What Fresh Insanity is this?

From The Times:

Every Tuesday, at 9.45am precisely, a 50-seat executive coach draws up at a bus stop outside Ealing Broadway station in West London. No one ever gets on and, a moment later, it departs - empty - on a 70-minute trip to Wandsworth Road in South London.

Why, you might ask?

The “ghost bus” runs simply to allow the Government to escape the embarrassment of admitting that it has closed several sections of railway in West London to passenger trains.

Oh, goody. Avoiding government embarrassment. That most noble of causes.

By running a weekly bus, ministers can claim that a service still operates and avoid the legal requirement to hold a public consultation. Rail passenger groups fear that the Ealing “ghost bus” sets a dangerous precedent for more closures by stealth.

And, as well as the dangerous precedent, it is costly too:

The coach costs the DfT about £500 a day. A photographer and I paid £5.10 each for our tickets, so the taxpayer funded £489.80 of the cost of our trip.

Great. So the taxpayer pays for a bus that exists purely because the government cannot offer the services to the taxpayer that it once offered. The taxpayer is expected to pay for a bus that the taxpayer cannot use in order to save politicians, that the taxpayer funds, from embarrassment. This is not so much a mind-fuck as a full on brain assassination.

Holy mother of fuck, this is beyond satire. It is beyond insane. This is a fresh level of government incompetence and mendacity that almost defies understanding. The government is literally burning our money - in the engine of a bus, rather than in a big fire in Parliament Square.

So there we have it. The government is willing to spend your money deceiving you. I don't think many of the readers of this blog will be surprised by that, but this little example stands as living proof of just how low the government will sink to save face.