Had a chat with the local butcher the other day. High end place - expensive but top quality meat.
The chap at the counter laughed when I asked - apparently the problems are/were in the low end of the business. The turkeys that when you cook them emit a gallon of salt water, which they've been pumped up with... The workers in that end of the business are treated just how you'd imagine, apparently.
So, at a guess, they are seeing a dislocation of ultra-cheap, seasonal, hire-then-fire workers.
High end butcher in you don't want to go near that cheap meat shocker.
I've bought turkeys (and much of the meat we buy) there for 15 years. There is no chance of me buying one of the supermarket turkeys.
He was making a point about the low end of the industry treating the workers exactly as you would expect. Which has led into labour shortages in a number of places.....
My mother-in-law was very confused the first Christmas I was married and bought a turkey - she was poor and had always bought the cheap turkeys, in this country. She was in charge of the turkey.... cooked for hours - where was the pond of salt water?
My next great book discovery, after David Skelton's The New Snobbery (did I mention that - plus I wonder what Skelton is thinking after yesterday's announcement) is Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel recommended to me by a friend last week.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
People keen to use Rafiq's antisemitic tweets to undermine his testimony about YCCC and people who disagree that racism in our society is a serious problem.
If we're talking overlaps I reckon that one is probably quite sizeable.
I'm one of the people strongly criticising Rafiq. And to make it clear, I am not trying to undermine his testimony about YCCC. The obviously had a corrosive culture at times (I heard a bit of the committee, and ISTR he said it was fine at times, seemingly depending on who was in the team/captain), and its reaction (cover-up) to the abuse was awful.
But it is not useful to ignore what Rafiq himself did, either in 2010 or 2011. Were his tweets messages abusing a coach in 2010 a sign of a corrosive culture at the club that he himself was part of? I'd argue yes.
If you want to get to the bottom of what was going on at YCCC, then you need to look at everything - and that involves Rafiq himself.
One thing I'd add: there are a lot of young kids who are hopefuls in high-profile sports. Most have their dreams dashed and are unceremoniously dumped. But along with sporting help, the ones who make it should also get help in schooling and dealing with the somewhat odd pressures top-level competitive sports impose on young people.
The coach insults were tweets - I'm guessing he thought only his followers could/would see them.
They were aimed at an England U19 coach, not at a Yorkshire coach. I believe he was punished by Yorkshire for them; I'd be shocked if any player weren't for that kind of behaviour.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
It's useful having people on here who support their party 99.9% of the time, so you can calibrate how much trouble the party is in as they lose each of their loyalists in turn. I can't remember the details but I think there were a couple of occasions when even HYUFD couldn't come up with anything supportive to say about some particularly shambolic episode, and it was a good signal of a u-turn IIRC. (I may be wrong about that, I can't remember). I would also add that I personally don't see party loyalty as a bad thing in and of itself, as long as it's not taken to an absurd degree. What's odd at the current juncture I think is that the PM himself doesn't seem to be loyal to anything except his own interests.
That last bit is what makes HYUFD's utter loyalty to the Tory party so funny as he once again tries to believe in 6 Impossible things before breakfast
"It's very good jam," said the Queen. "Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate." "You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day."
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
It won't. Most Tory voters would happily scrap HS2 full stop.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
It's useful having people on here who support their party 99.9% of the time, so you can calibrate how much trouble the party is in as they lose each of their loyalists in turn. I can't remember the details but I think there were a couple of occasions when even HYUFD couldn't come up with anything supportive to say about some particularly shambolic episode, and it was a good signal of a u-turn IIRC. (I may be wrong about that, I can't remember). I would also add that I personally don't see party loyalty as a bad thing in and of itself, as long as it's not taken to an absurd degree. What's odd at the current juncture I think is that the PM himself doesn't seem to be loyal to anything except his own interests.
That last bit is what makes HYUFD's utter loyalty to the Tory party so funny.
I think that the cynicism in Johnson's relationship with his party goes both ways. Whereas HYUFD's relationship is actually quite a healthy one. If the Tories had more loyal footsoldiers like him they wouldn't have to spend quite so much time pimping themselves out to every passing shady billionaire in order to win elections and the whole country would benefit.
What's funny is that I don't think HYUFD sees your post the way I do.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
It won't. Most Tory voters would happily scrap HS2 full stop.
Do you have any polling from when that Mr Stephenson proposed to demolish half Camden and Euston Square to build this new fangled railroad from London to Birmingham? It would be interesting to see how the Tory squire subsamples play out.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
If the plan is to kick things past the 2023 election then it may work for Boris and co.
If, however, as I suspect will happen Network Rail start reporting that the plans cannot be achieved (because remember they haven't yet been paid to validate them) the reaction may be different.
