I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
As a fully signed up member of the Wokerati I have to say this is news to me. I will keep an eye out for any cabinet ministers attending our next secret conclave at Polly Toynbee's place in Hampstead.
Can you briefly explain for those of us considering it, or indeed seeking to avoid doing so, what 'embracing wokery' might entail ?
I will leave that task to others. Any comments I make on this subject seem to trigger a load of unpleasant personal attacks that I can do without.
I'm old enough to remember Labour's Green Deal, and then I look at the size, complications and cost of heat pumps and I think...ok, good luck with that.
That was before the cost of gas quadrupled in the space of a couple of months. Alternative heating solutions and/or improved insulation might look rather more interesting to consumers now.
Its a lot of equipment to fit in a standard three bed semi.
Despite what is says if you are going to use the ASHP a lot then the radiators and pipework will need to changed, as pumping 40 degree water through 15mm pipework into a standard radiator will provide very limited heat.
Agree on the lot of equipment.
That looks like someone trying to create an opportunity to keep their technology in the game. It's problematic because 1 - we are pivoting away from gas, 2 - because it is a more complex install which will requite you to eg have 2 annual services not one (gas engineers will love you), 3 - because there are far simpler solutions available.
The stuff about always needing new pipework is for an ASHP is baloney, btw. You perhaps resize your rads (or use a double of the same size). Once you have improved your fabric you do a heat demand model for your house, and a calculation which will tell you what kit you need. Replacing rads is cheap. And then set the appropriate flow rate.
Keeping the same radiators is even cheaper. Which is what happens if you switch from natural gas to hydrogen.
Gas explosions are more common than you'd like them to be. Another home was destroyed in Ayr from a gas explosion yesterday. I was woken up by the Police and ordered to evacuate my own home in the week after the London Riots after a lone copycat moron chose to go on an arson campaign and set fire to the gas pipe going into one of my neighbours leading to a fear the entire bloc could go up.
I'm no chemist but from what I understand hydrogen seems even riskier than natural gas to be connected to homes for if things go wrong.
Safety studies have been performed, and more are ongoing. On balance, the risk from hydrogen is roughly the same as that from natural gas. While, for example, there is a greater leakage potential, hydrogen is less likely to achieve a fuel-air mixture in the explosive region. Also, no carbon monoxide deaths from hydrogen.
More to the point, how will it ever be economic ?
Once we fully internalise the negative externalities of burning unabated fossil fuels, then low-carbon technologies will be cheaper.
In other words, tax the feck out of CO2 emissions.
We think we've been having a free lunch since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Now the earth has presented us with the bill.
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Electric immersion heaters are an extremely expensive way to heat you house. Not sure about the efficiencies etc but no one in their right mind currently uses their immersion heater for anything other than short term quick heat if they can avoid it.
That somewhat depends on the energy efficiency quality of your housebuild.
If you use them on Economy 7 it can be OK, and if you have renovated (or built) your house such that it uses a fraction of the heat demand then it can be fine.
I know people who have their central heating as a couple of immersion heaters in the slab, and have total energy bills in the mid-hundreds. Those would be people with detached houses built to a near-passive standard.
And others who are all electric and have similar bills using heat pumps.
A heat pump works because you pull 3 or 4x as much heat from the air / ground / water as it takes to drive the process.
But the GOLDEN rule is always 'Fabric First'.
Thanks. My thought however is this; the most direct electric source is the simplest potentially carbon free form of heating. Despite cost and efficiency problems this may still be true.
Because: there is no real limit to how much electricity can be produced by renewables + nuclear; this form involves less domestic infrastructure change than others and is therefor attractive; it doesn't explode; and the higher cost is now, not in the future when all the renewable/nuclear electricity is on stream in say 30-40 years time.
And even if there is a higher cost, if the science is right we are talking about the future of the planet, not the economy.
I don't need to change my boiler so haven't looked into alternate heat sources - I did note that RHI would pay me rather more than £5k currently if I was to have a GSHP installed (Though still a net cost)
Is the £5k replacing this, a sleight of hand by the chancellor to actually save money ?
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
People who voted for the Tories but now think the government is too woke, are not about to help Labour.
So, who’s the next Farage?
We're going with Piers Morgan. And it would help Labour if lots of Con voters split off to him. If Morgan picked up, say, 15%, mainly from the Cons, the FPTP impact would be a shift of seats from them to the main opposition, which is Labour. Morgan might win a seat himself, in a village or town where he as an individual really resonates, but that would probably be it. We've seen this movie before.
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Heat Pumps have a "Coefficient of Performance" (COP) greater than 1. So, you put in 1 kJ of electrical energy, you get >1kJ of heat into your home. With direct radiant heating you can't get a COP >1, so less efficient.
And the same for immersion heaters. COP = 1.
The problem of course is that CoP depends on the ratio of the temperatures between the hot supply and the cold source - the lower this ratio the better - thus the requirement to have the radiators as cold as you can get away with.
Do room thermostats work very well with this, though? I do wonder if having direct heating with fully controllable room thermostats might not be _that_ terrible in comparison.
With a heat pump you can't decide to turn up the heating in one room on a whim because it will take a long time to warm up. Whereas with direct heating you could, and thus you could keep the ambient temperature in rooms you aren't currently using lower.
One change is that as the quality of your house fabric improves, it loses negligible heat in a short interval (eg all heating off goes from 23C to 22C in 24 hours), so the way you run your house changes to a constant temperature and it works as just one or two zones.
So the need for zonal control in either physical areas, or by time periods, goes away. And you save hundreds on time controllers.
That might be fine in a passive house but realistically there is no chance that most of the housing stock will ever be that efficient. The only realistic way to upgrade my house would be to demolish it and start again. Given that we aren't starting from an ideal position, there must be scope for alternative solutions.
We are going to need a LOT of electricity to do any of this in any case and we can't rely on wind. I am yet to see a realistic plan to fix this.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Electric immersion heaters are an extremely expensive way to heat you house. Not sure about the efficiencies etc but no one in their right mind currently uses their immersion heater for anything other than short term quick heat if they can avoid it.
That somewhat depends on the energy efficiency quality of your housebuild.
If you use them on Economy 7 it can be OK, and if you have renovated (or built) your house such that it uses a fraction of the heat demand then it can be fine.
I know people who have their central heating as a couple of immersion heaters in the slab, and have total energy bills in the mid-hundreds. Those would be people with detached houses built to a near-passive standard.
And others who are all electric and have similar bills using heat pumps.
A heat pump works because you pull 3 or 4x as much heat from the air / ground / water as it takes to drive the process.
But the GOLDEN rule is always 'Fabric First'.
Thanks. My thought however is this; the most direct electric source is the simplest potentially carbon free form of heating. Despite cost and efficiency problems this may still be true.
Because: there is no real limit to how much electricity can be produced by renewables + nuclear; this form involves less domestic infrastructure change than others and is therefor attractive; it doesn't explode; and the higher cost is now, not in the future when all the renewable/nuclear electricity is on stream in say 30-40 years time.
And even if there is a higher cost, if the science is right we are talking about the future of the planet, not the economy.
Look at the relative energy demand for leccy and gas on a peak winter's day. Supply all of that energy from leccy with a COP of 1 and you need to build a hell of a lot of new power stations and/or batteries.
Like the Amazon Go stores this is technology looking for a purpose. There will be endless disputes over products having been "stolen" when the fancy weighing and camera monitoring systems screw up.
Is that true though? Tesco's retail margin is approx 5.5%.
If it is constantly in dispute about what has or has not been paid for it won't make any money and I suspect Amazon would be the same. Apparently there are just 29 Amazon Go stores so clearly we are still in a test phase.
People said the same thing about self-checkouts.
They did, and for quite a while they were right... My doubt about these "just walk out stores" remains and they've been trialling the technology for quite a few years now. The retailers can't make automated scales work - how many times do you get "unexpected item in the bagging area" alerts? So how will a whole store of scales work reliably?
The risk to retailers isn't theft. Its that they end up heavily reliant on technology and computers to do basic things that people can do better. It isn't their core business.
I can't say I fundamentally disagree, my view is simply to let them try. The whole store might be one big PR exercise but I am not sure I care.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Well, Farage was it - are we writing him off now? And, ok, Piers Morgan is suggested by some in jokey mode, but IS it such a joke? He has a huge presence, both digital and in person, and he knows how to push the buttons. His biggest problem is he's just so dislikeable, most of the country wants to punch him, but if he can graft on some folksy charm to his brand, who knows.
Farage is going to get old. He doesn't seem to have the energy for it. And he is too associated with an elderly support base that is basically dying off. Dealing with those people for all these years cannot have been easy, it has taken its toll and he shows no real signs of wanting to start a new party. He is looking for a lucrative easy retirement.
Laurence Fox is obviously determined, despite the endless comical setbacks he experiences. He seems to be willing to get sent to prison, in order to become a free speech martyr. I don't see that determination in someone like Piers Morgan. Fox is the right age and has the perfect backstory, being a remain voter, so he theoretically has very wide appeal. His acting skills are impressive and are transferring well in to his new role. The more people dismiss him, the better his prospects become, in my view.
One problem though is that Covid may get him. He is an anti vaxxer and a smoker.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
People who voted for the Tories but now think the government is too woke, are not about to help Labour.
So, who’s the next Farage?
We're going with Piers Morgan. And it would help Labour if lots of Con voters split off to him. If Morgan picked up, say, 15%, mainly from the Cons, the FPTP impact would be a shift of seats from them to the main opposition, which is Labour. Morgan might win a seat himself, in a village or town where he as an individual really resonates, but that would probably be it. We've seen this movie before.
Or we get a SNP balance of power govt, Labour give them a referendum but implement PR for E&W at the same time. Morgan's Burn the Woke party gets 25% (England more favourable to him) and holds the balance of power.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
The thing is, when people are told what woke means, the voters seem to back a lot of it.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
The thing is, when people are told what woke means, the voters seem to back a lot of it.
Right now it means increasing energy bills, being told you’re racist for being white and that women have penises. You think that agenda has much support in the Red Wall?
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
It is an incredibly sensible policy and it will almost certainly save the home owner far more in energy bills than they have to fork out. You could also add the investment cost to the mortgage.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
I think embracing workery = not banging on about wokery every day.
The fringes of both woke and anti-woke are silly places, most people are somewhere in the middle and fine, whether on the woke or anti-woke "side".
