Leaving aside the by election, In 2022 there are series of elephant traps that now seem set to engulf the Conservatives.
The most serious is that the mutated ERG has now become a permanent rebel alliance and will be a long term thorn in the side of the PM. Problem is that most of their ideas are either unpopular or unworkable and many members are borderline batsh%t crazy. However they ground May´s government into the dirt and are quite capable of making Johnson´s life a living hell.
Even if the Covid crisis gradually eases (which is likely, given the vaccines and the overall infection rate with low reinfections) there are a series of further "events" which will be at least as challenging. Even if the government performed well, they will get little to no credit.
In the end "its the economy stupid". Inflation will require interest rate rises sooner rather than later. Government expenditure will need to fall, simply to meet a higher interest bill. Local government will go to the brink of collapse and several councils (including Tory ones) will go bust. Growth after a small post Covid bounce will be anemic at best and the ball and chain of post Brexit paperwork is already causing an exodus of investment and a sharp fall in both exports and imports. The UK is already lagging behind the EU and in the coming months that gap will get bigger. The weakness of the City will become a bigger talking point. There is little to no good news on the economic front. A slow puncture of misery.
Sir Kier and Sir Ed are engaged in a pincer movement which will see a very poor Tory perfomance at the locals. The Tories will lose any by election. The ennui of 12 years of the Tories in power is making people bored and fed up with the circus.
So much for the strategic picture
Meanwhile Johnson will face big problems over his own personal conduct and will have to face a series of investigations and any of them could blow up in his face. A fragile PM with a mutinous party behind him may see a forced change of leader (that would be the fourth in 12 years). However a change of face at the front and the retirement of gargoyles like JRM would not be like John Major rescuing the Tories in 91: "First as tragedy the as farce" is more likely, and any leadership campaign may have to reward the Steve Baker tendency and raising their profile will remind the punters that they are mostly nuts. The problem is that the good alternatives are not powerful and the powerful alternatives are not good.
So "Never glad confident morning again" for the Tories and 3 years of misery for the rest of us as they put off their inevitible destruction by delaying the general election as long as possible..
Re Red Wall. The key point is full employment for the first time in two generations. Everything stems from that. Leave school, minimum wage job, live with parents rent free for a few years, affordable house prices mean bingo you can buy. Something your parents and grandparents couldn't. Because there was a fear that if, or when, you lost your job it was a decade or a lifetime on the Dole.
CDC estimates Omicron is 2.9% of cases in US, up from 0.4%.
January in the US is going to be a real world experiment in vaccine, booster, unvaxxed, prior infection effectiveness vs Omicron.
I'm surprised that it's taking as long as this to get going. We know in London it's got to be over half of all cases by now.
Their data reporting lags are likely greater than ours, though. With a potential doubling time of three days it could be much higher than that already. In any event, watch out for what happens in January.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
But again that only works if your job is office based and the office is sat in a town / city centre.
Otherwise no amount of public transport is going to get people to work.
It's not just about commuting. Many people travel into cities and towns for leisure and recreation as well. That's where all the big shops/theatres/cinemas/museums/etc are.
The question we were asking is why do people have / need cars and the truthful answer is that they need them to get to / from work because their workplaces aren't in a town centre.
Leisure travel is already at insane levels. Kings Cross was busier than I've ever seen it on Sunday night and I used to travel home from there on a Friday at 18:30...
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Personally I'd like to see every single car in the world pulped into a small metal cube and launched into space to become debris that might with any luck take out one of Elon Musk's satellites, but I recognise that might not be an electoral winner.
In the core "Red Wall" - that is, the countless towns dominated by retail parks across the North of England - you and the Economist are 100% right. And it's not exactly surprising: if you plan your towns for cars, you get cars. Manchester and Leeds, with their dense city centres and largely un-Beechinged rail networks, are very different kettles of fish.
But here's a thing. Since 2012, fuel duty has been frozen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_Price_Escalator), while train fares have been consistently increased at 1% above inflation. These are both explicit Government policy.