It really does depend on what Boris manages to deliver in the next 2 years because if the Red Wall voters don't see obvious benefits I cannot see Boris (and his Red Wall MPs) getting a second chance.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
What details do they see? Voters in Devon see a new passenger rail line opening tomorrow. One of the problems with HS2 is that it is a long-term project, and the improvements it offers are far in the future. A few much cheaper pieces of meat thrown to local areas might be much better electorally - if not for the country in the mid- and long-term.
Also note that today he is on a Sprinter train (same age as a pacer but the bus seats were replaced with slightly better ones as they served longer routes)
Had a chat with the local butcher the other day. High end place - expensive but top quality meat.
The chap at the counter laughed when I asked - apparently the problems are/were in the low end of the business. The turkeys that when you cook them emit a gallon of salt water, which they've been pumped up with... The workers in that end of the business are treated just how you'd imagine, apparently.
So, at a guess, they are seeing a dislocation of ultra-cheap, seasonal, hire-then-fire workers.
High end butcher in you don't want to go near that cheap meat shocker.
I've bought turkeys (and much of the meat we buy) there for 15 years. There is no chance of me buying one of the supermarket turkeys.
He was making a point about the low end of the industry treating the workers exactly as you would expect. Which has led into labour shortages in a number of places.....
My mother-in-law was very confused the first Christmas I was married and bought a turkey - she was poor and had always bought the cheap turkeys, in this country. She was in charge of the turkey.... cooked for hours - where was the pond of salt water?
Yes there is a lot of water in a lot of commercial birds.
As for Christmas, Turkey into the bottom oven overnight does it for me.
Oh and by the way I hope you didn't think my post yesterday about the charts was me being anything other than grateful for them. Just that your shorter post with a summary was excellent.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
If the plan is to kick things past the 2023 election then it may work for Boris and co.
If, however, as I suspect will happen Network Rail start reporting that the plans cannot be achieved (because remember they haven't yet been paid to validate them) the reaction may be different.
It really does depend on what Boris manages to deliver in the next 2 years because if the Red Wall voters don't see obvious benefits I cannot see Boris (and his Red Wall MPs) getting a second chance.
Which of the following mindsets prevail amongst the Red Wallers will be crucial.
'Voted for Boris. Best thing I ever did. Feel liberated!'
Andrew Marr @AndrewMarr9 · 1h Personal announcement. After 21 years, I have decided to move on from the BBC.l leave behind many happy memories and wonderful colleagues. But from the New Year I am moving to Global to write and present political and cultural shows, and to write for newspapers
"In the UK there has been an incidence of around 400 for months, but not nearly the same panic as in Germany. The hospitals are not at their limit because of covid patients. The shortage of intensive care beds in Germany seems to me to be the result of a major political failure."
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
It won't. Most Tory voters would happily scrap HS2 full stop.
Correction: most pre-2019 era Tory voters would happily scrap HS2. 2019 Tory voters I'm not so sure and neither are you.
You are living in a pre-2019 south of England Tory bubble. You need to go on a cruise around the highways and byways of The North (cruise, obvs, because you can't get there by train).
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
He is not worse, but he is as bad as. If he was prepared to write that stuff on twitter what was he saying in his normal conversations with his friends?
The other thing that puzzled me if he hated Yorkshire so much why did he return there in 2016 for another spell?
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
What details do they see? Voters in Devon see a new passenger rail line opening tomorrow. One of the problems with HS2 is that it is a long-term project, and the improvements it offers are far in the future. A few much cheaper pieces of meat thrown to local areas might be much better electorally - if not for the country in the mid- and long-term.
There is no meat - my biggest problem with the announcement is that it offers 2 completely contradictory items (more local trains / faster trains) when without capacity increases (not possible because it's the same track) only 1 or the other is possible...
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
As I said yesterday, if they were going to scrap anything (as I think they should have scrapped the whole thing) then they should have scrapped the southern portion from London to Birmingham and kept the Northern parts linking cities.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
I think his racist messages are less interesting than the abusive tweets.
We were urged to believe a few days ago that Rafiq's cricketing career opportunities were severely curtailed, primarily because of racism at YCCC and in cricket in general.
Not once did we hear that when he'd made it to the fringe of the England set up he foully abused one of his coaches, and the England set up, in a public internet space.
We heard instead that 30% of youth cricketers are Asian, but only 3% of professional cricketers are (or something like that) - so cricket MUST be racist, and Rafiq MUST have been the victim of it because he didn't make it to the very highest level.
How many white players could have progressed an England career beyond an identical tirade?
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
It is an interesting point. I think people were wondering about your use of "anti-semitism" on the one hand, and "racism" on the other. To invoke my new favourite book:
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”.
Now I have no doubt you were doing nothing of the sort - you seem the kind of left wing type that merely uses anti-semitism as a synonym for racism - but your fellow leftwing travellers aren't always as precise in the demarcation.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
What details do they see? Voters in Devon see a new passenger rail line opening tomorrow. One of the problems with HS2 is that it is a long-term project, and the improvements it offers are far in the future. A few much cheaper pieces of meat thrown to local areas might be much better electorally - if not for the country in the mid- and long-term.