Agreed, but I do recoil more from the antiwoke side of things. It's like I always think about the metropolitan liberal elite. Awful bunch. Only thing worse than the metropolitan liberal elite are those forever fulminating about the metropolitan liberal elite. Imagine having that crew in charge. But wait! - we don't have to imagine, do we.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It's odd that he bangs on about not letting people rip boilers out your house and then dreams up something like this the next day. Will my panels be enough ?
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
The thing is, when people are told what woke means, the voters seem to back a lot of it.
Only if you give them an incredibly sanitized version of it. If you tell them that the West is structurally white supremacist and that every difference in average performance between racial groups is down to racism, they would reject it.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
People who voted for the Tories but now think the government is too woke, are not about to help Labour.
So, who’s the next Farage?
We're going with Piers Morgan. And it would help Labour if lots of Con voters split off to him. If Morgan picked up, say, 15%, mainly from the Cons, the FPTP impact would be a shift of seats from them to the main opposition, which is Labour. Morgan might win a seat himself, in a village or town where he as an individual really resonates, but that would probably be it. We've seen this movie before.
Does anyone actually like Piers Morgan though? I know this is inconceivable to many, but people liked Farage. He was seen as someone you could have a pint with. I don't think Morgan has the same appeal. People watch him out of horrified fascination. Even people who agree with him find him dislikeable. Also, he was nanny-in-chief during the pandemic. No restrictions were restrictive enough for Piers. I'd say that sits uneasily with the natural territory of the burn-the-woke party.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Well, Farage was it - are we writing him off now? And, ok, Piers Morgan is suggested by some in jokey mode, but IS it such a joke? He has a huge presence, both digital and in person, and he knows how to push the buttons. His biggest problem is he's just so dislikeable, most of the country wants to punch him, but if he can graft on some folksy charm to his brand, who knows.
Farage is going to get old. He doesn't seem to have the energy for it. And he is too associated with an elderly support base that is basically dying off. Dealing with those people for all these years cannot have been easy, it has taken its toll and he shows no real signs of wanting to start a new party. He is looking for a lucrative easy retirement.
Laurence Fox is obviously determined, despite the endless comical setbacks he experiences. He seems to be willing to get sent to prison, in order to become a free speech martyr. I don't see that determination in someone like Piers Morgan. Fox is the right age and has the perfect backstory, being a remain voter, so he theoretically has very wide appeal. His acting skills are impressive and are transferring well in to his new role. The more people dismiss him, the better his prospects become, in my view.
One problem though is that Covid may get him. He is an anti vaxxer and a smoker.
In most cases, that's not how democracy works.
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It's odd that he bangs on about not letting people rip boilers out your house and then dreams up something like this the next day. Will my panels be enough ?
Doesn't sound too complicated.
It may be a condition for your mortgage that the property meets a certain EPC rating and you may find it more difficult to get a mortgage or pay more if it does not.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Well, Farage was it - are we writing him off now? And, ok, Piers Morgan is suggested by some in jokey mode, but IS it such a joke? He has a huge presence, both digital and in person, and he knows how to push the buttons. His biggest problem is he's just so dislikeable, most of the country wants to punch him, but if he can graft on some folksy charm to his brand, who knows.
The problem with folksy charm is this is Piers Morgan you're talking about.
It's a big ask, yes. But if he truly wants to govern this country he's going to have to have a makeover. Same uncompromising message but deliver it with a wink and a cheeky grin.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It's odd that he bangs on about not letting people rip boilers out your house and then dreams up something like this the next day. Will my panels be enough ?
Would be really very tricky on any type of listed building.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It's odd that he bangs on about not letting people rip boilers out your house and then dreams up something like this the next day. Will my panels be enough ?
Doesn't sound too complicated.
It may be a condition for your mortgage that the property meets a certain EPC rating and you may find it more difficult to get a mortgage or pay more if it does not.
It is a bit ruthless but I can see the appeal.
No impact on mortgage free core Tory vote pensioners too.
More evidence, if more evidence was needed, to nuke The Met.
The Metropolitan Police has “a long way to go” to repair trust from women, campaigners have said, after it emerged a male officer was given the contact details of a woman who lodged a complaint about his conduct after witnessing an arrest.
A 36-year-old unnamed woman watched the caution and arrest of a vulnerable woman and her partner after officers attended a suspected incident of domestic violence in June.
The complainant, from Lewisham, south-east London, wrote to the police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), after witnessing the officer repeatedly shout “F*** off” at the other woman.
The eyewitness said she felt the police officer’s behaviour was “utterly wrong”, adding: “Regardless of whether he felt under threat, it was unacceptable to swear and use force against a vulnerable woman who may have already been assaulted by her partner.”
The IOPC, which oversees the system for handling complaints made against police forces in England and Wales, referred the woman’s complaint back to the Met Police.
She later received a letter about her complaint, which informed her the Met had “also sent a copy of our record to the police officer(s), who is/are the subject of your complaint”.
She told The Independent: “I felt vulnerable and exposed knowing that he knew that I had complained and where I lived, and that I probably wouldn’t have complained in the first place if I’d known this would happen.”
The woman called the station investigating the complaint to question why her personal data had been shared. She spoke to the officer’s line manager, who she felt failed to understand her personal safety concerns.
She said: “This was about 10 days after Wayne Couzens had admitted the kidnap of Sarah Everard six miles away, so it seemed particularly weird that none of the officers I’d talked to seemed to understand why as a woman I’d be particularly worried about a potentially violent police officer having my address.”
The Metropolitan Police admitted the personal details were shared with the male officer who was subject to the complaint and believed it was “an isolated incident”.
The force said personal information should be stripped from any document before it reaches the subject of a complaint.
On balance, I would give Priti a positive rating. She is the sort of person I want to see occupying the role of Home Sec. Someone who wants to lock up criminals.
What I don't want is some north London hand-wringer, saying that the criminals are victims of society, and being soft on crime, being clueless about its impact on Red Wall voters.
I saw Priti as someone who would go places as soon as she entered parliament. I've not been wrong, although #Priti4Leader has yet to come to fruition.
That's all fine. So why isn't Ms Patel locking up criminals? To do so you need coppers and well-resourced police forces, a well-staffed CPS and then a courts system that hasn't been budget cut to death.
One of our lawyer contributors can opine as to the exact length of the backlog in the courts, I know it isn't short. And this is nothing new with this government. Lots of guff about "we're going to do this" whilst slashing resources so that even the old standard they want to improve on is impossible.
A lot of it is out of Priti's hands. She isn't the Chancellor. She isn't the Justice Secretary. She isn't a Calais copper giving the boats a shove to get into the Channel. But as an instinctive "Hang Em and Flog Em" authoritarian, she comes to the Home Office with the right attitude.
Their model looks like they expect to be losing money for a very long time, but happily they've raised enough money to do it, you can look forwards to cheaply delivered wine for at least a couple of years.
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Electric immersion heaters are an extremely expensive way to heat you house. Not sure about the efficiencies etc but no one in their right mind currently uses their immersion heater for anything other than short term quick heat if they can avoid it.
That somewhat depends on the energy efficiency quality of your housebuild.
If you use them on Economy 7 it can be OK, and if you have renovated (or built) your house such that it uses a fraction of the heat demand then it can be fine.
I know people who have their central heating as a couple of immersion heaters in the slab, and have total energy bills in the mid-hundreds. Those would be people with detached houses built to a near-passive standard.
And others who are all electric and have similar bills using heat pumps.
A heat pump works because you pull 3 or 4x as much heat from the air / ground / water as it takes to drive the process.
But the GOLDEN rule is always 'Fabric First'.
Thanks. My thought however is this; the most direct electric source is the simplest potentially carbon free form of heating. Despite cost and efficiency problems this may still be true.
Because: there is no real limit to how much electricity can be produced by renewables + nuclear; this form involves less domestic infrastructure change than others and is therefor attractive; it doesn't explode; and the higher cost is now, not in the future when all the renewable/nuclear electricity is on stream in say 30-40 years time.
And even if there is a higher cost, if the science is right we are talking about the future of the planet, not the economy.
Look at the relative energy demand for leccy and gas on a peak winter's day. Supply all of that energy from leccy with a COP of 1 and you need to build a hell of a lot of new power stations and/or batteries.
If we are to electrify the country and the world anyway - which is SFAICS the only way of saving our way of life and the planet if the science is right, then electric has to replace almost everything anyway. Think of all those cars, vans and lorries plugged in every day. Within our lifetimes this may be done by covering the sahara/gobi etc with solar panels + nuclear all over the place. There is no alternative. So, Yes. A lot of new electric power sources. Your friendly local supplier is the sun.
Either you think big in terms of world and government action, or it isn't going to work anyway. In which case it makes no difference.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
The thing is, when people are told what woke means, the voters seem to back a lot of it.
Right now it means increasing energy bills, being told you’re racist for being white and that women have penises. You think that agenda has much support in the Red Wall?
Probably has more support in the Red Wall than the PM’s environmental policies.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
People who voted for the Tories but now think the government is too woke, are not about to help Labour.
So, who’s the next Farage?
We're going with Piers Morgan. And it would help Labour if lots of Con voters split off to him. If Morgan picked up, say, 15%, mainly from the Cons, the FPTP impact would be a shift of seats from them to the main opposition, which is Labour. Morgan might win a seat himself, in a village or town where he as an individual really resonates, but that would probably be it. We've seen this movie before.
Does anyone actually like Piers Morgan though? I know this is inconceivable to many, but people liked Farage. He was seen as someone you could have a pint with. I don't think Morgan has the same appeal. People watch him out of horrified fascination. Even people who agree with him find him dislikeable. Also, he was nanny-in-chief during the pandemic. No restrictions were restrictive enough for Piers. I'd say that sits uneasily with the natural territory of the burn-the-woke party.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
So, democracy works, but the wrong people are in power? I genuinely don't know what you're saying. Perhaps you don't, either?
What I’m saying, is that if both main parties embrace calling the white working class racist while increasing their cost of living, then other politicians will turn up to appeal to their thinking. Maybe they will be a new party, or maybe they will take over an existing party.
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
I'm old enough to remember Labour's Green Deal, and then I look at the size, complications and cost of heat pumps and I think...ok, good luck with that.
That was before the cost of gas quadrupled in the space of a couple of months. Alternative heating solutions and/or improved insulation might look rather more interesting to consumers now.
Its a lot of equipment to fit in a standard three bed semi.
Despite what is says if you are going to use the ASHP a lot then the radiators and pipework will need to changed, as pumping 40 degree water through 15mm pipework into a standard radiator will provide very limited heat.
Agree on the lot of equipment.
