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As an aside, the (very real) improvements in San Francisco are largely the simple consequence of getting a decent Mayor in.

Daniel Laurie was elected last year, on a platform of dealing with petty crime and homelessness. The biggest element has been a very simple 'move along' policy. If you're hanging out on a street corner (particularly in the center, financial or tourist districts), the police will simply move you on. You can no longer pitch a tent and be ignored by the police.

This has been combined with creating 1,500 new beds for homeless people... away from the City itelf. Get fed and a bed... but you won't be near Union Square.

Laurie also had a policy of avoiding conflict with Washington. The people of San Francisco wanted their city back, not political statements.

The San Franciscans seem to be pretty happy with him: his 75% approval rating has to be among the highest of Mayors in the US.

Came across this and had a mild LOL myself.
@Leon 's fellow travel writer.

I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt
https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867

Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.

... it kinda of is, for American standards. The places with antifa terrorist uprisings tend to have relatively low crime rates. Sorry to pop the bubble:

San Fran: 7 per 100,000 (murder rate)
St Louis: 88
New Orleans: 52
Memphis: 48
Chicago: 29
Portland: 13

Sadiq Khan's London: 1

When you stop recording crime, recorded crime goes down.

Even the murder rates are suspect in the US, with many being classified as overdoses, accidents, or suicides.

It’s the low-level crime that really defines a city though, the petty theft and muggings.

You’re right that recorded crime can fall if you stop recording it.

But there are independent ways to check whether crime is actually falling. I.e., we can look at different (ideally non-government) sets of stats, and see if they tell a similar story or a contradictory one.

The first is the US's equivalent of the BCS - the National Crime Victimization Survey. It interviews about 240,000 people every year and asks if they’ve been victims, whether they went to the police or not. It shows about 22 violent victimizations per 1,000 people in 2023, roughly the same as 2022 and far below the early 1990s. About 40 percent of victims report to police, and that share hasn’t changed much. So even allowing for underreporting, the overall trend really has improved.

Then there’s insurance data. Now, I'm an auto insurance industry CEO, so these numbers are near and dear to my heart. Car crime is falling (while unfortunately medical costs are soaring). Last year we paid out a record low percentage of premium on car crime. Now, some of this is technology (albeit my customers are poor and don't tend to have immobilisers), but the drops are really significant. And out insustry body - the National Insurance Crime Bureau - says vehicle thefts fell 17 percent in 2024.

There's also Police Union data. Remember that the US police are heavily unionized, and like to use attacks on officers as a reason for pay rises. Well, assaults on officers rose during 2020 and 2021 (Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, George Floyd, etc), then eased off again in 2023 and 2024. They are currently - in terms of percentage of officers being assaulted - almost back down to 2019 levels. And this is from a group that likes to highlight risk to police officers, not hide it.

There are softer indicators too. Public transport use in cities like New York and Chicago have bounced back to near pre-pandemic levels. The restaurant booking data tells an even starker story: OpenTable publishes really good data (there's a really good API) , which probably gives you about as good an idea of where people feel safe. (Of course, the percentage of bookings through OpenTable will have risen, so you can't just assume it is 100% accurate. But it's still an important data point.)

Simply: people don’t crowd trains and book dinners if they think they’ll get mugged.

So yes, recording practices matter. But when surveys, insurers, police unions, and everyday behaviour all tell the same story, it’s hard to argue that falling crime is just a statistical illusion.

The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?

The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.

The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)

Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.

There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.

And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,

No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.

The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."

It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.

There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.

My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).

Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG

Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.

They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.

There's what people say and what people do.

In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.

Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.

We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.

Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.

One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.

I hear a lot of criticism towards those who are sceptical of heat pumps, I've heard it and felt it myself, so people just keep their mouths shut instead and... don't buy heat pumps.

I'd need to be convinced it'd keep my family warm in Winter, and not disrupt my home, as well as save me money. Since I've never have that assurance, I haven't taken it any further.

Why would I do otherwise?

Your house would be turned into a building site while your existing perfectly good central heating system is ripped out and replaced with new that can cope with the Luke warm water provided by an air source heat pump.