There is no meat - my biggest problem with the announcement is that it offers 2 completely contradictory items (more local trains / faster trains) when without capacity increases (not possible because it's the same track) only 1 or the other is possible...
I understand that - I've been making the capacity point on here for a decade.
However, HS2 is years in the future. In the case of phase 2, at least a decade and a half. That's a long time in politics, and for the voters. What does count politically are the improvements people see actually happen - and things like the Okehampton line reopening is a classic example.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
It won't. Most Tory voters would happily scrap HS2 full stop.
Correction: most pre-2019 era Tory voters would happily scrap HS2. 2019 Tory voters I'm not so sure and neither are you.
You are living in a pre-2019 south of England Tory bubble. You need to go on a cruise around the highways and byways of The North (cruise, obvs, because you can't get there by train).
Voters in the Midlands too backed scrapping it and plenty of Red Wall voters there
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
As I said yesterday, if they were going to scrap anything (as I think they should have scrapped the whole thing) then they should have scrapped the southern portion from London to Birmingham and kept the Northern parts linking cities.
And I think you're utterly wrong on that - as we've discussed many times in the past.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
It is an interesting point. I think people were wondering about your use of "anti-semitism" on the one hand, and "racism" on the other. To invoke my new favourite book:
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”.
Now I have no doubt you were doing nothing of the sort - you seem the kind of left wing type that merely uses anti-semitism as a synonym for racism - but your fellow leftwing travellers aren't always as precise in the demarcation.
I think the problem that some have with anti-semitism is that it's victims are a bit... successful. The stereotype of the rich Jew etc..
And of course, you have Israel, where the narrative is that the Jews are the winners, the oppressors etc.
So you are asking people to empathise with rich oppressors. Who are winning.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
What details do they see? Voters in Devon see a new passenger rail line opening tomorrow. One of the problems with HS2 is that it is a long-term project, and the improvements it offers are far in the future. A few much cheaper pieces of meat thrown to local areas might be much better electorally - if not for the country in the mid- and long-term.
There is no meat - my biggest problem with the announcement is that it offers 2 completely contradictory items (more local trains / faster trains) when without capacity increases (not possible because it's the same track) only 1 or the other is possible...
I understand that - I've been making the capacity point on here for a decade.
However, HS2 is years in the future. In the case of phase 2, at least a decade and a half. That's a long time in politics, and for the voters. What does count politically are the improvements people see actually happen - and things like the Okehampton line reopening is a classic example.
Nothing in the plan announced yesterday will be finished (or even completely planned and costed) by the next election.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
People keen to use Rafiq's antisemitic tweets to undermine his testimony about YCCC and people who disagree that racism in our society is a serious problem.
If we're talking overlaps I reckon that one is probably quite sizeable.
I'm one of the people strongly criticising Rafiq. And to make it clear, I am not trying to undermine his testimony about YCCC. The obviously had a corrosive culture at times (I heard a bit of the committee, and ISTR he said it was fine at times, seemingly depending on who was in the team/captain), and its reaction (cover-up) to the abuse was awful.
But it is not useful to ignore what Rafiq himself did, either in 2010 or 2011. Were his tweets messages abusing a coach in 2010 a sign of a corrosive culture at the club that he himself was part of? I'd argue yes.
If you want to get to the bottom of what was going on at YCCC, then you need to look at everything - and that involves Rafiq himself.
One thing I'd add: there are a lot of young kids who are hopefuls in high-profile sports. Most have their dreams dashed and are unceremoniously dumped. But along with sporting help, the ones who make it should also get help in schooling and dealing with the somewhat odd pressures top-level competitive sports impose on young people.
No, it shouldn't be ignored. And it isn't, certainly not as regards the media, although I don't know how it will play specifically into whatever investigation they do and any resulting reforms. And, no, I didn't think for a second you were in that 'ha ha ha he's a fucking racist too, so we can forget about all his bullshit' camp.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
It won't. Most Tory voters would happily scrap HS2 full stop.
Correction: most pre-2019 era Tory voters would happily scrap HS2. 2019 Tory voters I'm not so sure and neither are you.
You are living in a pre-2019 south of England Tory bubble. You need to go on a cruise around the highways and byways of The North (cruise, obvs, because you can't get there by train).
Voters in the Midlands too backed scrapping it and plenty of Red Wall voters there
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
What details do they see? Voters in Devon see a new passenger rail line opening tomorrow. One of the problems with HS2 is that it is a long-term project, and the improvements it offers are far in the future. A few much cheaper pieces of meat thrown to local areas might be much better electorally - if not for the country in the mid- and long-term.
There is no meat - my biggest problem with the announcement is that it offers 2 completely contradictory items (more local trains / faster trains) when without capacity increases (not possible because it's the same track) only 1 or the other is possible...
I understand that - I've been making the capacity point on here for a decade.
