General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

If you look in detail at what has happened in all our large scale projects, from defence to aerospace to infrastructure, they have all been financial messes, although this has sometimes been obscured.

The end result is always a fudge.

They can be fudged to complete.
They can be fudged to abandon.

It is a power politics decision.

Everyone has their two penneth worth of opinion concerning what went wrong.

One of my favourite books, it is usually called the book of failures: more correctly it is the Open University Case Book of Systems Failures. It covers from Three Mile Island to Rolls Royce, From Flixborough to Normansfield Hospital Scandal. It is a bit old now though.

There is a dire need for a similar investigation into our recurrent failure to adequately manage large projects.

And we need a very robust policing of the behaviour of our governments.

I suggest some financing be given to LSE. (I say LSE because of its ability to attract international proven talent) to establish a body to enhance compliance with standards which end our repeating the same failures over, and over, and over again.

Or, we could just be resigned to becoming a sleeze ridden backward country.