That looks like someone trying to create an opportunity to keep their technology in the game. It's problematic because 1 - we are pivoting away from gas, 2 - because it is a more complex install which will requite you to eg have 2 annual services not one (gas engineers will love you), 3 - because there are far simpler solutions available.
The stuff about always needing new pipework is for an ASHP is baloney, btw. You perhaps resize your rads (or use a double of the same size). Once you have improved your fabric you do a heat demand model for your house, and a calculation which will tell you what kit you need. Replacing rads is cheap. And then set the appropriate flow rate.
Keeping the same radiators is even cheaper. Which is what happens if you switch from natural gas to hydrogen.
Gas explosions are more common than you'd like them to be. Another home was destroyed in Ayr from a gas explosion yesterday. I was woken up by the Police and ordered to evacuate my own home in the week after the London Riots after a lone copycat moron chose to go on an arson campaign and set fire to the gas pipe going into one of my neighbours leading to a fear the entire bloc could go up.
I'm no chemist but from what I understand hydrogen seems even riskier than natural gas to be connected to homes for if things go wrong.
Safety studies have been performed, and more are ongoing. On balance, the risk from hydrogen is roughly the same as that from natural gas. While, for example, there is a greater leakage potential, hydrogen is less likely to achieve a fuel-air mixture in the explosive region. Also, no carbon monoxide deaths from hydrogen.
More to the point, how will it ever be economic ?
Once we fully internalise the negative externalities of burning unabated fossil fuels, then low-carbon technologies will be cheaper.
In other words, tax the feck out of CO2 emissions.
We think we've been having a free lunch since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Now the earth has presented us with the bill.
I'm not asking about the economics versus fossil fuels. I'm asking how producing hydrogen to heat homes will ever be economic versus doing so with green electricity.
NE farmers, fishermen, proposed closure of Kinloss barracks, now this? BJ & co seemed to have given up on NE Tories.
HYUFD assures me that they will be re-elected because everyone up here Loves Them.
There are only 6 Tory MPs in Scotland, even if the Tories lost every one of them they would still have a comfortable majority given their current majority of 80 UK wide.
It is holding the RedWall and the BlueWall which will determine whether Boris wins the next UK general election again or not, not Scotland
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
The devil will be in the details but so long as its sensibly managed then that could be a free market nudge in the right direction if we're to take this seriously.
If you need to make £5k of improvements in the property, then having £5k spent over 25 years is a lot more affordable than finding the money immediately.
Plus presumably then this will filter through to the market as a free market solution whereby those who've invested themselves will see the value of their home go up as a result.
On balance, I would give Priti a positive rating. She is the sort of person I want to see occupying the role of Home Sec. Someone who wants to lock up criminals.
What I don't want is some north London hand-wringer, saying that the criminals are victims of society, and being soft on crime, being clueless about its impact on Red Wall voters.
I saw Priti as someone who would go places as soon as she entered parliament. I've not been wrong, although #Priti4Leader has yet to come to fruition.
That's all fine. So why isn't Ms Patel locking up criminals? To do so you need coppers and well-resourced police forces, a well-staffed CPS and then a courts system that hasn't been budget cut to death.
One of our lawyer contributors can opine as to the exact length of the backlog in the courts, I know it isn't short. And this is nothing new with this government. Lots of guff about "we're going to do this" whilst slashing resources so that even the old standard they want to improve on is impossible.
A lot of it is out of Priti's hands. She isn't the Chancellor. She isn't the Justice Secretary. She isn't a Calais copper giving the boats a shove to get into the Channel. But as an instinctive "Hang Em and Flog Em" authoritarian, she comes to the Home Office with the right attitude.
You are very "Blue" Labour, Sandy, I have to say.
And that's where the votes are. Hence why Boris, despite his obvious problems, does so well. But Labour will never compromise with the electorate on this stuff, whether it's the Starmerites or the Corbynites. That is why they keep losing.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
You sound like Yvette Cooper defending HIPS.
No - I was actually involved with the DCLG over HIPs and in 18 trips to London they just did not listen to those of us from the Industry
And having been involved in negotiating house sales for near 40 years I know how it works
Don't recall the Nonce-Finder-General going after this one:
Police investigations into allegations of child abuse against a former MP were marred by "a series of failings", a report has found.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) said Leicestershire Police officers "shut down" investigations into Lord Janner "without pursuing all inquiries".
It also criticised Leicestershire County Council's "sorry record of failures" over abuse.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
You sound like Yvette Cooper defending HIPS.
To be fair, at least unlike politicians, the HIPS dont lie.
These lack of booster shots is beginning to cut through. R5L done a big feature on it. Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
The additional bureaucracy of not having a “Minister for Covid Vaccination”, with an utterly unrestricted budget from the Treasury to do whatever he wanted.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
The thing is, when people are told what woke means, the voters seem to back a lot of it.
Only if you give them an incredibly sanitized version of it. If you tell them that the West is structurally white supremacist and that every difference in average performance between racial groups is down to racism, they would reject it.
But who is it going around telling everyone that relatively mainstream political policies, TV programmes and celebrities are achingly woke ad nauseum?
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
People who voted for the Tories but now think the government is too woke, are not about to help Labour.
So, who’s the next Farage?
We're going with Piers Morgan. And it would help Labour if lots of Con voters split off to him. If Morgan picked up, say, 15%, mainly from the Cons, the FPTP impact would be a shift of seats from them to the main opposition, which is Labour. Morgan might win a seat himself, in a village or town where he as an individual really resonates, but that would probably be it. We've seen this movie before.
The chance of Morgan winning a seat except as a mainstream party candidate are, to the nearest whole number, zero.
And I think the chance of anyone significant splitting the centre right vote when we come to the actualities of an election when the government will either be led by Labour or Tory are small. The centre right is fairly good at tactical voting, and can within a short space of time put in a Tory government in one election, and ensure it comes near last in another (EU) one. Using that skill to put in the Lab/LD/SNP alliance is a long shot.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
You sound like Yvette Cooper defending HIPS.
EPCs have been required for a while. And given the current soaring costs of energy, I don't think this will be anything like as unpopular as HIPS.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
The thing is, when people are told what woke means, the voters seem to back a lot of it.
Only if you give them an incredibly sanitized version of it. If you tell them that the West is structurally white supremacist and that every difference in average performance between racial groups is down to racism, they would reject it.
The only time I've ever heard that the West is structurally white supremacist is on this website. By "antiwoke" people.
I've never heard even a single BLM supporter or anyone on Sky or anything else say that in the UK.
I have heard people call Trump white supremacist. Me for starters and that's because Trump was. Trump is also not the West.
I'm old enough to remember Labour's Green Deal, and then I look at the size, complications and cost of heat pumps and I think...ok, good luck with that.
That was before the cost of gas quadrupled in the space of a couple of months. Alternative heating solutions and/or improved insulation might look rather more interesting to consumers now.
Its a lot of equipment to fit in a standard three bed semi.
Despite what is says if you are going to use the ASHP a lot then the radiators and pipework will need to changed, as pumping 40 degree water through 15mm pipework into a standard radiator will provide very limited heat.
Agree on the lot of equipment.
That looks like someone trying to create an opportunity to keep their technology in the game. It's problematic because 1 - we are pivoting away from gas, 2 - because it is a more complex install which will requite you to eg have 2 annual services not one (gas engineers will love you), 3 - because there are far simpler solutions available.
The stuff about always needing new pipework is for an ASHP is baloney, btw. You perhaps resize your rads (or use a double of the same size). Once you have improved your fabric you do a heat demand model for your house, and a calculation which will tell you what kit you need. Replacing rads is cheap. And then set the appropriate flow rate.
Keeping the same radiators is even cheaper. Which is what happens if you switch from natural gas to hydrogen.
Gas explosions are more common than you'd like them to be. Another home was destroyed in Ayr from a gas explosion yesterday. I was woken up by the Police and ordered to evacuate my own home in the week after the London Riots after a lone copycat moron chose to go on an arson campaign and set fire to the gas pipe going into one of my neighbours leading to a fear the entire bloc could go up.
I'm no chemist but from what I understand hydrogen seems even riskier than natural gas to be connected to homes for if things go wrong.
Safety studies have been performed, and more are ongoing. On balance, the risk from hydrogen is roughly the same as that from natural gas. While, for example, there is a greater leakage potential, hydrogen is less likely to achieve a fuel-air mixture in the explosive region. Also, no carbon monoxide deaths from hydrogen.
Would a hydrogen gas leak be detectable through suddenly developing a squeaky voice (c.f. helium balloons)
(Scientist hat on - presumably so, at high enough concentration, as it would be lower density than normal air, just like breathing in helium-enhanced air? But at sufficient concentrations to be noticeable bad things might happen?)
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
You sound like Yvette Cooper defending HIPS.
You managed to write that, and missed the obvious pop music reference..?
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Electric immersion heaters are an extremely expensive way to heat you house. Not sure about the efficiencies etc but no one in their right mind currently uses their immersion heater for anything other than short term quick heat if they can avoid it.
That somewhat depends on the energy efficiency quality of your housebuild.
If you use them on Economy 7 it can be OK, and if you have renovated (or built) your house such that it uses a fraction of the heat demand then it can be fine.
I know people who have their central heating as a couple of immersion heaters in the slab, and have total energy bills in the mid-hundreds. Those would be people with detached houses built to a near-passive standard.
And others who are all electric and have similar bills using heat pumps.
A heat pump works because you pull 3 or 4x as much heat from the air / ground / water as it takes to drive the process.
But the GOLDEN rule is always 'Fabric First'.
Thanks. My thought however is this; the most direct electric source is the simplest potentially carbon free form of heating. Despite cost and efficiency problems this may still be true.
Because: there is no real limit to how much electricity can be produced by renewables + nuclear; this form involves less domestic infrastructure change than others and is therefor attractive; it doesn't explode; and the higher cost is now, not in the future when all the renewable/nuclear electricity is on stream in say 30-40 years time.
And even if there is a higher cost, if the science is right we are talking about the future of the planet, not the economy.
Look at the relative energy demand for leccy and gas on a peak winter's day. Supply all of that energy from leccy with a COP of 1 and you need to build a hell of a lot of new power stations and/or batteries.
If we are to electrify the country and the world anyway - which is SFAICS the only way of saving our way of life and the planet if the science is right, then electric has to replace almost everything anyway. Think of all those cars, vans and lorries plugged in every day. Within our lifetimes this may be done by covering the sahara/gobi etc with solar panels + nuclear all over the place. There is no alternative. So, Yes. A lot of new electric power sources. Your friendly local supplier is the sun.
