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Jul 7 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
1/ Spent the day pottering around #Belgrade. Visited the House of Flowers - resting place of President Tito. The museum to his life was interesting - there’s even a football signed by the 1980 Man Utd squad sending him a get well soon message
2/ Shhhhh 🤫 Don’t tell TfL about the roundel in the Tito museum
3/ Then wandered up to the Belgrade Fortress and, after 1700km of train and coach journeys across Europe, I finally reach the Danube. Not looking too blue - rather brown - at its confluence with the Sava - its biggest tributary
4/ Then back to my hotel for a siesta

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More from @nickbowes1975

Nick Bowes Profile picture
Jul 7
1/ I’ve been asked what a change of PM means for London. There’s two parts to this - the personalities and their relationships; and then the hard political realities. But what I would say is things couldn’t be any worse!
2/ Rather ironically, it presents the opportunity to reset relations between City Hall & Government the Transport Secretary called for in his recent letter to the Mayor - perhaps not quite the reset he was thinking!
3/ Personality clashes between City Hall on one side and the PM/Cabinet Ministers and No 10 advisers on the other has been a big problem. Changes in personnel ought to see a thawing of relations, particularly on transport & @tfl funding.
Read 9 tweets
Nick Bowes Profile picture
Jul 7
1/ 🧵 Social norms & conventions alone aren’t enough anymore to protect something as important as our democracy. Running a country isn’t like a golf club - shaking of heads at jeans in the clubhouse. I hope I’m wrong but I’m not sure we can rely on ‘doing the right thing’ anymore
2/ We like to think we’re special and that we don’t need the protections of a simpler, clearer written constitution, neatly captured in one place. To quote a former PM, I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists. Why are almost alone as a democracy without one? 🤷🏻‍♂️
3/ It needn’t be like what we’ve seen in the US with the Supreme Court. Look to our European neighbours - Germany, France etc. Some kind of constitutional arbiter (or court) made up of fixed term judges, academics and former PMs could be the guardian of our constitution.
Read 9 tweets
Nick Bowes Profile picture
May 20
1/ Crossrail funding – a long thread 🧵: there’s much being written now on Elizabeth Line (EL) funding ahead of the opening next week, not all based on fact. It is complicated, involving central government funding and money from London.
2/ The fact it is opening in 2022, 48 years after the first concrete plans were approved, 33 years after the 2nd attempt was shelved, shows how poor we are at big transport projects. Over this period, Paris has built 5 equivalents with the RER
3/ First, a bit of the history. Construction was set up as a joint project between the Department for Transport (@transportgovuk) and Transport for London (@TfL). Crossrail Ltd, the organisation building the line, would be wholly owned by @TfL.
Read 17 tweets
Nick Bowes Profile picture
May 20
I read @DaveHill’s book on the 2012 Olympics recently, but it’s taken me a while to get around to tweeting about it. As someone who has lived in London throughout the period of bidding for, winning, building and hosting the games, it was a real reminder of much I had forgotten
Dave is unapologetically positive about what the Olympics has done for East London. But it is also a reminder of how London was the centre of the world for that fortnight in 2012, and the country was proud of the city. We’ve lost that some of that pride
A few things that struck me. The buccaneering of some key people - Ken Livingstone, Tony Winterbottom, the list goes on. The monumental job it was to purchase all the land and bring it together under public ownership, even before any of the cleaning up and remedial works happened
Read 10 tweets
Nick Bowes Profile picture
May 19
Fascinating thread from @ahawksbee - new transport infrastructure alone won’t solve levelling up, and it will require investment in many of the more softer elements
These findings matters from a London perspective because there is a perception that, as London has (relatively) great transport infrastructure, levelling up can’t possibly be a problem as everyone has easy access to shed loads of secure, well paid job
But London’s geography shows that to be untrue. There are places cheek by jowl with immense prosperity (e.g. Whitechapel - The City, Poplar - Canary Wharf) with great transport connections but still suffer from some of the worse deprivation in the country
Read 6 tweets

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