However, HS2 is years in the future. In the case of phase 2, at least a decade and a half. That's a long time in politics, and for the voters. What does count politically are the improvements people see actually happen - and things like the Okehampton line reopening is a classic example.
Nothing in the plan announced yesterday will be finished (or even completely planned and costed) by the next election.
No - and that's the nature of infrastructure. But it's not just about this plan - it's about all the little projects already being planned around the network that the government can point at. And that's countrywide.
I'm not saying it's wise; I'm not saying it's good for the country. It *may* be good politics.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
People keen to use Rafiq's antisemitic tweets to undermine his testimony about YCCC and people who disagree that racism in our society is a serious problem.
If we're talking overlaps I reckon that one is probably quite sizeable.
Is there one covering those who complain of islamophobia but who are anti-Semitic themselves?
Perfectly possible to be both. We don't need to be virginal innocents to be deserving of respect.
"In the UK there has been an incidence of around 400 for months, but not nearly the same panic as in Germany. The hospitals are not at their limit because of covid patients. The shortage of intensive care beds in Germany seems to me to be the result of a major political failure."
It's the sudden nature of their rise that's the real issue for Germany and much of Europe. We have a fairly stable hospitalisation funnel which has stayed between 5k and 7k for inpatients for England for most of the summer and autumn, it's currently falling despite our high level of cases which is probably a pretty good sign that the booster programme is working.
I also think there's an unnecessary level of panic in Europe. They don't need lockdowns and the rest of it but they do need to tell people that everyone is going to get COVID whether or not you want to you will get it and that means the only way to not get severe symptoms is to get vaccinated. Portugal, Spain and I think even the UK have been pretty successful with this messaging. Here it's clear that 10% of adults are willing to take their chances with being infected and no amount of poking and prodding will get them over the line so locking down to protect them isn't necessarily going to prevent them from getting it.
In most European countries they haven't faced up to this basic fact that we will all get COVID, probably more than once and sometimes that will result in unvaccinated people and vaccinated older people dying.
I wonder whether these countries would change their unlockdown steps knowing now what they do about exit waves and seeing our example, or would they steadfastly stick to the same dogma of keeping cases down at any cost. I worry that the latter view still prevails in most of Europe and they will, once again, try and keep cases down when they come out of lockdown in April/May 2022.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
As I said yesterday, if they were going to scrap anything (as I think they should have scrapped the whole thing) then they should have scrapped the southern portion from London to Birmingham and kept the Northern parts linking cities.
And I think you're utterly wrong on that - as we've discussed many times in the past.
Indeed. And yet I am confident that if we are around in 20 years time or so I will be able to point out that I was right both on the costs of the project and its failure to deliver any of the claimed improvements to rail services or regional GDPs. It is a pointless white elephant that was already obsolete long before Covid started to make us rethink our whole work model.
I would love to see us build more train lines. I think trains are great. But build low (er) speed freight lines to increase capacity not unneeded high speed passenger lines.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
It is an interesting point. I think people were wondering about your use of "anti-semitism" on the one hand, and "racism" on the other. To invoke my new favourite book:
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”.
Now I have no doubt you were doing nothing of the sort - you seem the kind of left wing type that merely uses anti-semitism as a synonym for racism - but your fellow leftwing travellers aren't always as precise in the demarcation.
I think the problem that some have with anti-semitism is that it's victims are a bit... successful. The stereotype of the rich Jew etc..
And of course, you have Israel, where the narrative is that the Jews are the winners, the oppressors etc.
So you are asking people to empathise with rich oppressors. Who are winning.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
It is an interesting point. I think people were wondering about your use of "anti-semitism" on the one hand, and "racism" on the other. To invoke my new favourite book:
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”.
Now I have no doubt you were doing nothing of the sort - you seem the kind of left wing type that merely uses anti-semitism as a synonym for racism - but your fellow leftwing travellers aren't always as precise in the demarcation.
I think the problem that some have with anti-semitism is that it's victims are a bit... successful. The stereotype of the rich Jew etc..
And of course, you have Israel, where the narrative is that the Jews are the winners, the oppressors etc.
So you are asking people to empathise with rich oppressors. Who are winning.
Dave is also very good on this. For example you say yourself "the stereotype of the rich Jew". I have no idea, stats-wise what the breakdown is of Jews' wealth vs any particular metric but it is a stereotype.
But yes you describe the Left's journey to champions of Israel (underdog, post-WWII, let's all go to work on a Kibbutz) to believing them to be a vile, oppressive regime which, as per that tweet earlier, controls even our saintly Priti.
(NOTE: not all my favourite books are written by people called Dave. Although Dave Mantel's latest and final of the trilogy is a cracker.)
I might be quoting from Baddiel's book on occasion, should it be relevant to the discussion.
Baddiel writes very eloquently on the subject of anti-semitism.