Either you think big in terms of world and government action, or it isn't going to work anyway. In which case it makes no difference.
The UK needs to think big in terms of energy security anyway.
And solar need not be expensive, even for the UK on its own: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/22/submarine-cable-to-connect-10-5-gw-wind-solar-complex-in-morocco-to-the-uk-grid/ …Xlinks is planning to inject power into the UK for a CfD price of around £0.048 ($0.67)/kWh, which would be a bit more than around £0.040/kWh for current off-shore wind tenders and much less than the £0.0925/kWh for the controversial Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant currently under construction. “However, the supply of power would be similar to nuclear baseload as it would be able to deliver at least 8 hours during any peak demand for more than 363 days in the year,” he explained.
Overall, Xlinks expects to invest about £18 billion in the project. “We are not doing anything exceptional from a technological point of view…
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
You sound like Yvette Cooper defending HIPS.
EPCs have been required for a while. And given the current soaring costs of energy, I don't think this will be anything like as unpopular as HIPS.
When people buy a home they already have to contend with Stamp Duty etc (which should be abolished IMHO). If investing in improving their new home costs a comparable amount to Stamp Duty and is amortised over 25 years then I can't see that being a deal-breaker for many people.
NE farmers, fishermen, proposed closure of Kinloss barracks, now this? BJ & co seemed to have given up on NE Tories.
HYUFD assures me that they will be re-elected because everyone up here Loves Them.
There are only 6 Tory MPs in Scotland, even if the Tories lost every one of them they would still have a comfortable majority given their current majority of 80 UK wide.
It is holding the RedWall and the BlueWall which will determine whether Boris wins the next UK general election again or not, not Scotland
These lack of booster shots is beginning to cut through. R5L done a big feature on it. Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
Incompetence. We’ve got more than enough doses.
Is it incompetence or people not that bothered? They've been double vaxxed and that's enough thanks? If the correct letters have gone out at the six month mark and the vax centres are up and running, then surely it is about the punters?
I don't need to change my boiler so haven't looked into alternate heat sources - I did note that RHI would pay me rather more than £5k currently if I was to have a GSHP installed (Though still a net cost)
Is the £5k replacing this, a sleight of hand by the chancellor to actually save money ?
(Still here)
That's what it looks like, but otoh the £5k is now, not over a number of years.
On the upside, it is a lot simpler than the RHI calculations, where to maximise the difference to get the most you do the 'starting' EPC before you do any work at all.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
So, democracy works, but the wrong people are in power? I genuinely don't know what you're saying. Perhaps you don't, either?
What I’m saying, is that if both main parties embrace calling the white working class racist while increasing their cost of living, then other politicians will turn up to appeal to their thinking. Maybe they wil be a new party, or maybe they will take over an existing party.
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
It is the same thing as pre 2016, when all the main parties were pro EU despite the views of a majority of the population. The only thing that is different with the woke and green stuff is that it is now quite difficult to advance any opposing views. They get shut down as hate speech or misinformation.
Laurence Fox will probably take on the 'green crap' once he moves on from his anti vaxxer phase. BoJo is just giving him an open goal on this front.
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Farage is very good at the "tells it like it us" impression, and there's definitely an audience for that, which linked up well with scepticism about the EU and general grumpiness. Insurgents don't need to get a majority - just enough to worry a major party, which will feel they need to shift their policies to stem the losses.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
51 Small Axe (2020) 52 This is England 86, 88 and 90 (2010-2015) 53 Call My Agent! (2015-2020) 54 Happy Valley (2014-) 55 The Shield (2002-2008) 56 The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019) 57 The Young Pope (2016) 58 Dark (2017-2020) 59 The Underground Railroad (2021) 60 House of Cards (2013-2018) 61 Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008) 62= The Good Place (2016-2020) 62= Pose (2018-2021) 64 Detectorists (2014-2017) 65 Orange is the New Black (2013-2019) 66 Mare of Easttown (2021) 67 RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-) 68 Stranger Things (2016-) 69 24 (2001-2010) 70 Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) 71 Enlightened (2011-2013) 72 Gilmore Girls (2000-2007) 73 Planet Earth (2006) 74 Utopia (2013-2014) 75 Babylon Berlin (2017-) 76 Rick and Morty (2013-) 77 American Crime Story (2016-) 78 The Killing (Denmark) (2007-2012) 79 Mindhunter (2017-2019) 80 House (2004-2012) 81 OJ: Made in America (2016) 82 Big Little Lies (2017-2019) 83 Insecure (2016-2021) 84= Normal People (2020) 84= Narcos (2015-2017) 86 How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) 87 The Comeback (2005-2014) 88 The OA (2016-2019) 89 Dexter (2006-2013) 90 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-) 91 Westworld (2016-) 92 Show Me a Hero (2015) 93 Treme (2010-2013) 94 Louie (2010-2015) 95 Luther (2010-2019) 96 Catastrophe (2015-2019) 97 Hannibal (2013-2015) 98 Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019) 99 Steven Universe (2013-2020) 100 The Queen's Gambit (2020) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
BBC list of 100 greatest 21st Century TV series 1 The Wire (2002-2008) 2 Mad Men (2007-2015) 3 Breaking Bad (2008-2013) 4 Fleabag (2016-2019) 5 Game of Thrones (2011-2019) 6 I May Destroy You (2020) 7 The Leftovers (2014-2017) 8 The Americans (2013-2018) 9 The Office (UK) (2001-2003) 10 Succession (2018-) 11 BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) 12 Six Feet Under (2001-2005) 13 Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) 14 Atlanta (2016-) 15 Chernobyl (2019) 16 The Crown (2016-) 17 30 Rock (2006-2013) 18 Deadwood (2004-2006) 19 Lost (2004-2010) 20 The Thick of It (2005-2012) 21 Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-) 22 Black Mirror (2011-) 23 Better Call Saul (2015-2022) 24 Veep (2012-2019) 25 Sherlock (2010-2017) 26 Watchmen (2019) 27 Line of Duty (2012-2021) 28 Friday Night Lights (2006-2011) 29 Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) 30 Girls (2012-2017) 31 True Detective (2014-2019) 32 Arrested Development (2003-2019) 33 The Good Wife (2009-2016) 34 The Bridge (2011-2018) 35 Fargo (2014-) 36= Downton Abbey (2010-2015) 36= Band of Brothers (2001) 38 The Handmaid's Tale (2017-) 39 The Office (US) (2005-2013) 40 Borgen (2010-2022) 41 Schitt's Creek (2015-2020) 42 Peep Show (2003-2015) 43 Money Heist (2017-2021) 44 Community (2009-2015) 45 The Good Fight (2017-) 46 Homeland (2011-2020) 47 Grey's Anatomy (2005-) 48 Inside No 9 (2014-) 49 The Bureau (2015-) 50 Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Heat Pumps have a "Coefficient of Performance" (COP) greater than 1. So, you put in 1 kJ of electrical energy, you get >1kJ of heat into your home. With direct radiant heating you can't get a COP >1, so less efficient.
And the same for immersion heaters. COP = 1.
The problem of course is that CoP depends on the ratio of the temperatures between the hot supply and the cold source - the lower this ratio the better - thus the requirement to have the radiators as cold as you can get away with.
Do room thermostats work very well with this, though? I do wonder if having direct heating with fully controllable room thermostats might not be _that_ terrible in comparison.
With a heat pump you can't decide to turn up the heating in one room on a whim because it will take a long time to warm up. Whereas with direct heating you could, and thus you could keep the ambient temperature in rooms you aren't currently using lower.
One change is that as the quality of your house fabric improves, it loses negligible heat in a short interval (eg all heating off goes from 23C to 22C in 24 hours), so the way you run your house changes to a constant temperature and it works as just one or two zones.
So the need for zonal control in either physical areas, or by time periods, goes away. And you save hundreds on time controllers.
That might be fine in a passive house but realistically there is no chance that most of the housing stock will ever be that efficient. The only realistic way to upgrade my house would be to demolish it and start again. Given that we aren't starting from an ideal position, there must be scope for alternative solutions.
We are going to need a LOT of electricity to do any of this in any case and we can't rely on wind. I am yet to see a realistic plan to fix this.
Fair comment - an older house can perhaps have its carbon footprint reduced by 40-70%.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
So, democracy works, but the wrong people are in power? I genuinely don't know what you're saying. Perhaps you don't, either?
What I’m saying, is that if both main parties embrace calling the white working class racist while increasing their cost of living, then other politicians will turn up to appeal to their thinking. Maybe they wil be a new party, or maybe they will take over an existing party.
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
It is the same thing as pre 2016, when all the main parties were pro EU despite the views of a majority of the population. The only thing that is different with the woke and green stuff is that it is now quite difficult to advance any opposing views. They get shut down as hate speech or misinformation.
Laurence Fox will probably take on the 'green crap' once he moves on from his anti vaxxer phase. BoJo is just giving him an open goal on this front.
I don’t think it will be Lawrence Fox, he’s gone quickly from a potential next Nigel Farage to a potential next David Icke. Someone will find a way through though, just as NF did a decade ago.
These lack of booster shots is beginning to cut through. R5L done a big feature on it. Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
Incompetence. We’ve got more than enough doses.
Is it incompetence or people not that bothered? They've been double vaxxed and that's enough thanks? If the correct letters have gone out at the six month mark and the vax centres are up and running, then surely it is about the punters?
I really don't know, it's a genuine question.
From the phone in it seems letters have not gone out in some cases. Moreover, many anecdotes of folk being told not to get in contact until 9 months after second jab! Spotty though, as other areas seem to be walk-in no problems. Trying to get a feel for what is actually happening.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
So, democracy works, but the wrong people are in power? I genuinely don't know what you're saying. Perhaps you don't, either?
What I’m saying, is that if both main parties embrace calling the white working class racist while increasing their cost of living, then other politicians will turn up to appeal to their thinking. Maybe they wil be a new party, or maybe they will take over an existing party.
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
It is the same thing as pre 2016, when all the main parties were pro EU despite the views of a majority of the population. The only thing that is different with the woke and green stuff is that it is now quite difficult to advance any opposing views. They get shut down as hate speech or misinformation.
Laurence Fox will probably take on the 'green crap' once he moves on from his anti vaxxer phase. BoJo is just giving him an open goal on this front.
Decarbonising is nothing like the EU.
For one thing the opinion polls have consistently shown strong support for environmental measures. Which wasn't the case for Europe.
