Best Of

A lot of people on PB are vocally against ID cards, and have been whenever they're mentioned. So it's good to hear a few pro-ID card voices downthread.

It'd be interesting to know how many people involved in IT or computing are for or against them.

Any relationship between Davey's conference vote on changing opposition to ID cards and today's announcement from the governement, do we reckon? In no direction, either direction, or both?

Absolutely shameful that a liberal party could get behind this IMHO.

According to Luke Tryl it's 54 to 18% in favour. What's more two of the main Parties big thinkers Tony Blair and William Hague are supporters so that's good enough for me

The devil will be in the detail. But IMO it's very difficult, of not impossible, to alter the detail so that it is beneficial to the public and individuals. And very easy to have the details to be far from benficial.

Do you trust this government - any government - to get the details right?

It would be a fair criticism of me that I get a lot of my opinions from The Spectator, because it's really the one bit of the media I read the most. And I think the first thing I read about a topic, if it reads convincingly, usually becomes my opinion till something else comes along.

So I am now officially against Northern Powerhouse Rail. I was all for it, till I read this fairly damning account of it, which is basically that it's not going to do anything for the North, because it's basically more of the HS2 project, just gussied up by Obsborne to look like his own genius levelling up scheme.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-time-to-admit-that-high-speed-rail-is-a-dead-end/

Osborne did that a lot. The OBR for example was meant to be a great way to ensure Tory style fiscal rectitude, but it wasn't - it was actually a quango designed to ready us for monetary union. Northern Powerhouse Rail sounds brilliant, but it turns out:

Called Northern Powerhouse Rail, this section alone will cost a claimed £17 billion (in reality, perhaps £30 billion). It will be a high-speed railway on which trains can never reach high speeds, because the stations are too close together. It will leave Manchester via a vastly expensive new eight-mile tunnel in the wrong direction – roughly south, only then turning west towards Liverpool, hence the longer journey time. The official reason for doing it like this is to serve Manchester Airport. But the ‘airport’ station would be almost a mile away from the airport. You’d have to transfer by bus.

So until another, better take comes along, I'm adopting Gilligan's view that NPR is shite and we should do a Queen Elizabeth line for Northern England instead. We're out of the EU now, we can do what the populace actually needs, not continue with their ludicrous grand projets and have to pretend they're working for people.

I'm surprised that's the criticism you think is the fairest. That you are a nasty racist piece of shit roughly on a par with the 'white baby' chancer would be my take. Maybe you havre to be of a particular mindset to both to read or write for that publication?

Is gratuitous, vulgar, foul-mouthed abuse of other posters now AOK again? I thought we were warned off that, coz it got a bit heated

But if pin-head, potty mouthed tragic retired tampon ad exec @Roger is allowed to say all this, then I presume it is OK for the rest of us?

I do hope so, because I LOVE handing out this stuff, particularly to a worthless shit stain of a human like, ooh, @Roger

No.

Today is not a day to piss me off.

You weren’t served pineapple pizza at lunch again, were you?