So what more is the Government supposed to do? Cut fuel duty rather than freezing it? Put up rail ticket prices even more? Barely feasible policies in an age of climate change. The correct long-term answer, as many transport wonks will tell you, involves less use of the word "train" and more of the word "bus" - but even famed bus wanker BoJo is not really committed to that.
For so many of the hoards who pour into cities like Manchester every day, fare rises help control numbers. There aren't remotely enough rail vehicles to cope with the demand and its only a few years ago that the Northern franchise was let on a zero growth assumption dictated by the government.
There needs to be a huge investment in making trains 4- 6 coaches and running services into the evening. That means stations lengthened / fixed, more capacity at the terminals and the routes leading into them. So instead out the prices up and hope people don't travel. Its a major electoral issue hence the anger from voters about the cancellation of much of the promised investment especially in the east.
If the LDs win North Shropshire then Boris will likely face a VONC in the next few weeks, which he should still survive. Though judging by last night's vote over a 1/3 of Tory MPs would vote against him.
Otherwise he needs the booster programme to have proved a success by mid January next year and to have avoided another lockdown
If a third of Tory MPs vote against him how the hell does he survive a VONC ?
As 2/3 of Tory MPs would still vote for him and he would then be safe for a year from a further VONC.
Lol. That's a party VONC; @Nigelb is talking about a real VONC.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
If you build all over the greenbelt and concrete over peoples' parks you lose the BlueWall in the Home Counties and posher parts of London to the LDs.
New building should always be in brownbelt land first. In any case as your chart showed most people in the RedWall already own their own property anyway
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
The huge sums have been put into the wrong thing by people obsessed over playing with train sets.
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Trains are less popular than the Lib Dems. They're Official Monster Raving Loony Party levels of support.
Leaving aside the by election, In 2022 there are series of elephant traps that now seem set to engulf the Conservatives.
The most serious is that the mutated ERG has now become a permanent rebel alliance and will be a long term thorn in the side of the PM. Problem is that most of their ideas are either unpopular or unworkable and many members are borderline batsh%t crazy. However they ground May´s government into the dirt and are quite capable of making Johnson´s life a living hell.
Even if the Covid crisis gradually eases (which is likely, given the vaccines and the overall infection rate with low reinfections) there are a series of further "events" which will be at least as challenging. Even if the government performed well, they will get little to no credit.
In the end "its the economy stupid". Inflation will require interest rate rises sooner rather than later. Government expenditure will need to fall, simply to meet a higher interest bill. Local government will go to the brink of collapse and several councils (including Tory ones) will go bust. Growth after a small post Covid bounce will be anemic at best and the ball and chain of post Brexit paperwork is already causing an exodus of investment and a sharp fall in both exports and imports. The UK is already lagging behind the EU and in the coming months that gap will get bigger. The weakness of the City will become a bigger talking point. There is little to no good news on the economic front. A slow puncture of misery.
Sir Kier and Sir Ed are engaged in a pincer movement which will see a very poor Tory perfomance at the locals. The Tories will lose any by election. The ennui of 12 years of the Tories in power is making people bored and fed up with the circus.
So much for the strategic picture
Meanwhile Johnson will face big problems over his own personal conduct and will have to face a series of investigations and any of them could blow up in his face. A fragile PM with a mutinous party behind him may see a forced change of leader (that would be the fourth in 12 years). However a change of face at the front and the retirement of gargoyles like JRM would not be like John Major rescuing the Tories in 91: "First as tragedy the as farce" is more likely, and any leadership campaign may have to reward the Steve Baker tendency and raising their profile will remind the punters that they are mostly nuts. The problem is that the good alternatives are not powerful and the powerful alternatives are not good.
So "Never glad confident morning again" for the Tories and 3 years of misery for the rest of us as they put off their inevitible destruction by delaying the general election as long as possible..
Have a nice day.