For another thing, decarbonising is happening and then when its done its done. Its not like people are suddenly going to start taking up high-polluting measures again once they've gone when they've no reason to do so. Dealing with the climate issue also will negate it as an issue - once we have clean electricity why not use as much electricity as you want and can afford if its clean? Which will show the difference between those who really want to tackle the issue, and the hairshirt brigade who want to abuse the issue to further their own agenda.
Whereas for Europe the issue was never going to go away. Integrating into Europe didn't make the European issue go away because the problems never went away and we just had "more Europe" as the solution.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
That's actually quite interesting. The Scottish Govt proposal is that improvements should be done before the house is placed for sale.
I think a good point of that proposal is that works can be combined with normal decorating / work of newly purchased houses etc, prices will adjust according to what it will cost, and finally we will get some market value placed on energy efficiency.
These are bullet points from Scottish Govt proposals:
- Net Zero target for heating buildings is 2045 - 2030 target to have 68% lower emissions (from heating buildings) than 2020 level, requiring over 1,000,000 homes to be made zero carbon this decade. - Vague statement that "most" homes must be EPC C or better by 2030 - More definite statement that all homes (where feasible and cost-effective) must be EPC C or better by 2033 - Legislation to be introduced in 2025 requiring any home changing ownership or tenancy to be EPC C or better at point of sale - Earlier date set at 2028 for all private rental homes to be EPC C or better - Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties - Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
There is a lot of heating expertise around on PB. May I ask them a question from a non scientist.
SFAICS home heating mostly involves heating liquid and sending hot liquid around the home with a pump.
The other forms involve radiant heat (gas and electric fires).
Electric immersion heaters have long been part of how to heat water. There are homes entirely electrically heated, though a minority at the moment.
Why isn't the answer, instead of complicated air source/ground source pumps and reverse refrigeration, to create an economy around renewable/nuclear electricity supply and use electricity as directly as possible to heat the liquid that is pumped around the home? With direct electric radiant heating as the secondary source.
Electric immersion heaters are an extremely expensive way to heat you house. Not sure about the efficiencies etc but no one in their right mind currently uses their immersion heater for anything other than short term quick heat if they can avoid it.
That somewhat depends on the energy efficiency quality of your housebuild.
If you use them on Economy 7 it can be OK, and if you have renovated (or built) your house such that it uses a fraction of the heat demand then it can be fine.
I know people who have their central heating as a couple of immersion heaters in the slab, and have total energy bills in the mid-hundreds. Those would be people with detached houses built to a near-passive standard.
And others who are all electric and have similar bills using heat pumps.
A heat pump works because you pull 3 or 4x as much heat from the air / ground / water as it takes to drive the process.
But the GOLDEN rule is always 'Fabric First'.
Thanks. My thought however is this; the most direct electric source is the simplest potentially carbon free form of heating. Despite cost and efficiency problems this may still be true.
Because: there is no real limit to how much electricity can be produced by renewables + nuclear; this form involves less domestic infrastructure change than others and is therefor attractive; it doesn't explode; and the higher cost is now, not in the future when all the renewable/nuclear electricity is on stream in say 30-40 years time.
And even if there is a higher cost, if the science is right we are talking about the future of the planet, not the economy.
One downside of that is that if we take then view "carbon free energy is great we can make any amount of it" is that eg double the energy requires double the amount of wind turbines.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
So, democracy works, but the wrong people are in power? I genuinely don't know what you're saying. Perhaps you don't, either?
What I’m saying, is that if both main parties embrace calling the white working class racist while increasing their cost of living, then other politicians will turn up to appeal to their thinking. Maybe they wil be a new party, or maybe they will take over an existing party.
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
It is the same thing as pre 2016, when all the main parties were pro EU despite the views of a majority of the population. The only thing that is different with the woke and green stuff is that it is now quite difficult to advance any opposing views. They get shut down as hate speech or misinformation.
Laurence Fox will probably take on the 'green crap' once he moves on from his anti vaxxer phase. BoJo is just giving him an open goal on this front.
Decarbonising is nothing like the EU.
For one thing the opinion polls have consistently shown strong support for environmental measures. Which wasn't the case for Europe.
For another thing, decarbonising is happening and then when its done its done. Its not like people are suddenly going to start taking up high-polluting measures again once they've gone when they've no reason to do so. Dealing with the climate issue also will negate it as an issue - once we have clean electricity why not use as much electricity as you want and can afford if its clean? Which will show the difference between those who really want to tackle the issue, and the hairshirt brigade who want to abuse the issue to further their own agenda.
Whereas for Europe the issue was never going to go away. Integrating into Europe didn't make the European issue go away because the problems never went away and we just had "more Europe" as the solution.
Not comparable at all.
What's that old saying? I think we're starting to see that an environmentalist* is just a capitalist mugged by reality.
*of the sane, find better tech variety, not of the hair-shirt variety
NE farmers, fishermen, proposed closure of Kinloss barracks, now this? BJ & co seemed to have given up on NE Tories.
HYUFD assures me that they will be re-elected because everyone up here Loves Them.
There are only 6 Tory MPs in Scotland, even if the Tories lost every one of them they would still have a comfortable majority given their current majority of 80 UK wide.
It is holding the RedWall and the BlueWall which will determine whether Boris wins the next UK general election again or not, not Scotland
So "Fuck Scotland" and "Fuck these MPs"
Thanks for confirming.
Scots decided to remain in the UK in the once in a generation 2014 referendum.
Scottish MPs therefore count no more than MPs from any other part of the UK in UK general elections.
The Tories have far more MPs in the South and Red Wall than they do in Scotland, in fact the Tories have fewer MPs in Scotland than in Wales or in any region of England.
So obviously to preserve their majority the Tories need to look beyond Scotland, Scotland makes little difference to their prospects
Even if you believe in the global warming worldview, unless China does likewise cutting carbon zealously is pissing in the wind, then spending cash to buy Chinese-made cleaning products.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
That's actually quite interesting. The Scottish Govt proposal is that improvements should be done before the house is placed for sale.
I think a good point of that proposal is that works can be combined with normal decorating / work of newly purchased houses etc, prices will adjust according to what it will cost, and finally we will get some market value placed on energy efficiency.
These are bullet points from Scottish Govt proposals:
- Net Zero target for heating buildings is 2045 - 2030 target to have 68% lower emissions (from heating buildings) than 2020 level, requiring over 1,000,000 homes to be made zero carbon this decade. - Vague statement that "most" homes must be EPC C or better by 2030 - More definite statement that all homes (where feasible and cost-effective) must be EPC C or better by 2033 - Legislation to be introduced in 2025 requiring any home changing ownership or tenancy to be EPC C or better at point of sale - Earlier date set at 2028 for all private rental homes to be EPC C or better - Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties - Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
Some of those proposals seem absolutely crazy!
Absolutely it makes more sense for renovations to be done by the buyer not the seller.
So if someone is broke and wants to sell their home before they default on the mortgage, how are they supposed to make their home EPC C or better before they put it up for sale?
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Farage is very good at the "tells it like it us" impression, and there's definitely an audience for that, which linked up well with scepticism about the EU and general grumpiness. Insurgents don't need to get a majority - just enough to worry a major party, which will feel they need to shift their policies to stem the losses.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
I think Fox is in it for the long run; he has no other career option, and lots of money behind him, it seems. He will learn from his weird courting of the anti vaxxers and it won't harm him too much. His basic popular appeal is rooted in his performance on question time, which prompted his cancellation and subsequent political career.
BBC list of 100 greatest 21st Century TV series 25 Sherlock (2010-2017)
Sherlock at 25 is the most unbelievable thing I have ever seen. It had one great season, the first, and the rest was wildly inconsistent with the exception of the final season which was all unmitigated tripe.
Told you Boris Johnson was a socialist, this is HIPS on speed.
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
It is sensible policy as it is likely that the buyer and seller will negotiate the cost in the sale price which should lead to many more homes being greened without public subsidy
You sound like Yvette Cooper defending HIPS.
You managed to write that, and missed the obvious pop music reference..?
Well you know me, the master of subtlety, putting in a HIPS don't lie was a bit too obvious.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Well, Farage was it - are we writing him off now? And, ok, Piers Morgan is suggested by some in jokey mode, but IS it such a joke? He has a huge presence, both digital and in person, and he knows how to push the buttons. His biggest problem is he's just so dislikeable, most of the country wants to punch him, but if he can graft on some folksy charm to his brand, who knows.
Farage is going to get old. He doesn't seem to have the energy for it. And he is too associated with an elderly support base that is basically dying off. Dealing with those people for all these years cannot have been easy, it has taken its toll and he shows no real signs of wanting to start a new party. He is looking for a lucrative easy retirement.
Laurence Fox is obviously determined, despite the endless comical setbacks he experiences. He seems to be willing to get sent to prison, in order to become a free speech martyr. I don't see that determination in someone like Piers Morgan. Fox is the right age and has the perfect backstory, being a remain voter, so he theoretically has very wide appeal. His acting skills are impressive and are transferring well in to his new role. The more people dismiss him, the better his prospects become, in my view.
One problem though is that Covid may get him. He is an anti vaxxer and a smoker.
Fox is intellectually underpowered though. You could see that when he was on Talking Pints with Farage the other week. Farage kept having to dumb down the chat so Fox could catch on. And there was a touch of "humouring" going on, as I often pick up from Nigel towards his guests on Talking Pints. The perfect right populist leader will talk like simple simon but there'll be a shrewdie calculation going on inside. With Fox, I don't think that shrewdie is there. Lacking this, he'd be a lamb to the slaughter in big ticket national politics.
Even if you believe in the global warming worldview, unless China does likewise cutting carbon zealously is pissing in the wind, then spending cash to buy Chinese-made cleaning products.
It depends which way you cut it.
If you cut it by austere means as the zealots want telling people not to fly, not to travel, not to live, not to enjoy life - then yes its utterly futile.
If you cut it by investing in new technologies that can then be sold to the Chinese [or stolen by the Chinese] so they copy us then that works.
These lack of booster shots is beginning to cut through. R5L done a big feature on it. Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
Incompetence. We’ve got more than enough doses.
Is it incompetence or people not that bothered? They've been double vaxxed and that's enough thanks? If the correct letters have gone out at the six month mark and the vax centres are up and running, then surely it is about the punters?
I really don't know, it's a genuine question.
Incompetence, ask an NHS doctor/GP surgery staff, and the question they are getting asked the most is when can I have my booster jab and the reply they get told is wait until you are contacted.
