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Johnson’s big HS3 gamble – politicalbetting.com
Johnson’s big HS3 gamble – politicalbetting.com
As seen above six leading regional newspapers from Tyneside to Manchester all had similar front pages as part of a coordinated last ditch effort to save Northern Powerhouse Rail which looks as though it will be ditched on Thursday by the government.
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We Northerners will not forget the Harrying Of The North.
I said last night the big gain from high speed rail is taking fast trains off suburban services. There's a lot more potential to do that with NPR than HS2.
25 years later the orange and white is still unmistakable.
My view - and this is blether rather than me knowing what I'm talking about - is that the MEN is more influential in GM than any of the national papers. I'm sure the same is true of the Echo on Merseyside, the Chronicle in the North East, the Yorkshire Post in Yorkshire, and so on.
This makes me happy and slightly proud for reasons I can't quite place.
https://twitter.com/dtsp17/status/1460549567120826368?s=21
The Polish forces not taking any shit. I thought they’d buckle. Not gonna happen
Which means two other possible outcomes. Lukashenko/Putin give up and send the migrants back to Syria, or so many of the migrants start dying in the wet and cold they disperse of their own accord
It is the main reason I’ve never done drugs.
Time for a bit of a tangent.
The Netherlands is one of the countries, alongside the UK, that has been moving upwards towards the great race to the middle that we are seeing in corporate tax across the developed world.
It's one of the most remarkable trends over the last 3 or 4 years and one that not only waters down any meaningful tax rate arbitrage between countries but also potentially renders government use of tax incentives for investment toothless.
The NL has for a few years had a mainstream rate of around 25% (25.5% until recently), but was able to make use of a number of tools to give MNCs lower effective rates. With the exception of the innovation box pretty much all of these are no longer available due to BEPS, EU state aid challenges and a general change in the ethos of the government.
The UK as we know is raising its main CT rate from 19% to 25%. The patent box was one of our principal innovation incentives, alongside R&D credits. The qualification rules changed following BEPS and really kicked in this year, making it harder to access.
Meanwhile the rest of Europe is cutting rates. France will be at 25% from next year (plus a few small surcharges). Italy is now at 24% plus their IRAP which takes the rate to around 25-26%. Spain is now 25%. Belgium is now 25%. Korea is 25%. And, most remarkably after the falling through of much of the original Biden tax plan, the US is likely to remain at 21% + state taxes i.e. an effective rate of....25%. Only Germany (c.29-31% depending on location) and Japan (30.62%) remain outliers.
And BEPS 2.0 will put a floor under even the low tax countries including the SIS (Switzerland, Ireland and Singapore). It introduces a global minimum tax from 2023 and Ireland, for example, has already undertaken to increase its mainstream rate from 12.5% to 15%. Singapore will withdraw its current tax incentive rates. Switzerland has already reformed corporate tax to give rates from the low to high teens.
What does this mean for government use of tax to incentivise FDI? It will change massively, and already has done to some extent. There is little rate arbitrage left, and you can't go below 15%. So we are seeing governments focusing instead on direct subsidy, regulatory incentives (e.g. planning exemptions) and non-CT tax incentives on payroll tax or indirect taxes - see Switzerland's recent announcement it will drop all customs duties on industrial products.
Short highlight version, the lines are at (over) capacity so we need new lines and if we have new lines they may as well be fast.
Absolutely true story
This is especially so in the constituencies that the Conservatives have or could win.
As apparently does Big_G.
https://twitter.com/alemannoEU/status/1460502047552323584
Boris promised HS2 and HS3 - and is now backtracking from those commitments. Ones that helped him win the Red Wall seats in the north.
'Two women — including Tory MP Caroline Nokes — have accused Boris Johnson’s father Stanley of inappropriately touching them.
Ms Nokes, who is the chair of the parliamentary women and equalities committee, said the 81-year-old smacked her “on the backside about as hard as he could” during a party conference in 2003.
The elder Mr Johnson declined to comment about her allegation made to Sky News, other than to say he has “no recollection of Caroline Nokes at all”.'
The prime minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, has been accused of inappropriately touching a former cabinet minister as well as a senior political journalist.
Not impressed. For sure, report the story - and it's very much of interest to hear what Tory Party conferences used to be like (I hope they aren't like that now) - but saying "PM's dad..." is pretty disgraceful. It doesn't make the story any more significant.
NPR High Speed Liverpool > Manchester Airport. This connects to HS2 for southern access towards Birmingham and London, and joins it northbound towards Manchester
NPR High Speed Manchester > Leeds. A new Pennines base tunnel connecting high speed lines at either end, connecting into HS2 into the new station in Leeds
The idea being that we can massively speed up travel between the big northern cities and add huge additional capacity for local travel. Currently through services are slow and hamper the ability to run sufficient local trains.
What appears to be happening is a binning of this whole project. Instead they will dress up the existing Transpennine Route Upgrade and call it NPR. Standby for years of disruption, bustitution and cancelled trains - where the outcome is not much extra capacity or speed. They aren't even committing to electrification - because its so massively complex and expensive where the line passes by people's front doors at Mossley and through the Standedge tunnel.
