Now this is why I give to charity!

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RNID to look at name change in £260,000 rebrand

Yes, that's right the well known charity for the deaf wants to spend your charitable gift on paying blokes with ponytails loads of cash to work out a new name and design a new logo. I just know those coffee mornings, those marathons, those sponsored silences and Mrs Smith's legacy raised cash for RNID.

But then what do we expect from an organisation run by this woman:

RNID appointed Jackie Ballard as its chief executive in July 2007 after she had spent five years at the helm of the RSPCA.She had previously been a Liberal Democrat MP for Taunton, a county and district councillor for Somerset, and a further education lecturer and adult basic education organiser. Ballard has a BSc in social psychology from London School of Economics and spent one year studying in Iran. She is also a trustee of WSPCA.

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Build better roads and urban systems...inter city high speed trains are rubbish

The Government - applying it's usual strategy of stealing any Tory policy that's been announced, changing it slightly and spending more money - has announced a new high speed rail link from London to Birmingham. And the usual collection of politicians who wish they had better train sets and the rail network operators were frothing about the wonderment of all this...

Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher said high-speed rail was "a vital part of a modern, dynamic economy". He also said that it would "take cars and lorries off the road, cut domestic flights and release capacity on the existing rail network, transforming services even for those communities not served directly by a high-speed line. It is the low-carbon, sustainable transport of the future."

Inter-city trains are not the solution. They travel from one place you don't want to be to another place you don't want to be. They are expensive. The rails makes them inflexible and route-bound. They are inefficient carriers of small load freight. Yet we seem obsessed by them!

I'm all in favour of urban mass transit systems - trams, local trains...I could even persuade myself to like buses. But super fast trains are a waste of money - £30 billion in this case. When they can't get a train 9 miles from Leeds to Bradford in under 20 minutes and most of us a nowhere near a railway station, super-fast trains seem just another shiny toy.

If you want to spend £30 billion linking our cities. Can I suggest building some better roads?

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