Whilst I agree with most of what you posted, remember that the mutated ERG have their supporters. It isn't that long ago that the Nigel was getting millions of votes, which have largely all been swallowed up supporting Steve Baker et al.
We have seen political opinion Balkanised and previously fringe at best ideas brought mainstream...
If the LDs win North Shropshire then Boris will likely face a VONC in the next few weeks, which he should still survive. Though judging by last night's vote over a 1/3 of Tory MPs would vote against him.
Otherwise he needs the booster programme to have proved a success by mid January next year and to have avoided another lockdown
If a third of Tory MPs vote against him how the hell does he survive a VONC ?
As 2/3 of Tory MPs would still vote for him and he would then be safe for a year from a further VONC.
Lol. That's a party VONC; @Nigelb is talking about a real VONC.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
Leythers don't want a "guided busway". It's ace but very little used. They want a train station like everywhere else. And Independence from Wigan. Leythexit as it were with their own council. 2 things which psychological mark you out as a "proper town". Those 2 hyperlocal issues were what swung the seat over the edge. I can't see how they'll get either.
Is that what people from Leigh are called? Mildly innerested cos my surname is not a million miles adrift of Leigh.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
Leythers don't want a "guided busway". It's ace but very little used. They want a train station like everywhere else. And Independence from Wigan. Leythexit as it were with their own council. 2 things which psychological mark you out as a "proper town". Those 2 hyperlocal issues were what swung the seat over the edge. I can't see how they'll get either.
Yes, independence from Wigan! Evil pie-eaters!
Indeed. The lobbygobblers voting Tory has become yet another identity marker in the fight over the General Strike.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
CDC estimates Omicron is 2.9% of cases in US, up from 0.4%.
January in the US is going to be a real world experiment in vaccine, booster, unvaxxed, prior infection effectiveness vs Omicron.
Georgia and Florida are both show cases starting to rise again. They are the states to watch.
I believe NY has seen a big uptick in cases.
Yah, but we were expecting cases to rise in the North of the USA due to seasonal effects. However the hope was that the absolute devastation of summer in the South (UK equivalent of over 1000 deaths per day in Florida! With Vaccines freely available!!!) would result in only a ripple in winter. If instead it is a repeat of lat year with a summer AND winter wave in the South then America is in serious trouble.
Leaving aside the by election, In 2022 there are series of elephant traps that now seem set to engulf the Conservatives.
The most serious is that the mutated ERG has now become a permanent rebel alliance and will be a long term thorn in the side of the PM. Problem is that most of their ideas are either unpopular or unworkable and many members are borderline batsh%t crazy. However they ground May´s government into the dirt and are quite capable of making Johnson´s life a living hell.
Even if the Covid crisis gradually eases (which is likely, given the vaccines and the overall infection rate with low reinfections) there are a series of further "events" which will be at least as challenging. Even if the government performed well, they will get little to no credit.
In the end "its the economy stupid". Inflation will require interest rate rises sooner rather than later. Government expenditure will need to fall, simply to meet a higher interest bill. Local government will go to the brink of collapse and several councils (including Tory ones) will go bust. Growth after a small post Covid bounce will be anemic at best and the ball and chain of post Brexit paperwork is already causing an exodus of investment and a sharp fall in both exports and imports. The UK is already lagging behind the EU and in the coming months that gap will get bigger. The weakness of the City will become a bigger talking point. There is little to no good news on the economic front. A slow puncture of misery.
Sir Kier and Sir Ed are engaged in a pincer movement which will see a very poor Tory perfomance at the locals. The Tories will lose any by election. The ennui of 12 years of the Tories in power is making people bored and fed up with the circus.
So much for the strategic picture
Meanwhile Johnson will face big problems over his own personal conduct and will have to face a series of investigations and any of them could blow up in his face. A fragile PM with a mutinous party behind him may see a forced change of leader (that would be the fourth in 12 years). However a change of face at the front and the retirement of gargoyles like JRM would not be like John Major rescuing the Tories in 91: "First as tragedy the as farce" is more likely, and any leadership campaign may have to reward the Steve Baker tendency and raising their profile will remind the punters that they are mostly nuts. The problem is that the good alternatives are not powerful and the powerful alternatives are not good.