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Farage is very good at the "tells it like it us" impression, and there's definitely an audience for that, which linked up well with scepticism about the EU and general grumpiness. Insurgents don't need to get a majority - just enough to worry a major party, which will feel they need to shift their policies to stem the losses.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
I think Fox is in it for the long run; he has no other career option, and lots of money behind him, it seems. He will learn from his weird courting of the anti vaxxers and it won't harm him too much. His basic popular appeal is rooted in his performance on question time, which prompted his cancellation and subsequent political career.
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Farage is very good at the "tells it like it us" impression, and there's definitely an audience for that, which linked up well with scepticism about the EU and general grumpiness. Insurgents don't need to get a majority - just enough to worry a major party, which will feel they need to shift their policies to stem the losses.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
I think Fox is in it for the long run; he has no other career option, and lots of money behind him, it seems. He will learn from his weird courting of the anti vaxxers and it won't harm him too much. His basic popular appeal is rooted in his performance on question time, which prompted his cancellation and subsequent political career.
Fox's 'basic popular appeal', as you put it, won him 1.9% of the vote in the London mayoral election. He campaigned on anti-woke, anti-BLM stuff. If he was any good, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit that he could have won over, especially in the London suburbs.
I think you seriously underestimate quite how thick Laurence Fox is. He makes Farage look like an intellectual titan.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Yes the Conservative embrace of soft socialism and wokery have been a disaster.
This Brexit/BritNat iteration of the Tory Party has embraced wokery? That would be a democratic outrage. As soon as all the "trad values" Leavers whose support they rely on become aware of it, it's curtains. Betting volte face - lump on that Lab majority!
Yes. For instance, it allows diversity officers to remain throughout government instead of sacking them (the ones in the NHS are paid twice as much as junior nurses), tolerates hate crime sentences which value minority lives more highly, clamps down on free speech and puts all kind of ESG crap on companies.
I doubt there would be a Lab majoirty as a party led by Sir Kneel woud be even worse. Hard wokery, not soft wokery.
So both big parties are woke? Sounds like the British people have spoken.
The UK politics of the last six years, illustrate what happens when the political classes no longer speak for the people.
So you don't think democracy works?
I think it very much does work, as we have observed.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
So, democracy works, but the wrong people are in power? I genuinely don't know what you're saying. Perhaps you don't, either?
What I’m saying, is that if both main parties embrace calling the white working class racist while increasing their cost of living, then other politicians will turn up to appeal to their thinking. Maybe they wil be a new party, or maybe they will take over an existing party.
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
It is the same thing as pre 2016, when all the main parties were pro EU despite the views of a majority of the population. The only thing that is different with the woke and green stuff is that it is now quite difficult to advance any opposing views. They get shut down as hate speech or misinformation.
Laurence Fox will probably take on the 'green crap' once he moves on from his anti vaxxer phase. BoJo is just giving him an open goal on this front.
I don’t think it will be Lawrence Fox, he’s gone quickly from a potential next Nigel Farage to a potential next David Icke. Someone will find a way through though, just as NF did a decade ago.
Fox as the next David Icke is the funniest and truest thing I've read all week.
I'm not surprised by the data in the Header. Ms Patel is a right wing populist lacking the je ne sais quoi needed to really excel in that space. Home Sec is her peak (imo) and in itself represents considerable career over-achievement by a person of quite limited ability. Speaking of right wing populists, I've just been reading about that Eric Zemmour in France, ex TV shock jock, sort of a French cross between Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, now a Trumpiste candidate for president. A joke candidate then? I'm afraid not. There are big vibrant rallies in the provinces and a surging enthusiasm amongst folk who are discontented with their lot and blame foreigners and woke liberals for it. Which they are right to do, according to this Zemmour character. He tells them that, oui oui, foreigners and woke liberals are indeed to blame for the lot with which they are discontented. They love him for it, apparently, cheering him to the rafters. They say he’s “not like normal politicians” (natch) and - oh no please spare us - he TELLS IT LIKE IT IS. I do wish some politician would one day be brave enough to tell the sort of people who lap this up how it really is. They'd have my vote, left or right. Anyway, off to betfair to check, and the worst is duly confirmed. He’s clear favourite after Macron. Mon dieu.
I have often set out my view that Brexit and Trump were just the soft version of darker things to come. It seems likely that Zemmour will have a decent run. He is no idiot, looks like an intellectual Trump. At one point there was talk of an english translation of his book (the suicide of france) but it seems like it never materialised.
A British Zemmour? Hard to see where it will emerge from. I did think Priti Patel could fill this role, but her moment has passed. Lee Anderson, Ben Bradley?
More likely, the tory acquiescence with the woke under the direction of Carrie Symonds will result in this arriving from outside the current main political parties.
Not good developments, but a fate we seem to be uncontrollably sleepwalking in to.
Well, Farage was it - are we writing him off now? And, ok, Piers Morgan is suggested by some in jokey mode, but IS it such a joke? He has a huge presence, both digital and in person, and he knows how to push the buttons. His biggest problem is he's just so dislikeable, most of the country wants to punch him, but if he can graft on some folksy charm to his brand, who knows.
Farage is going to get old. He doesn't seem to have the energy for it. And he is too associated with an elderly support base that is basically dying off. Dealing with those people for all these years cannot have been easy, it has taken its toll and he shows no real signs of wanting to start a new party. He is looking for a lucrative easy retirement.
Laurence Fox is obviously determined, despite the endless comical setbacks he experiences. He seems to be willing to get sent to prison, in order to become a free speech martyr. I don't see that determination in someone like Piers Morgan. Fox is the right age and has the perfect backstory, being a remain voter, so he theoretically has very wide appeal. His acting skills are impressive and are transferring well in to his new role. The more people dismiss him, the better his prospects become, in my view.
One problem though is that Covid may get him. He is an anti vaxxer and a smoker.
Fox is intellectually underpowered though. You could see that when he was on Talking Pints with Farage the other week. Farage kept having to dumb down the chat so Fox could catch on. And there was a touch of "humouring" going on, as I often pick up from Nigel towards his guests on Talking Pints. The perfect right populist leader will talk like simple simon but there'll be a shrewdie calculation going on inside. With Fox, I don't think that shrewdie is there. Lacking this, he'd be a lamb to the slaughter in big ticket national politics.
Fair points - I saw the same episode of talking pints and thought the same. Perhaps it will come with time.
Thanks for that. I'll make an effort to try and come back on that, but it will be 4pm or so.
We do install heat pumps, although we would never recommend them, and in order to get any heat into the radiators the pipework has to be changed, 15mm pipework simply does not provide enough flow to heat the radiators. By far the best use of an ASHP is underfloor heating as this operates at a lower temperature, but as most houses in this country have concrete floors downstairs, its very hard to retrofit.
BBC list of 100 greatest 21st Century TV series 1 The Wire (2002-2008) 2 Mad Men (2007-2015) 3 Breaking Bad (2008-2013) 4 Fleabag (2016-2019) 5 Game of Thrones (2011-2019) 6 I May Destroy You (2020) 7 The Leftovers (2014-2017) 8 The Americans (2013-2018) 9 The Office (UK) (2001-2003) 10 Succession (2018-) 11 BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) 12 Six Feet Under (2001-2005) 13 Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) 14 Atlanta (2016-) 15 Chernobyl (2019) 16 The Crown (2016-) 17 30 Rock (2006-2013) 18 Deadwood (2004-2006) 19 Lost (2004-2010) 20 The Thick of It (2005-2012) 21 Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-) 22 Black Mirror (2011-) 23 Better Call Saul (2015-2022) 24 Veep (2012-2019) 25 Sherlock (2010-2017) 26 Watchmen (2019) 27 Line of Duty (2012-2021) 28 Friday Night Lights (2006-2011) 29 Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) 30 Girls (2012-2017) 31 True Detective (2014-2019) 32 Arrested Development (2003-2019) 33 The Good Wife (2009-2016) 34 The Bridge (2011-2018) 35 Fargo (2014-) 36= Downton Abbey (2010-2015) 36= Band of Brothers (2001) 38 The Handmaid's Tale (2017-) 39 The Office (US) (2005-2013) 40 Borgen (2010-2022) 41 Schitt's Creek (2015-2020) 42 Peep Show (2003-2015) 43 Money Heist (2017-2021) 44 Community (2009-2015) 45 The Good Fight (2017-) 46 Homeland (2011-2020) 47 Grey's Anatomy (2005-) 48 Inside No 9 (2014-) 49 The Bureau (2015-) 50 Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
Mrs America is an obvious omission, unless I missed it in the list. Peep Show should be way higher, certainly top 10. Fleabag continues to be absurdly over-rated. I'd put The Crown higher. I'd throw in Mrs Brown's Boys, too - mostly just to wind people up, but really it's no worse than Downton Abbey.
It's good to know we can blame a disaster on the stars. Well, etymologically speaking - as is my wont.
Disaster came to English via the French désastre in the 16C, from the Italian disastro. This literally means 'ill-starred', with the dis- equivalent to English mis-, + astro meaning star or planet, from Latin astrum and Greek astron.
Other *-aster-* derived words from star meanings are disappointingly obvious - asterisks, asteroids, astronauts, astronomy - all yawn..
But I was quite interested by AstroTurf. It was first used at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas - which was presumably named such as the US space program was HQ'd there (Houston, not the Astrodome!). So AstroTurf is astro- for star, + -turf which is from Proto-Germanic turbz (for turf or lawn), from Proto-Indo-European -derb (for tuft or grass), so star-grass
What about cadastral (as in cadastral map)? Same root or something different. And catastrophe?
No, I looked that up. Seems to be from Ancient Greek κατὰ στίχον kata stikhon, which means "organised line by line"
ETA
And catastrophe is from κατά ,katá, “down, against”, + στρέφω stréphō, “I turn”
I had high hopes for the Cometaster moth from Africa, but I can't find anything about why it was called that by a 19C German lepidopterist (lepido - scale + pteron - wing (like in pterodactyl and helico-pter)).
I think it might be using an alternative -aster suffix from Latin that represents a diminuitive, along with the Latin word for 'comet', cometa, to just mean "little comet", for the same reason that it's also known as a Ying-Yang moth - ie due to the pattern on its wings
These lack of booster shots is beginning to cut through. R5L done a big feature on it. Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
Incompetence. We’ve got more than enough doses.
Complacency seems to have set in now Covid isn't the top news agenda item any more.
It is so obvious, we all know the winter could be bad, we should have prepped for this, mass media campaign, which the government is now starting this week, instead of two months ago.