It's my first acquaintance with his writings. I had planned to go to see the (much acclaimed) play he wrote about his dad's dementia but I never got there.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
What hypocrisy. Has Rafiq made claims to be a saint? Has Rafiq and his gang pinned poor white boys down and forced Halal meat down their throats? Has he spent years making endless comments about whitey designed to belittle them?
The harsh reality is that some people are desperate to defend the racists and show the paki to be a liar so that they can justify more racism.
Hang on. Criticising Rafiq is *not* the same as defending the people, and behaviour, he was complaining about.
That's right. With a slight trepidation (since yesterday I was misconstrued by some) the following is how I see this -
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
It is an interesting point. I think people were wondering about your use of "anti-semitism" on the one hand, and "racism" on the other. To invoke my new favourite book:
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”.
Now I have no doubt you were doing nothing of the sort - you seem the kind of left wing type that merely uses anti-semitism as a synonym for racism - but your fellow leftwing travellers aren't always as precise in the demarcation.
I think the problem that some have with anti-semitism is that it's victims are a bit... successful. The stereotype of the rich Jew etc..
And of course, you have Israel, where the narrative is that the Jews are the winners, the oppressors etc.
So you are asking people to empathise with rich oppressors. Who are winning.
For the first time in about 18 centuries.
I don't think they're quite all the way there yet.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
People keen to use Rafiq's antisemitic tweets to undermine his testimony about YCCC and people who disagree that racism in our society is a serious problem.
If we're talking overlaps I reckon that one is probably quite sizeable.
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”. Anti-semitic tropes are everywhere – yet, he argues, few of those who consider themselves alert to racism notice, let alone care."
It's meant to be pretty good. But aren't you sometimes tempted to seek out books that argue against a view you already hold?
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
People keen to use Rafiq's antisemitic tweets to undermine his testimony about YCCC and people who disagree that racism in our society is a serious problem.
If we're talking overlaps I reckon that one is probably quite sizeable.
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”. Anti-semitic tropes are everywhere – yet, he argues, few of those who consider themselves alert to racism notice, let alone care."
It's meant to be pretty good. But aren't you sometimes tempted to seek out books that argue against a view you already hold?
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
As I said yesterday, if they were going to scrap anything (as I think they should have scrapped the whole thing) then they should have scrapped the southern portion from London to Birmingham and kept the Northern parts linking cities.
And I think you're utterly wrong on that - as we've discussed many times in the past.
Indeed. And yet I am confident that if we are around in 20 years time or so I will be able to point out that I was right both on the costs of the project and its failure to deliver any of the claimed improvements to rail services or regional GDPs. It is a pointless white elephant that was already obsolete long before Covid started to make us rethink our whole work model.
I would love to see us build more train lines. I think trains are great. But build low (er) speed freight lines to increase capacity not unneeded high speed passenger lines.
Twenty years is a bit early to see the effects, considering Phase 1 isn't due to open after 2030.
But your idea was looked at, and rejected. From memory: people want fast express services, but local stations are on the express routes. Opening a slow-speed line does not help that, as local stations will not shift and therefore the conflicts between slow and fast traffic remains. A slow-speed line is not much cheaper to build than a high-speed one (slow speed being 100 MPH, as the new EWR is being planned to be). Anything that touches existing rail infrastructure balloons up in cost, time and disruption, etc, etc.
Big crossover between fans of Sir Keir and believing everything Azeem Rafiq said/forgiving his hypocrisy
Remember it was the LotO who instigated the ‘believe anyone who makes any allegation’ culture that led to the Carl Beech debacle, as well as almost destroying Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Jimmy Tarbuck. I suppose they are easy enough targets for edgy lefties for it not to matter
People keen to use Rafiq's antisemitic tweets to undermine his testimony about YCCC and people who disagree that racism in our society is a serious problem.
If we're talking overlaps I reckon that one is probably quite sizeable.
Is there one covering those who complain of islamophobia but who are anti-Semitic themselves?
Yep, that'd be some overlap there. Not quite as much as with the one I floated though. We're talking a real 90 odd % high roller with that.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
But again you are looking at the headline figures before people have looked at the details. When they look at the details then it will be very different.
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
It won't. Most Tory voters would happily scrap HS2 full stop.
Do you have any polling from when that Mr Stephenson proposed to demolish half Camden and Euston Square to build this new fangled railroad from London to Birmingham? It would be interesting to see how the Tory squire subsamples play out.
Squire is paying SeanT and his ilk too much of a compliment.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
As I said yesterday, if they were going to scrap anything (as I think they should have scrapped the whole thing) then they should have scrapped the southern portion from London to Birmingham and kept the Northern parts linking cities.
And I think you're utterly wrong on that - as we've discussed many times in the past.
Indeed. And yet I am confident that if we are around in 20 years time or so I will be able to point out that I was right both on the costs of the project and its failure to deliver any of the claimed improvements to rail services or regional GDPs. It is a pointless white elephant that was already obsolete long before Covid started to make us rethink our whole work model.
