Alice Smith

Westminster has built a country where we spend more money on the planning paperwork for a single road than it costs other nations to build an entire mountain tunnel. This isn't a system accidentally strangled by red tape: it is a highly lucrative industry. A vast priesthood of consultants and lawyers is making a fortune they have no interest in the work being done. It is corruption by bureaucracy, and working-class communities are footing the bill for projects that never even see a spade in the ground. The absolute paralysis of modern Britain was laid bare in a recent parliamentary committee. A single witness gave them the truth with both barrels, exposing the administrative vampires sucking public money dry while the work goes undone. The details are an insult to every community waiting for homes, decent transport, and cheaper energy. Take the Lower Thames Crossing. The planning application alone has swallowed more than a quarter of a billion pounds. For that exact same amount, Norway actually constructed the world’s longest road tunnel. We spent it on paper, and we have not even turned a sod of earth. This is a permission state eating itself alive. Look at HS2, the most expensive railway line on earth. Part of the reason it cost so much is that we are spending £121 million on a specific "bat tunnel" to protect a few hundred bats living in a nearby wood, a wood the line does not even pass through. Look at Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear power station in human history. For eight years, developers locked in a multi-million-pound wrangle with regulators over installing an underwater "fish disco", an acoustic deterrent to stop fish swimming into the pipes. 20 years ago, we built nuclear fleets at a fraction of the cost. Today, we sacrifice national infrastructure to the gods of endless compliance. The final absurdity is the plan to reopen just 3.3 miles of an existing railway line between Bristol and Portishead, a route already built but closed during the Beeching cuts. The planning application is 80,000 pages long. Over one thousand of those pages are about bats. We have created a system that trades in paper while the real economy rots. The working class pay the price for this institutional cowardice. They pay for it in soaring energy bills, missing homes, broken transport links, and a country that cannot build the future it keeps promising. Protecting the environment is vital, but drowning ourselves in paper is not environmentalism. A system that takes 80,000 pages to clear three miles of existing track is broken. It is not governance: it is managed decline with a clipboard. It's the bureaucratic vampires drinking the country's wealth...

Odysseus sails home in a Viking ship. The vessel in Nolan’s Odyssey is Draken Harald Hårfagre, the largest Viking ship built in modern times. Built in Haugesund, Norway. Named after Harald Fairhair, our first king. The Odyssey is set around 1200 BC. Ships like this appeared around 800 AD. The Viking Age is closer to us today than to Odysseus. Homer’s ships were black, low, open galleys, light enough to be dragged onto the beach at night. Not a 35-meter dragon ship built for the North Atlantic. A sailing reconstruction of a Mycenaean warship already exists: the Argo, 50 oars, built in Volos, Greece. Nolan filmed in Greece. He still picked the Viking ship. This week Draken sails down the Norwegian coast to the Oslo premiere. She will be the most authentic thing on screen. She is 2,000 years off.

Our ★★★★★ review of THE ODYSSEY, While Nolan’s screenplay is certainly not the most accurate to its source material, it captures the soul of Homer’s tale, outstandingly translating into images the most magnificent comeback story ever told.

Why is Moana featuring heavy Polynesian actors while Odyssey is going out of its way to not use Greek actors?