Coupled with the blunder of not vaccinating kids during the summer, the powers that be have screwed this up.
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Farage is very good at the "tells it like it us" impression, and there's definitely an audience for that, which linked up well with scepticism about the EU and general grumpiness. Insurgents don't need to get a majority - just enough to worry a major party, which will feel they need to shift their policies to stem the losses.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
I think Fox is in it for the long run; he has no other career option, and lots of money behind him, it seems. He will learn from his weird courting of the anti vaxxers and it won't harm him too much. His basic popular appeal is rooted in his performance on question time, which prompted his cancellation and subsequent political career.
Fox's 'basic popular appeal', as you put it, won him 1.9% of the vote in the London mayoral election. He campaigned on anti-woke, anti-BLM stuff. If he was any good, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit that he could have won over, especially in the London suburbs.
I think you seriously underestimate quite how thick Laurence Fox is. He makes Farage look like an intellectual titan.
He did have the second fav in the betting, the famous Brian Rose fishing in the same pond though.
Thanks for that. I'll make an effort to try and come back on that, but it will be 4pm or so.
We do install heat pumps, although we would never recommend them, and in order to get any heat into the radiators the pipework has to be changed, 15mm pipework simply does not provide enough flow to heat the radiators. By far the best use of an ASHP is underfloor heating as this operates at a lower temperature, but as most houses in this country have concrete floors downstairs, its very hard to retrofit.
Also we have the question of flats.
Is it still copper piping with push fit elbows and tees ?
I'm old enough to remember Labour's Green Deal, and then I look at the size, complications and cost of heat pumps and I think...ok, good luck with that.
That was before the cost of gas quadrupled in the space of a couple of months. Alternative heating solutions and/or improved insulation might look rather more interesting to consumers now.
Its a lot of equipment to fit in a standard three bed semi.
Despite what is says if you are going to use the ASHP a lot then the radiators and pipework will need to changed, as pumping 40 degree water through 15mm pipework into a standard radiator will provide very limited heat.
Agree on the lot of equipment.
That looks like someone trying to create an opportunity to keep their technology in the game. It's problematic because 1 - we are pivoting away from gas, 2 - because it is a more complex install which will requite you to eg have 2 annual services not one (gas engineers will love you), 3 - because there are far simpler solutions available.
The stuff about always needing new pipework is for an ASHP is baloney, btw. You perhaps resize your rads (or use a double of the same size). Once you have improved your fabric you do a heat demand model for your house, and a calculation which will tell you what kit you need. Replacing rads is cheap. And then set the appropriate flow rate.
Keeping the same radiators is even cheaper. Which is what happens if you switch from natural gas to hydrogen.
Gas explosions are more common than you'd like them to be. Another home was destroyed in Ayr from a gas explosion yesterday. I was woken up by the Police and ordered to evacuate my own home in the week after the London Riots after a lone copycat moron chose to go on an arson campaign and set fire to the gas pipe going into one of my neighbours leading to a fear the entire bloc could go up.
I'm no chemist but from what I understand hydrogen seems even riskier than natural gas to be connected to homes for if things go wrong.
Safety studies have been performed, and more are ongoing. On balance, the risk from hydrogen is roughly the same as that from natural gas. While, for example, there is a greater leakage potential, hydrogen is less likely to achieve a fuel-air mixture in the explosive region. Also, no carbon monoxide deaths from hydrogen.
More to the point, how will it ever be economic ?
Once we fully internalise the negative externalities of burning unabated fossil fuels, then low-carbon technologies will be cheaper.
In other words, tax the feck out of CO2 emissions.
We think we've been having a free lunch since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Now the earth has presented us with the bill.
I'm not asking about the economics versus fossil fuels. I'm asking how producing hydrogen to heat homes will ever be economic versus doing so with green electricity.
Yup, hydrogen seems like a fool's errand. It would require ripping out and replacing our existing natural gas infrastructure to accommodate how tiny hydrogen molecules are.
The nation has got to look beyond gas delivery and move towards electrical heating for everything with electricity generated by SMR/mini-nukes and renewable energy with compressed air battery storage.
In the end hydrogen will prove to be unfeasible due to the hugely explosive nature and inability to safely transport and pipe it to homes it as we do with natural gas.
Not quite. Look at Farage. Everyone kept dismissing him as way out there, way beyond the realms of acceptable opinion, fruitcakes and loons, etc; stood X times for parliament and never got anywhere. And much of this was true. For years UKIP didn't do very well and looked like a lost cause. But many people were ultimately very sympathetic to its key position about the EU. And there is a similarity between this and Laurence Fox's defence of freedom and free speech.
Farage is very good at the "tells it like it us" impression, and there's definitely an audience for that, which linked up well with scepticism about the EU and general grumpiness. Insurgents don't need to get a majority - just enough to worry a major party, which will feel they need to shift their policies to stem the losses.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
I think Fox is in it for the long run; he has no other career option, and lots of money behind him, it seems. He will learn from his weird courting of the anti vaxxers and it won't harm him too much. His basic popular appeal is rooted in his performance on question time, which prompted his cancellation and subsequent political career.
Fox's 'basic popular appeal', as you put it, won him 1.9% of the vote in the London mayoral election. He campaigned on anti-woke, anti-BLM stuff. If he was any good, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit that he could have won over, especially in the London suburbs.
I think you seriously underestimate quite how thick Laurence Fox is. He makes Farage look like an intellectual titan.
I don't disagree with you about his lack of intellectual skills. But then again, we've been saying the same about Priti Patel. Fox just needs to find the right wave to surf on. What I am seeing in him is determination, which is another parallel with Priti Patel.
These lack of booster shots is beginning to cut through. R5L done a big feature on it. Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
Incompetence. We’ve got more than enough doses.
Complacency seems to have set in now Covid isn't the top news agenda item any more.
It is so obvious, we all know the winter could be bad, we should have prepped for this, mass media campaign, which the government is now starting this week, instead of two months ago.
Coupled with the blunder of not vaccinating kids during the summer, the powers that be have screwed this up.
Back to the 5 Live phone-in. Head teacher off school with Covid. Still no vaccination done at his school, nor any word as to an indication of any timeframe. Still banging on about vaccine success, mind.
BBC list of 100 greatest 21st Century TV series 1 The Wire (2002-2008) 2 Mad Men (2007-2015) 3 Breaking Bad (2008-2013) 4 Fleabag (2016-2019) 5 Game of Thrones (2011-2019) 6 I May Destroy You (2020) 7 The Leftovers (2014-2017) 8 The Americans (2013-2018) 9 The Office (UK) (2001-2003) 10 Succession (2018-) 11 BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) 12 Six Feet Under (2001-2005) 13 Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) 14 Atlanta (2016-) 15 Chernobyl (2019) 16 The Crown (2016-) 17 30 Rock (2006-2013) 18 Deadwood (2004-2006) 19 Lost (2004-2010) 20 The Thick of It (2005-2012) 21 Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-) 22 Black Mirror (2011-) 23 Better Call Saul (2015-2022) 24 Veep (2012-2019) 25 Sherlock (2010-2017) 26 Watchmen (2019) 27 Line of Duty (2012-2021) 28 Friday Night Lights (2006-2011) 29 Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) 30 Girls (2012-2017) 31 True Detective (2014-2019) 32 Arrested Development (2003-2019) 33 The Good Wife (2009-2016) 34 The Bridge (2011-2018) 35 Fargo (2014-) 36= Downton Abbey (2010-2015) 36= Band of Brothers (2001) 38 The Handmaid's Tale (2017-) 39 The Office (US) (2005-2013) 40 Borgen (2010-2022) 41 Schitt's Creek (2015-2020) 42 Peep Show (2003-2015) 43 Money Heist (2017-2021) 44 Community (2009-2015) 45 The Good Fight (2017-) 46 Homeland (2011-2020) 47 Grey's Anatomy (2005-) 48 Inside No 9 (2014-) 49 The Bureau (2015-) 50 Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017) https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
Mrs America is an obvious omission, unless I missed it in the list. Peep Show should be way higher, certainly top 10. Fleabag continues to be absurdly over-rated. I'd put The Crown higher. I'd throw in Mrs Brown's Boys, too - mostly just to wind people up, but really it's no worse than Downton Abbey.
This is Us would be my biggest omission, I would definitely have it in the top 10.
Topping is the master of the box set reviews, he is always on point with those.
Comments
In other words, tax the feck out of CO2 emissions.
We think we've been having a free lunch since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Now the earth has presented us with the bill.
Because: there is no real limit to how much electricity can be produced by renewables + nuclear; this form involves less domestic infrastructure change than others and is therefor attractive; it doesn't explode; and the higher cost is now, not in the future when all the renewable/nuclear electricity is on stream in say 30-40 years time.
And even if there is a higher cost, if the science is right we are talking about the future of the planet, not the economy.
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/1508098/capital-gains-tax-national-insurance-contributions-rishi-sunak-autumn-budget-2021
Utterly shameless how they lobby against their readers interests.
Regardless of whether it’s the right or wrong thing to do, very few express readers will be troubled by raising CGT.
Is the £5k replacing this, a sleight of hand by the chancellor to actually save money ?
Home buyers face having to improve the energy efficiency of their new properties under the terms of their mortgage as part of government plans to decarbonise Britain’s housing stock.
Mortgage lenders will have to disclose the energy efficiency of homes they lend money for and set themselves targets to improve the insulation of buildings in their portfolio.
Ministers hope the plan will encourage lenders to fund homeowners to carry out green improvements when they move into a property, with the money spent added to mortgages and repaid through cheaper bills.
However, it will lead to fears that new buyers could find it hard to get a mortgage unless they commit to spending potentially thousands of pounds on home improvements.
The plan is contained in documents due to be published today that set out the government’s road map to reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 70 per cent by 2030.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/government-plans-to-link-mortgages-to-compulsory-green-home-improvements-0t7vhmwhn
We are going to need a LOT of electricity to do any of this in any case and we can't rely on wind. I am yet to see a realistic plan to fix this.
Laurence Fox is obviously determined, despite the endless comical setbacks he experiences. He seems to be willing to get sent to prison, in order to become a free speech martyr. I don't see that determination in someone like Piers Morgan. Fox is the right age and has the perfect backstory, being a remain voter, so he theoretically has very wide appeal. His acting skills are impressive and are transferring well in to his new role. The more people dismiss him, the better his prospects become, in my view.
One problem though is that Covid may get him. He is an anti vaxxer and a smoker.
Will my panels be enough ?