I would love to see us build more train lines. I think trains are great. But build low (er) speed freight lines to increase capacity not unneeded high speed passenger lines.
Twenty years is a bit early to see the effects, considering Phase 1 isn't due to open after 2030.
But your idea was looked at, and rejected. From memory: people want fast express services, but local stations are on the express routes. Opening a slow-speed line does not help that, as local stations will not shift and therefore the conflicts between slow and fast traffic remains. A slow-speed line is not much cheaper to build than a high-speed one (slow speed being 100 MPH, as the new EWR is being planned to be). Anything that touches existing rail infrastructure balloons up in cost, time and disruption, etc, etc.
Yes, in a nutshell the argument is that north-south lines are at capacity and if we need new capacity, it may as well be fast.
The only real basis for challenge that is even potentially legitimate is that the pandemic has changed forever (i.e. reduced) the way that we work and travel. Whether that is true or not, it is too early to say.
On Starmer's changed view of HS2 I wonder if he has thought this through
The whole costs of both HS2 and NPR will now be additional to the total 96 billion announced and in view of his other high spending commitments on home insulation and green investment where is all this money coming from
It will be popular in metropolitan areas but these are already labour but with just 28% giving it the thumbs up yesterday it may not be the vote winner he thinks it is
Furthermore his opposition to HS2 is going to be played on repeat and has he thought how the Greens will react as he could lose supporters to the Greens
In politics nothing is as simple as it seems
Lets pick this apart: 1. The "£96bn announced" hasn't been announced. Its a press release statement with nothing behind it. As an example, part of your £96bn is the 12-minute journey time Leeds to Bradford which isn't even yet a project, its an "we'll ask Network Rail" and will then be "subject to a business case" and treasury approval. 2. When you strip away pre-announced and already budgeted monies the total is £54bn. So no, HS2E / NPR is not additional to the £96bn £54bn -large chunks are still HS2E / NPR 3. Where the money comes from is where all the money comes from. We borrow money. Invest in something. Receive a return on the investment. Its called "capitalism" 4. From the sizeable choir of angry red wall Tories and at least one mayor, the areas in question are not already Labour. 5. Opposition to 2015 Euston plans - which have already been curtailed - is not going to get Boris off the hook. People are not stupid.
Big_G, you are supposedly past your previous "defend at all costs" position. This isn't even a shit sandwich as they have cancelled the bread roll. All the people celebrating the end of blight on their homes are now realising the blight continues indefinitely. All the people being told "this delivers quicker" can see that the previous 2043 timeline is now a much sooner 2043.
Please stop. They aren't worth it. Let the remaining PB parrots try and excuse this fiasco.
I am not taking any lectures from someone who is anti anything HMG does and yesterday was fine by me and many others
Your idea you are always the expert, always right, and attempts to insult those who see things differently referring to them as stupid is arrogant and simply an attempt to close down debate
I'm not trying to give lectures. Nor am I anti-anything HMG does having been a long-standing fan of Sunak and the ocean of critical money hosed at businesses through furlough and other schemes.
Some of this is demonstrable fact though. It isn't £96bn its £54bn when you remove the money in IRP that has already been announced and in some cases is already being spent. Thats just a fact. The 12 minute Leeds Bradford being subject to a business case is taken directly from the document which I have read - have you?
I suppose my criticism is that you spoil your at times well put case by descending into calling people stupid if they do not agree or even accept HMG viewpoint
It is not necessary and the 96 billion is relevant in the overall spend
Please make your case but also accept other views are legitimate as well
My problem is that I don't see a view from you beyond - money saved, yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe / saved for a while longer.
If you wish to join the discussion actually read the proposals and highlight bits that actually make sense, because when give it even a quick glance the flaws are incredibly obvious.
You are again stereotyping me as a pensioner saying 'yippee my beloved NHS and triple lock pension is safe'
Nothing is further from the truth, I support the reduction in the pension to 3.1% next year and the investment in the railways announced yesterday
It remains to be seen just how this pans out but I suspect this is very much Rishi applying fiscal constraints
But the “investment in the railways announced yesterday” is hugely reduced from what was promised. Surely even you can see that?
Not quite I'm stereotyping you as someone who believes everything that comes out from the Government without doing his own research to see who accurate it is.
And the new plan isn't accurate - it's taken a set of costed plans (with a delivery date of 2043) and replaced it with a set of unresearched, unvalidated fantasies that offer the impossible (both faster trains and more local trains running on lines already at and beyond capacity) without investing any money (prior to the announcement) on getting Network Rail to see if the fantasies are possible let alone plausible and sane.
Stereotyping people is always risky, especially on PB!
I’ll ‘like’ your post on the grounds that you probably know more about this than I do. I’d fear to end up like Big_G, having to judge the world solely on the basis of what I can see from a big chair sitting on my a**e in Llandudno.
It's the parroting of a line (say the new plans are great) even though multiple different people have gone through the actual document line by line and spent time highlighting the flaws in it. BigG and HYUFD are by far the worst offenders there.