If the EU cuts off the money, that changes. Especially if it is combined with pressure on Poland to let migrants in
Nevertheless, Leythers never tire of whinging that they are the largest town in England without a train station.
Their MP too.
How does that last relate to Switzerland and their EU / Single Market relationship?
“I’ve had messages from people at Leicester, at Middlesex, at Nottinghamshire, so from quite a few,” says Rafiq. “Some people are still pretty scared to talk about it. The one reoccurrence was the word ‘Paki’ was used a lot.”
I have no confidence whatsoever that this is what will happen, however.
From the ONS, latest figures, religion in GB from 2011-2018:
Where that has been done, that is what happens.
https://twitter.com/kryscina_by/status/1460561927839563784?s=21
https://twitter.com/HannaLiubakova/status/1460146046286405632
‘No way I’m going back to Iraq’: Iraqi Kurds flee to Belarus
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/15/iraqi-kurds-perilous-journey-in-belarus
Same situation as when the UK negotiates zero tariffs with 3rd countries.
Perhaps you can tell us how much improving public transport would cost do create an alternative.
And how it would be improved for all the people living in housing in the conurbation sprawls and semi-rural areas.
The answer is that it cannot and will not beat the flexibility and utility of car travel.
That's the reality.
Deal with it.
In summary, the less white the UK becomes in turn generally the more religious the UK will start to become again (albeit we did have a fair number of Polish Catholics pre Brexit coming to the UK)
Cold symptoms got worse again yesterday evening. However I slept much better, not disturbed by fever, and slept through to about 9.30.
I now have a pulse oxymeter. It was a healthy 99 yesterday afternoon however it was 97 yesterday evening and I have just tested at 95. Hope this isn't a trend, however I don't feel breathless and haven't really been coughing.
But will the Belarusians let the migrants go? Check this photo of Belarus soldiers behind the migrants. No way back.
https://twitter.com/wasikmaciej/status/1460562575066910721?s=21
Sane, rational human beings completely ignoring facts = bad
It doesn't sound sexual assault territory, and indeed many will find it absolutely trivial and even borderline funny, but I just don't understand the brain chemistry of blokes who behave like this. Where does it come from?
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ff-tds-would-not-exclude-sinn-féin-coalition-after-next-election-1.4478483
Ideally he would have been punched in the face the first time he did it and would have learned to stop. Perhaps it's not too late to start his training.
I am offended by the fact that he was on the receiving end of racism - not by the fact that he is calling it out in public.
...the armored cars rumbling past wooden houses offer nothing to local residents, nothing to help them cope with the surreal situation they find themselves in. The Polish government’s official policy is that no one gets through, so nothing has to be done. In fact, almost everyone in the area has encountered starving, disoriented people from all kinds of places—Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon—struggling across their fields and gardens, hiding behind trees. Sometimes they have become too weak to walk, or are too frightened to ask for help. How are they supposed to react? Wappa told me that she simply finds it impossible to do nothing: “If I know that someone is dying outside my fence, outside my garden, my town … I have no option. I can’t allow someone to die of hunger, thirst, or cold right next to me.” Besides, she said, “it’s not normal that saving someone’s life might be a crime.”..
In any case as I already said FF and FG both grew out of SF anyway, all parties in the Republic are products of the Irish War of Independence. However on economics FF and FG are closer together than they are with SF even if FF is slightly less economically neoliberal than FG and FF is also more socially conservative than SF, indeed more socially conservative than FG too
How is anyone to know if and when this arbitrary rule will be extended to the P word and beyond? They can’t. So they are understandably super cautious
I recall predicting many years ago that one day racist terms would be seen as much more toxic and offensive than swear words in the 1950s
And so it is. Perhaps that is a good thing, but my inner libertarian still thinks “they are just words, however stupid and ugly”
Whether that is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, but the facts are the facts.
Mr Rafiq is testifying to the committee and his powerful descriptions of the abuse suffered and its impact is neutered by constantly beeping it out.
It sticks.
Absolutely stinks.
Hopefully there will be electoral damage for Johnson in those new northern marginals.
Also, a crass comparison. Poland, for all its coarse politics, is nothing close to Nazi Germany
That is another great piece by Anne Applebaum however. She’s a great writer. Fascinating that 9000 of these migrants have already made it to Germany. How many of them will push on to Calais?
Most FF voters would go to FG in such a scenario, leaving FG and SF as by far the 2 largest parties with FG as the main party of the centre right and SF the main party of the left.
FF doing a deal with SF would be as bad for FF as the LDs doing a deal with the Tories was for the LDs. The only benefit for FF is they would become effective kingmakers in Irish politics between FG and SF going forward but they would be a far smaller party than they were
(NB thanks to Christopher Chope the bit about it being reversed didn't work out that way) https://www.conservativehome.com/highlights/2021/11/the-moggcast-the-paterson-aftermath-rees-mogg-backs-extending-the-right-of-recall-by-making-it-broader-and-higher.html https://twitter.com/hzeffman/status/1460571688786182150/photo/1
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/11/15/andrew-bailey-incredibly-uneasy-surge-inflation/
"Mr Bailey voted to hold interest rates at 0.1pc at this month’s meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), but called the decision “a very close call”."