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His A Lexicon to Herodotus (1938, the most complete guide to the meaning of all the words used by the great Greek historian) and translation of Thucydides (1942) were completed before he took his degree in 1933. As income starts to flow in from customers using the first stage we could build the revenue to continue developing the line further.”A group of MPs representing constituencies in East London and Kent will today table a Commons motion urging the Government to press ahead with the rail link, arguing that thousands of jobs and commuter services will be at risk if the project is scrapped.. It has been designed to end at a new terminus at St Pancras but this would involve 12 miles of expensive tunnelling under central London.An alternative is to end the high-speed line at Ebbsfleet in north Kent and then continue on existing track to the terminus at Waterloo International .A spokesman said: “This would be a lot cheaper than doing the fully-fledged link in one year. Railtrack and Virgin executives are to hold further talks this week about a joint approach to the Government.The Railtrack board meets on Thursday to review progress and examine options for financing and building the link.Potential rival Eurorail, a consortium of construction companies and banks which lost out to LCR in the bidding for the link in 1996, is due to set out its new proposals for taking over the scheme tomorrow or Wednesday.One possibility Railtrack is considering is building the link in phases. However, Virgin had already withdrawn in all but name.Bechtel is credited with getting construction of the Channel Tunnel itself back on track after it was brought in by Eurotunnel to manage the project and liaise with the contractors Transmanche Link.

Under the revised scheme, construction of the 68-mile link from the Kent coast into central London would be left to Railtrack and Bechtel while Virgin would run the Eurostar train service.
Virgin and Bechtel are members of the discredited London & Continental Railways consortium which collapsed two weeks ago after the Government refused to provide an additional pounds 1.2bn on top of the pounds 1.8bn subsidy already granted to build the link. Richard Branson’s Virgin group is in talks with Railtrack and the US construction company Bechtel to form a new consortium to salvage the Channel Tunnel rail link Michael Harrison examines the proposal. The Red Book analysis of the public sector finances published with the Budget will have to acknowledge the disappointing result for 1997/98 so far.Although the full details are still unavailable, the slippage on expenditure seems to have come about because of the freeing of proceeds from local authority asset sales for capital spending.This has allowed authorities to use money that would have been earmarked for investment projects to increase their current spending on items like education budgets and pay.. “With slower growth hitting the government’s finances as well this year, we could easily see the targets for the public sector borrowing requirement being overshot,” he said.He predicted the PSBR would amount to pounds 12.3bn in 1998/99, likely to be slightly above this year’s out-turn and much higher than the Treasury’s forecast of pounds 4.5bn for next financial year. Only the revenues from the windfall tax on the privatised utilities in the final quarter of 1997 are likely to have kept the critical deficit to GDP ratio below the 3 per cent limit.David Owen, an economist at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the investment bank, said the overspending was likely to continue into 1998. It is likely to have been very close to the 3 per cent of GDP ceiling set in the Maastricht Treaty for the calendar year 1997, rather than the 2.3 per cent originally estimated.Detailed official figures for total current government expenditure in the second and third quarters of 1997 show spending to have been pounds 500,000 higher than first estimates for April-June, and pounds 1bn greater in July-September.

It could increase pressure on Mr Brown from the City to raise taxes even more than currently planned, as some experts think the Chancellor is already leaving too much of the task of slowing the economy to the Bank of England, which sets interest rates.The shortfall between revenues and expenditure could now exceed the Chancellor’s forecast of a pounds 9.5bn borrowing requirement in the current financial year. The disappointing figures, which were probably the result of unexpected higher spending by local authorities, will redouble Gordon Brown’s determination to stick to his tough line on expenditure in next month’s Budget.
The news will come as a shock to analysts, who have focused on the impressive control of expenditure by central government departments. The Government is in danger of missing its own targets for spending and borrowing, and Britain will come embarrassingly close to not even qualifying for membership of the single European currency, because the public finances were not in as healthy a state as first estimated last year. Unions fear up to 10,000 job losses globally, 2,000 of which could occur in the UK.. Glaxo’s main research facility is at Stevenage in Hertfordshire, which was opened at a cost of pounds 700m in 1995 and houses 1,700 workers. SmithKline employs 2,000 people at its new pounds 250m research site in Harlow, Essex.Overall, the two companies employ 21,000 people in the UK and 107,000 worldwide. If that budget was cut as the companies slashed costs, it would be a severe blow for Britain’s scientific community.Glaxo and SmithKline altogether currently employ more than 4,000 research and development staff.

Beckett has indicated in the past that R&D is a concern, and the Treasury has also been a generous supporter of research and development in this country.”The MSF is threatening legal action if the companies continue to ignore a European law that requires them to speak to employees in the event of forced redundancies.Together, Glaxo and SmithKline will become a huge force in the drugs industry, with an R&D budget of pounds 2bn a year, representing a fifth of all R&D spending in the UK. Mr Talbot said: “We don’t want Margaret Beckett to just nod through this deal and leave it up to the EU competition authorities.”Mrs. A convincing case for this merger has yet to be established.”The union is now pursuing a meeting with Margaret Beckett and Karyl van Miert, the European Competition Minister, as soon as possible to push forward its concerns.The MSF is confident that Margaret Beckett will move to protect research and development expenditure and jobs. However, the companies have refused to comment on possible redundancies.Paul Talbot, national secretary for the pharmaceutical industry at MSF, said: “The fact that Glaxo and SmithKline have not talked to us is really not acceptable.