What's then really annoying is that they don't argue over the points you are making they just repeat the line that the new plans are great (even though multiple people have torn the announcement apart and discovered multiple different statements that are a complete pack of lines)
If the plans lead to a roll back of HS2 then Tory voters are all for it.
Yougov yesterday had 35% of Conservative voters backing the government's plans to scrap the Birmingham-Leeds route from the HS2 rail project, only 23% opposed.
Voters in the Midlands and Wales also backed plans to scrap the HS2 route by 29% to 26% as did voters in the South by 29% to 23%
Yes. I strongly think the government's made a big mistake with these changes to HS2. But it might be that I, and PB, are wrongly judging how it plays out with the public.
As I said yesterday, if they were going to scrap anything (as I think they should have scrapped the whole thing) then they should have scrapped the southern portion from London to Birmingham and kept the Northern parts linking cities.
And I think you're utterly wrong on that - as we've discussed many times in the past.
Indeed. And yet I am confident that if we are around in 20 years time or so I will be able to point out that I was right both on the costs of the project and its failure to deliver any of the claimed improvements to rail services or regional GDPs. It is a pointless white elephant that was already obsolete long before Covid started to make us rethink our whole work model.
I would love to see us build more train lines. I think trains are great. But build low (er) speed freight lines to increase capacity not unneeded high speed passenger lines.
Twenty years is a bit early to see the effects, considering Phase 1 isn't due to open after 2030.
But your idea was looked at, and rejected. From memory: people want fast express services, but local stations are on the express routes. Opening a slow-speed line does not help that, as local stations will not shift and therefore the conflicts between slow and fast traffic remains. A slow-speed line is not much cheaper to build than a high-speed one (slow speed being 100 MPH, as the new EWR is being planned to be). Anything that touches existing rail infrastructure balloons up in cost, time and disruption, etc, etc.
Yes, in a nutshell the argument is that north-south lines are at capacity and if we need new capacity, it may as well be fast.
The only real basis for challenge that is even potentially legitimate is that the pandemic has changed forever (i.e. reduced) the way that we work and travel. Whether that is true or not, it is too early to say.
The changes in work patterns are most likely to increase long-distance train travel, at the expense of shorter daily commuter lines.
If I’m going into London once a week for a couple of days, I’m going to live in Rutland or Dorset, rather than Milton Keynes or Woking.
Is Thanksgiving widely celebrated in the Belgian capital?
There's quite a bit American contingent with NATO, but I don't know whether they stay there for Thanksgiving or go home.
Thanks. I was unsure of the context of the great-Brussels turkey shortage and whether they'd normally be in the shops this far out from Christmas.
However, I would point out that Marks and Spencer's website shows a lot of its Christmas food as already sold out, presumably due to early ordering by online customers (or just possibly because they forgot to update stock levels since last year).
I might be quoting from Baddiel's book on occasion, should it be relevant to the discussion.
Baddiel writes very eloquently on the subject of anti-semitism.
Does he? Tbh I thought it quite disappointing when I read it earlier this year. Important but for a comedian and experienced novelist, I thought it a bit clunky. Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy as I thought the same about Chris Bryant's book on gay anti-Nazi Tory MPs: important but harder than it needed to be.
Comments
He was making a point about the low end of the industry treating the workers exactly as you would expect. Which has led into labour shortages in a number of places.....
My mother-in-law was very confused the first Christmas I was married and bought a turkey - she was poor and had always bought the cheap turkeys, in this country. She was in charge of the turkey.... cooked for hours - where was the pond of salt water?
They were aimed at an England U19 coach, not at a Yorkshire coach. I believe he was punished by Yorkshire for them; I'd be shocked if any player weren't for that kind of behaviour.
"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day."
What upsets me most about HS2 is that even after 20 years everyone still thinks it's about speed not capacity. And that capacity would be a far better (and as will be discovered when Network rail stop laughing) far cheaper way to deliver what Boris and Co promised yesterday.
There's criticism of Rafiq (including from himself) for his racist comments.
Then there's using the comments in order to degrade his testimony about racism at YCCC and even the painting of him as being worse than those who subjected him to racist bullying because he now stands revealed as a racist AND a hypocrite.
These 2 things are easy to tell apart and the problem (which is quite a big one) is purely with the 2nd.
If, however, as I suspect will happen Network Rail start reporting that the plans cannot be achieved (because remember they haven't yet been paid to validate them) the reaction may be different.
It really does depend on what Boris manages to deliver in the next 2 years because if the Red Wall voters don't see obvious benefits I cannot see Boris (and his Red Wall MPs) getting a second chance.
https://twitter.com/GarethDennis/status/1461687345078575104
Also note that today he is on a Sprinter train (same age as a pacer but the bus seats were replaced with slightly better ones as they served longer routes)
As for Christmas, Turkey into the bottom oven overnight does it for me.
