming-brand and pitchfork-wielding peasants already gathering below… A simple real-person discussion of the set-up over a post-prandial shandy would have made the inevitable future failing glaringly obvious. It is akin to putting the National Parks in the care of people who hate sheep and countryside, people who own road-building and house-building companies…

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  4. So in effect government hived off responsibility to a ‘charity’ but continues to put public money into the project while the projec titself has morphed from care of the navigation into ‘wellness’ as that is seen as the key to unlocking the public purse while the navgation itself falls into disrepair.

    Who appoints the trustees?

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    1. There is an “All-Party Parliamentary Waterways Sub-Committee”… in times gone by it would have been a “quango”. They meet once a year to hear how well things are going. There’s a Waterways Ombudsman (Ombudswoman? She is a she.) – directly and totally funded by the Canal & River Trust… The “charitable” status is used to bat away unwanted “Freedom of Information” requests. The Directors – initially carried over from British Waterways – now apppoint one-another and decide on any replacements. The “Trustees” are in fact just unpaid Board Directors, also appointed by the prevailing C&RT board. The APWSub-Committee, Trustees and Ombudsperson may only “suggest” to the Board, they none of them have any teeth at all. There’s zero accountability/

      If the organisation were any more in-bred it would be named ‘Mongo’, would drag its knuckles in the dust and be in a lot of confusion about why its mother is also its sister and its uncle its own son. Banjo music and cold fear would haunt the canals… oh, hang on though… 😉

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      1. Very incestuous. So the loons have unlimited power to throw public money about as they wish. And from which tentacle of government do they receive their grants? Just to see if there is a roundabout way of using FOI…..

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        1. The rather nubulous Department for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs – DEFRA, to cut a long-winded title down. The original funding agreement expires in 2027, and there is -supposed- to be a “review” beginning in 2022. This is probably why C&RT are busy amending income and “visitor satisfaction” statistics numbers filed in their annual Companies House reports – all mistakes, apparently, but all in C&RT’s favour, somewhat agin the odds pertaining to genuine mitsakes.

          Members of Parliament being somewhat otherworldly at best, and all busy with lining-pwn-pockets/getting-re-elected/sh*gging-their-unpaid-interns real communication is nigh-on impossible, all is filtered by C&RT and cohort, and criticism dismissed as the mere squawkings of ne’er-do-wells and permanent discontents – C&RT have, on video, described live-aboard boaters as ‘gits’ and referred to us disparagingly as ‘these people’ (as in ‘we’re never goiing to please these people, at the end of a Zoom meeting during their summation).

          The canals need some sort of public funding approach along the lines of the National Parks, but adapted to accommodate the “real people live here” nature of the system. Boats are mobile scenery. Boat licences will never cover the full cost of course, but then we boaters are a tiny minority of the users, dwarfed even by the holiday-makers and hire-companies, let alone by the towpath wallahs. It’s a weird one and no denying. 😉

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          1. Right…thank you. So it is down to DEFRA….I donlt suppose you could persuade them that the trustees are llamas, could you…they seem to have it in for llamas…

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