Then you will be freezing cold in winter because, funnily enough, air at -5C isn't a great source of heat.

More than you might think, which is why they work in Scandinavia.

The relevant way to think about the temperature isn't -5C, it's 268 K.

a

The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?

The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.

The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)

Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.

There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.

And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,

No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.

The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."

It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.

Before North Sea Gas, we used to have hydrogen as our domestic gas supply. But it was safer then, as it was blended with carbon monoxide.


Seriously, modern plastic gas mains should be fine. All the old cast iron stuff is being eliminated.

Modern plastic gas mains won’t be fine. Hydrogen leaks through joints that are natural gas tight. It leaks because it is the smaller molecule.

The safety and handling rules for hydrogen are written in blood. And a part of that is certifying joints and materials.

And before anyone starts, they are an example of rules and process that work - because they are quite simple and clear. And are about keeping the hydrogen contained, rather than bullshitting administrators.

And no, the methods they use for certifying joints on new gas mains don’t meet the requirements for hydrogen.

Hydrogen is perfectly safe (like natural gas and petrol). As long as you remember how fucking dangerous it is.

The rise in sea temperatures is largely due to the banning of sulphur in maritime fuels. This is widely recognised - part of Ed's crazy carbon capture scheme (a part that I support) is 'cloud brightening', to counteract the effects of this fuel change on the skies over the sea.

@MoonRabbit's attempt to use the rise in sea temperatures to defend Net Zero (which will do absolutely nothing to cool the seas), is fundamentally dishonest - something sadly very common in the Net Zero lobby.

Okay. You’ve succinctly holed the first argument below waterline, what about the second one?

“pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan”

I might be missing something with some of the questions asked - so I thought you could help out by putting answers next to them.

How realistic is this policy to implement?
Who exactly is being deported? If The undocumented, the Windrush Scandal says hi.
Where are the deportees? How will they be found, rounded up, at what financial cost?
Are deportees entitled to due process and a hearing?
If so, where are they waiting for their due process to play out - locked in detention centres?
Will they get a hearing from a judge, before detained?
And to where, and how, are they being deported?
Will families be ripped apart?

The question you didn't ask ties in with HYUFD's point.
What are these people doing now?
I suppose the answer will be they are non essential.
Personally I look forward to being cared for in my dotage not by a foreigner with empathy and experience, but by a white person with a string of minor convictions who has spent five years out of work on a mental health waiting list.
Others may differ.

I've had carers much of the time for the last three years. They have included 'traditional' Brits, and immigrants. One was the daughter of a US serviceman who'd preferred it here .... he was Afro-American. Two others were Polish who'd stayed here after Brexit. Another was Ecuadorean who'd been here for years. I've had a Filipino and a Thai, a Zambian and a Zimbabwean. I've had 'good' British and 'poor' British, 'good' immigrants and 'poor' immigrants.

The Tories had a conference? Who knew?

I did, and I bothered to follow it. Especially with us both coming from areas of Scotland that have been devastated by poor SNP governance for years and now Labour policies that have really affected our areas too?! I am sorry, but that kind of cheap dig really gets me when I think of the fact that the only real effective opposition to the SNP & SGreens has been the Scottish Conservatives!! Thank god for Scottish Conservatives and the last Conservative government at Westminster when it came to protecting women's rights. And also after just a few days ago when Douglas Ross's Right to Recovery bill all about promoting wider drug rehabilatation was voted down by the SNP and SGreens in Holyrood and in the country with the biggest drug deaths, particularly in Dundee!

Also coming from the North East of Scotland, I remain really angry at the impact of the SNP, SGreens and now the Labour Government at Westminster's devasting impact on the North Sea Gas and Oil Industry here. So your flippant lads together comment really jarred with someone else who actually lives in the North East of Scotland right now! I am fed up watching the only Opposition party in Scotland knocking its head against a brick wall and getting dismissed in this way by a long time dismissive snobbish group on here! When I arrived on this site twenty years ago, I was out loud and a proud female Scottish Conservative and I remain so thanks to their bloody hard work protecting my rights as a biological woman here in Scotland!!

So Kemi, you go girl!