Tony Blair was hit by another Labour backbench rebellion last night when 31 of his MPs demanded a referendum on

Tony Blair was hit by another Labour backbench rebellion last night when 31 of his MPs demanded a referendum on the proposed new constitution for the European Union. The public want more services, not bureaucrats.”Mr Turnbull also admitted the Government is planning to scrap hundreds of its public sector performance targets in favour of a handful of core aims for each department. He acknowledged that Labour’s reliance on league tables and targets had flooded public sector workers with unwanted paperwork and created a reliance on figures that were vulnerable to distortion.Peter Gershon, the head of the Office of Government Commerce, confirmed that he is to lead a study of red tape in an attempt to release billions for re-investment. Mr Gershon told the Financial Times that the Chancellor has made future spending conditional on real efficiency savings.In a separate report, the NAO revealed that only a minority of official bodies are correctly using new accounting methods designed to ensure funds go where they are most needed. NAO inspectors calculate that a 1 per cent improvement in the handling of the £421bn spent by 46 organisations each year could put almost £5bn more into front-line services.. Perhaps now they can start to put patients, pupils and passengers first.”Gordon Brown keeps raising taxes but then wastes the money. Tony Blair’s leading civil servant admitted yesterday that public services were not “significantly different” despite Labour spending billions on attempts to improve them.

The Stockholm to Gothenburg route was opened in 1990, cutting the journey between the two cities by a quarter to three hours. The X2000 travels at 125mph on routes throughout the country.Tilting trains now run in Italy, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia and on the France-Italy line They also operate in Canada, Australia and Japan.. It now runs over most mainlines in Italy, travelling up to 186mph.The ETR450, ETR460 and ETR480 trains have now covered more than 18 million miles.Swedish state railways (SJ) started developing a high-speed network designed around tilting train technology in the middle of the 1980s. The British technology was incorporated with that model and the ETR450, now known as the Pendolino, or Little Pendulum, began service in 1988 between Milan and Rome; a journey of 290 miles, taking just under four hours.

The original train can still be seen in the Crewe Heritage Centre.The technology was sold to Italy, which had begun experimenting with tilting seats on trains in 1974 By 1984 Fiat Ferraviaria produced tilting trains. Now all he has to do is find the £9bn which the upgrade to tilting trains will cost to implement.How the project got up to speedBy Genevieve Roberts The tilting train was conceived in Britain in the 1960s but it was only in December 1981 that the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) entered service, on the west coast mainline from Euston to Glasgow, with a maximum speed of 150mph (240kph). After a non-stop diet of public relations disasters, it had a small success to celebrate.As the SRA’s Mr Bowker emerged from the driver’s cab, where he spent part of the journey, he was beaming like a schoolboy who has just been bought his first Hornby train set. But they can accelerate from zero-100mph in half the time, and the toilets work.Fare-paying passengers will start to experience tilt themselves early in the new year as more of the track is fitted out and strengthened and Virgin’s 470 drivers are trained in how to use the tilt mechanism.Tilting services from London to Manchester begin next September, cutting the journey time from two hours 44 minutes to two hours and six minutes.The original plan was to upgrade the line to take 140mph trains, but that may now never happen and certainly not within this decade.But that was not worrying the rail industry yesterday. A glass of water filled to the very brim not only stayed upright but retained every last drop as the driver arced through the Warwickshire countryside. The second test was less successful, a 50 pence piece stubbornly refusing to stay balanced on its edge as the train banked first left and then right.The early Pendolinos, introduced into Italy in the late 1980s, were hydrolically controlled and had the nausea-inducing habit of whipping passengers around in the rear coaches as if they were in the back of a roller coaster.Rail engineers call this the “tilt-lag effect”. Virgin’s Pendolino, built by Alstom at Washwood Heath in Birmingham, has overcome that with the aid of electronic suspension and a leading gyroscope that determines precisely how much tilt each carriage needs as it enters a curve.The tilt mechanism is activated by small, square monitors mounted in the track every two miles, which the train’s computer reads in much the same way as a supermarket scanner reads a barcode.

If the computer cannot read one, then the train automatically brakes to a conventional speed. If the driver exceeds 125mph, the computer takes over and applies the brakes.The £800m fleet of Pendolinos are narrower than the clapped-out Mk3 High Speed Trains which they are replacing and carry 30 fewer passengers. Because the train can take bends more quickly, journey times are reduced by 20 per cent.The Pendolino passed its first test with flying colours. To the relief of everyone, except the journalists on board, the morning passed off without incident.The Pendolino left Euston station precisely on time at 8.35am and, 55 minutes later, as it sailed past Rugby, Virgin’s director of performance, Tony Sadler, announced over the public address: “Tilt has been engaged.”Passengers gripped the arms of their seats and prayed that their full English breakfasts would stay down as the train accelerated to 125mph and took its first curve at a six degree tilt. All their discussions were with governments, with the exception of one arms dealer. The attraction was clear: once you were up in the air you could not only spy on enemies but bomb them from above.