Also, he was nanny-in-chief during the pandemic. No restrictions were restrictive enough for Piers. I'd say that sits uneasily with the natural territory of the burn-the-woke party.
It may be a condition for your mortgage that the property meets a certain EPC rating and you may find it more difficult to get a mortgage or pay more if it does not.
It is a bit ruthless but I can see the appeal.
Many of the political classes, on the other hand…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-58932593
Their model looks like they expect to be losing money for a very long time, but happily they've raised enough money to do it, you can look forwards to cheaply delivered wine for at least a couple of years.
Either you think big in terms of world and government action, or it isn't going to work anyway. In which case it makes no difference.
33 like vs 44 dislike!
A few years ago it was Nigel Farage, then it was Boris Johnson.
If Johnson keeps listening to his young wife rather than his backbenchers on the green crap and wokery, then he’ll likely be deposed by his own side before another Farage turns up to oppose the Tories from the right.
I'm asking how producing hydrogen to heat homes will ever be economic versus doing so with green electricity.
It is holding the RedWall and the BlueWall which will determine whether Boris wins the next UK general election again or not, not Scotland
If you need to make £5k of improvements in the property, then having £5k spent over 25 years is a lot more affordable than finding the money immediately.
Plus presumably then this will filter through to the market as a free market solution whereby those who've invested themselves will see the value of their home go up as a result.
Anyone know if this is due to shortages or incompetence?
And having been involved in negotiating house sales for near 40 years I know how it works
Police investigations into allegations of child abuse against a former MP were marred by "a series of failings", a report has found.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) said Leicestershire Police officers "shut down" investigations into Lord Janner "without pursuing all inquiries".
It also criticised Leicestershire County Council's "sorry record of failures" over abuse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-58932593
And I think the chance of anyone significant splitting the centre right vote when we come to the actualities of an election when the government will either be led by Labour or Tory are small. The centre right is fairly good at tactical voting, and can within a short space of time put in a Tory government in one election, and ensure it comes near last in another (EU) one. Using that skill to put in the Lab/LD/SNP alliance is a long shot.
And given the current soaring costs of energy, I don't think this will be anything like as unpopular as HIPS.
I've never heard even a single BLM supporter or anyone on Sky or anything else say that in the UK.
I have heard people call Trump white supremacist. Me for starters and that's because Trump was. Trump is also not the West.
(Scientist hat on - presumably so, at high enough concentration, as it would be lower density than normal air, just like breathing in helium-enhanced air? But at sufficient concentrations to be noticeable bad things might happen?)
And solar need not be expensive, even for the UK on its own:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/22/submarine-cable-to-connect-10-5-gw-wind-solar-complex-in-morocco-to-the-uk-grid/
…Xlinks is planning to inject power into the UK for a CfD price of around £0.048 ($0.67)/kWh, which would be a bit more than around £0.040/kWh for current off-shore wind tenders and much less than the £0.0925/kWh for the controversial Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant currently under construction. “However, the supply of power would be similar to nuclear baseload as it would be able to deliver at least 8 hours during any peak demand for more than 363 days in the year,” he explained.
Overall, Xlinks expects to invest about £18 billion in the project. “We are not doing anything exceptional from a technological point of view…
Thanks for confirming.
I really don't know, it's a genuine question.
That's what it looks like, but otoh the £5k is now, not over a number of years.
On the upside, it is a lot simpler than the RHI calculations, where to maximise the difference to get the most you do the 'starting' EPC before you do any work at all.
Laurence Fox will probably take on the 'green crap' once he moves on from his anti vaxxer phase. BoJo is just giving him an open goal on this front.
But I don't think there is anything like that level of sympathy for Fox's line and the liberty-including-freedom-from-vaccines stuff. It feels cranky and runs against the very large majorities in every poll that want tougher controls on the pandemic.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/19/manchester-arena-bombers-brother-flees-uk-summoned-give-evidence/
51 Small Axe (2020)
52 This is England 86, 88 and 90 (2010-2015)
53 Call My Agent! (2015-2020)
54 Happy Valley (2014-)
55 The Shield (2002-2008)
56 The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019)
57 The Young Pope (2016)
58 Dark (2017-2020)
59 The Underground Railroad (2021)
60 House of Cards (2013-2018)
61 Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008)
62= The Good Place (2016-2020)
62= Pose (2018-2021)
64 Detectorists (2014-2017)
65 Orange is the New Black (2013-2019)
66 Mare of Easttown (2021)
67 RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-)
68 Stranger Things (2016-)
69 24 (2001-2010)
70 Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)
71 Enlightened (2011-2013)
72 Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)
73 Planet Earth (2006)
74 Utopia (2013-2014)
75 Babylon Berlin (2017-)
76 Rick and Morty (2013-)
77 American Crime Story (2016-)
78 The Killing (Denmark) (2007-2012)
79 Mindhunter (2017-2019)
80 House (2004-2012)
81 OJ: Made in America (2016)
82 Big Little Lies (2017-2019)
83 Insecure (2016-2021)
84= Normal People (2020)
84= Narcos (2015-2017)
86 How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014)
87 The Comeback (2005-2014)
88 The OA (2016-2019)
89 Dexter (2006-2013)
90 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-)
91 Westworld (2016-)
92 Show Me a Hero (2015)
93 Treme (2010-2013)
94 Louie (2010-2015)
95 Luther (2010-2019)
96 Catastrophe (2015-2019)
97 Hannibal (2013-2015)
98 Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019)
99 Steven Universe (2013-2020)
100 The Queen's Gambit (2020)
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
1 The Wire (2002-2008)
2 Mad Men (2007-2015)
3 Breaking Bad (2008-2013)
4 Fleabag (2016-2019)
5 Game of Thrones (2011-2019)
6 I May Destroy You (2020)
7 The Leftovers (2014-2017)
8 The Americans (2013-2018)
9 The Office (UK) (2001-2003)
10 Succession (2018-)
11 BoJack Horseman (2014-2020)
12 Six Feet Under (2001-2005)
13 Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
14 Atlanta (2016-)
15 Chernobyl (2019)
16 The Crown (2016-)
17 30 Rock (2006-2013)
18 Deadwood (2004-2006)
19 Lost (2004-2010)
20 The Thick of It (2005-2012)
21 Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-)
22 Black Mirror (2011-)
23 Better Call Saul (2015-2022)
24 Veep (2012-2019)
25 Sherlock (2010-2017)
26 Watchmen (2019)
27 Line of Duty (2012-2021)
28 Friday Night Lights (2006-2011)
29 Parks and Recreation (2009-2015)
30 Girls (2012-2017)
31 True Detective (2014-2019)
32 Arrested Development (2003-2019)
33 The Good Wife (2009-2016)
34 The Bridge (2011-2018)
35 Fargo (2014-)
36= Downton Abbey (2010-2015)
36= Band of Brothers (2001)
38 The Handmaid's Tale (2017-)
39 The Office (US) (2005-2013)
40 Borgen (2010-2022)
41 Schitt's Creek (2015-2020)
42 Peep Show (2003-2015)
43 Money Heist (2017-2021)
44 Community (2009-2015)
45 The Good Fight (2017-)
46 Homeland (2011-2020)
47 Grey's Anatomy (2005-)
48 Inside No 9 (2014-)
49 The Bureau (2015-)
50 Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
Spotty though, as other areas seem to be walk-in no problems.
Trying to get a feel for what is actually happening.
For one thing the opinion polls have consistently shown strong support for environmental measures. Which wasn't the case for Europe.
For another thing, decarbonising is happening and then when its done its done. Its not like people are suddenly going to start taking up high-polluting measures again once they've gone when they've no reason to do so. Dealing with the climate issue also will negate it as an issue - once we have clean electricity why not use as much electricity as you want and can afford if its clean? Which will show the difference between those who really want to tackle the issue, and the hairshirt brigade who want to abuse the issue to further their own agenda.
Whereas for Europe the issue was never going to go away. Integrating into Europe didn't make the European issue go away because the problems never went away and we just had "more Europe" as the solution.
Not comparable at all.
I think a good point of that proposal is that works can be combined with normal decorating / work of newly purchased houses etc, prices will adjust according to what it will cost, and finally we will get some market value placed on energy efficiency.
These are bullet points from Scottish Govt proposals:
- Net Zero target for heating buildings is 2045
- 2030 target to have 68% lower emissions (from heating buildings) than 2020 level, requiring over 1,000,000 homes to be made zero carbon this decade.
- Vague statement that "most" homes must be EPC C or better by 2030
- More definite statement that all homes (where feasible and cost-effective) must be EPC C or better by 2033
- Legislation to be introduced in 2025 requiring any home changing ownership or tenancy to be EPC C or better at point of sale
- Earlier date set at 2028 for all private rental homes to be EPC C or better
- Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties
- Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
*of the sane, find better tech variety, not of the hair-shirt variety
Scottish MPs therefore count no more than MPs from any other part of the UK in UK general elections.
The Tories have far more MPs in the South and Red Wall than they do in Scotland, in fact the Tories have fewer MPs in Scotland than in Wales or in any region of England.
So obviously to preserve their majority the Tories need to look beyond Scotland, Scotland makes little difference to their prospects
Absolutely it makes more sense for renovations to be done by the buyer not the seller.
So if someone is broke and wants to sell their home before they default on the mortgage, how are they supposed to make their home EPC C or better before they put it up for sale?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jhQsp4Ow0A
If you cut it by austere means as the zealots want telling people not to fly, not to travel, not to live, not to enjoy life - then yes its utterly futile.
If you cut it by investing in new technologies that can then be sold to the Chinese [or stolen by the Chinese] so they copy us then that works.
I think you seriously underestimate quite how thick Laurence Fox is. He makes Farage look like an intellectual titan.
Also we have the question of flats.
I think it might be using an alternative -aster suffix from Latin that represents a diminuitive, along with the Latin word for 'comet', cometa, to just mean "little comet", for the same reason that it's also known as a Ying-Yang moth - ie due to the pattern on its wings
Coupled with the blunder of not vaccinating kids during the summer, the powers that be have screwed this up.
Is it still copper piping with push fit elbows and tees ?
Mine is about 10mm !!
The nation has got to look beyond gas delivery and move towards electrical heating for everything with electricity generated by SMR/mini-nukes and renewable energy with compressed air battery storage.
In the end hydrogen will prove to be unfeasible due to the hugely explosive nature and inability to safely transport and pipe it to homes it as we do with natural gas.
Still banging on about vaccine success, mind.
Topping is the master of the box set reviews, he is always on point with those.