Oh and by the way I hope you didn't think my post yesterday about the charts was me being anything other than grateful for them. Just that your shorter post with a summary was excellent.
'Voted for Boris. Best thing I ever did. Feel liberated!'
'Bunch of shysters. Never again.'
Andrew Marr
@AndrewMarr9
·
1h
Personal announcement. After 21 years, I have decided to move on from the BBC.l leave behind many happy memories and wonderful colleagues. But from the New Year I am moving to Global to write and present political and cultural shows, and to write for newspapers
"In the UK there has been an incidence of around 400 for months, but not nearly the same panic as in Germany. The hospitals are not at their limit because of covid patients. The shortage of intensive care beds in Germany seems to me to be the result of a major political failure."
https://twitter.com/PhilipPlickert/status/1461435946465964037
You are living in a pre-2019 south of England Tory bubble. You need to go on a cruise around the highways and byways of The North (cruise, obvs, because you can't get there by train).
The other thing that puzzled me if he hated Yorkshire so much why did he return there in 2016 for another spell?
We were urged to believe a few days ago that Rafiq's cricketing career opportunities were severely curtailed, primarily because of racism at YCCC and in cricket in general.
Not once did we hear that when he'd made it to the fringe of the England set up he foully abused one of his coaches, and the England set up, in a public internet space.
We heard instead that 30% of youth cricketers are Asian, but only 3% of professional cricketers are (or something like that) - so cricket MUST be racist, and Rafiq MUST have been the victim of it because he didn't make it to the very highest level.
How many white players could have progressed an England career beyond an identical tirade?
"Jews Don’t Count is a searing look at why anti-Semitism is often seen as a lesser form of racism, with a particular focus on the political left. To be Jewish, explains Baddiel, is to be subject to the contradictory belief that “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters”.
Now I have no doubt you were doing nothing of the sort - you seem the kind of left wing type that merely uses anti-semitism as a synonym for racism - but your fellow leftwing travellers aren't always as precise in the demarcation.
However, HS2 is years in the future. In the case of phase 2, at least a decade and a half. That's a long time in politics, and for the voters. What does count politically are the improvements people see actually happen - and things like the Okehampton line reopening is a classic example.
And of course, you have Israel, where the narrative is that the Jews are the winners, the oppressors etc.
So you are asking people to empathise with rich oppressors. Who are winning.
I'm not saying it's wise; I'm not saying it's good for the country. It *may* be good politics.
I also think there's an unnecessary level of panic in Europe. They don't need lockdowns and the rest of it but they do need to tell people that everyone is going to get COVID whether or not you want to you will get it and that means the only way to not get severe symptoms is to get vaccinated. Portugal, Spain and I think even the UK have been pretty successful with this messaging. Here it's clear that 10% of adults are willing to take their chances with being infected and no amount of poking and prodding will get them over the line so locking down to protect them isn't necessarily going to prevent them from getting it.
In most European countries they haven't faced up to this basic fact that we will all get COVID, probably more than once and sometimes that will result in unvaccinated people and vaccinated older people dying.
I wonder whether these countries would change their unlockdown steps knowing now what they do about exit waves and seeing our example, or would they steadfastly stick to the same dogma of keeping cases down at any cost. I worry that the latter view still prevails in most of Europe and they will, once again, try and keep cases down when they come out of lockdown in April/May 2022.
I would love to see us build more train lines. I think trains are great. But build low (er) speed freight lines to increase capacity not unneeded high speed passenger lines.
But yes you describe the Left's journey to champions of Israel (underdog, post-WWII, let's all go to work on a Kibbutz) to believing them to be a vile, oppressive regime which, as per that tweet earlier, controls even our saintly Priti.
(NOTE: not all my favourite books are written by people called Dave. Although Dave Mantel's latest and final of the trilogy is a cracker.)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/french-jews-fleeing-country
No, me neither.
But thanks for such a comprehensive answer.
But your idea was looked at, and rejected. From memory: people want fast express services, but local stations are on the express routes. Opening a slow-speed line does not help that, as local stations will not shift and therefore the conflicts between slow and fast traffic remains. A slow-speed line is not much cheaper to build than a high-speed one (slow speed being 100 MPH, as the new EWR is being planned to be). Anything that touches existing rail infrastructure balloons up in cost, time and disruption, etc, etc.
Or maybe not.
The only real basis for challenge that is even potentially legitimate is that the pandemic has changed forever (i.e. reduced) the way that we work and travel. Whether that is true or not, it is too early to say.
If I’m going into London once a week for a couple of days, I’m going to live in Rutland or Dorset, rather than Milton Keynes or Woking.
Those cock juggling thunder c**** might as well give the title to the Dutch shunt (sic) now before we even race on Sunday.
However, I would point out that Marks and Spencer's website shows a lot of its Christmas food as already sold out, presumably due to early ordering by online customers (or just possibly because they forgot to update stock levels since last year).
That said, I'm surprised they didn't at least have an investigation.