Researching the bloody obvious

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

The banking system may be broke, you can’t get a mortgage for love nor money, soldiers are being killed all the while in Afghanistan but one sector of human activity is alive and thriving – researching the bloody obvious.

In the past week, we have had an outfit calling itself Passenger Focus saying that British Rail fares are by far the highest in Western Europe. We are not talking about some piddling 10% here, they say our average rail fares are around 50% higher than on the Continent of Europe. Long distance, fully flexible, pay on the day, fares were 87% higher than the next highest country, Germany. And what is more, our fares for this are 3.5 times higher than the cheapest country, Holland.

When it comes to commuting, that is journeys of 25 miles or less, we happen to be 88% more expensive than the next country, France. On top of all this, some Government minister, Lord Adonis (you wouldn’t want to bend over in front of him) says it would cost £500 million a year to bring our commuter fares in line with the Continent. £500 million? What kind of flyshit is that compared to the bank bailout?

In all this some apologist has weighed in saying that Britain has more frequent trains. So what does that mean? Are they saying that by running more frequent trains half empty is a better bet than running less frequent trains which are three quarters full? Crap, I haven't done the figures but I do know intuitively that that would not account for anything like the fare difference. Down here in Cardiff you can get a train to London every 30 minutes through most of the day. Slash that to once an hour and maybe we might see a price reduction.

None of this is any surprise to anyone who has surfed the internet checking on rail prices at home and abroad.

Next we have some woman from Princeton University ( a really nice place and my friend Lin works there) telling us that pictures of bikini clad women in the workplace can make men see them as objects or tools rather than independent people. She apparently tested the men beforehand to determine their level of ‘sexual hostility’ and guess what? The men with the higher sexual hostility rating had lower empathy. Amazing isn’t it? Who could have guessed that?

Of course, she never bothered to check that attitudes of women who have hunky males on their calendars or their screen savers. After all, that might just have revealed that women were as ‘bad’ as men when regarding the opposite sex as objects.

And finally we come to the outstanding revelation that many British retailers have failed to pass on the VAT rate cut from 17.5% to 15%. Have they been asleep since this happened, I wonder? The cut was decided on overnight and most retailers didn’t have the time to change the labels so you got your VAT cut at the check out. Not for long though.

The labels were changed and afterwards you saw just as many prices such as £xxx.99 as before. Now hang on, let’s do some basic arithmetic. If it was £299.99 before the cut, then it should be £293.60 afterwards. Did we see a mushrooming of .60 tags? Hell no. Once the dust settled, the retailers went back to charging us what they like.

All this research would be fine if it cost nothing but it does and in the end, you, me and every other taxpayer funds it.

I tell you, the day is not long off when some Ph.D tells us that after two years intensive research, he has concluded that 5 years olds are generally smaller than adults or that lettuce is often green. And of course, you can only see the sun in the daytime.