So "Never glad confident morning again" for the Tories and 3 years of misery for the rest of us as they put off their inevitible destruction by delaying the general election as long as possible..
Have a nice day.
From that list you also miss out fuel prices which are going to be up 30% minimum come April when the price cap needs to be reset to reflect the actual market prices.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
The huge sums have been put into the wrong thing by people obsessed over playing with train sets.
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Put into the wrong thing based on what the people who use the wrong thing are telling the politicians.
Would help if your government was actually spending money building roads as an alternative - Greater Manchester and even more so West Yorkshire are in desperate need for more roads. Problem is they would be a massively destructive thing, and people object, so they don't happen either.
Not sure when you last went into places like Calderdale but it is not an easy place to get around. A huge number of people living in low-density developer-led housing clinging to hillsides. The only way through is down the valley where there's no room to expand the road which has become much worse thanks to all the new houses.
Which is why there is demand to make more use of the train on journeys where it would be better than the car. Which is why they needed NPR building so that there is enough capacity to stop more trains in places like Mytholmroyd and reopen other stations.
- “On top of all of this the days of Tory polling leads are becoming a distant memory and now LAB is opening a clear gap.”
That’s not the problem though. Mid-term leads for the Opposition is bog-standard for England (although not for Scotland these days).
Nope, the problem is not that Labour has a lead, it is *where* they have surged ahead: the Red Wall.
Yesterday’s Survation:
North: Lab 49% Con 29% Midlands: Lab 47% Con 33% South: Con 43% Lab 35% London: Lab 48% Con 27%
England Lab 43% Con 35%
What seems to be happening is that England is reverting to type: powerful Labour urban bases in the Midlands, North and London, with the Tories retreating to their traditional territory in the Home Counties and rural areas. This spells utter disaster for the Conservatives.
It is this geographical pattern that will panic Conservative MPs, not the overall Labour lead.
Delivery of levelling up was required, and it has been stopped rather than delivering even baby-steps.
Backsides will be kicked, and the Tories risk losing their new voting coalition for good.
Having persuaded large numbers of people to back the Tories in traditionally Labour areas last time out, the government has to deliver something tangible in this area before the next election, unless they want these new voters to go back to sitting on their hands.
The appointment of Gove to run DCLG (or whatever they’re called this week) showed that the PM is serious about it, but there need to be tangible results quickly.
The first thing they need to remember, is that most of the working classes use cars as transport - and most of them are old cars. They don’t see trains and EVs as a priority, quite the opposite.
This is not accurate. The Tory red wall heartlands are full of new Audis and BMWs.
Sure, but most of them will be company cars or leased - where an Audi costs about £20 a month more than a VW, which costs £20 a month more than a Skoda, and they’re all actually the same car underneath.
My point was more that the sort of transport solutions that are loved by civil servants in London, are not those desired by the occupants of the Red Wall towns.
Didn’t we cover that last week.
City centres have a core mass of offices and shops that mean a lot of journeys are into the city centre - for which public transport is great.
The issue comes when your journey doesn’t end in he city centre at which point every journey requires a minimum of 2 bits of public transport at which point a car becomes the better option.
That's not really true. In most large urban centres, public transport is frequent enough so that a change of transport - including inter-modal changes - is perfectly easy to do. Before Covid at least, public transport was well used. The question is, whether those dependant on public transport are aspirational Red Wall Tory voters, or less well off and still vote Labour. Also don't forget some people both drive and use public transport, depending on the circumstances, but they would probably be less easily swayed by public transport improvements as they have the car alternative.
Where public transport is available and practical it is used; ditto cycle facilities.
Nottm, Sheffield and Manchester light rail / tram networks are now working towards 100 million passengers a year between them, and they are only partial networks. That's the number without buses.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
The huge sums have been put into the wrong thing by people obsessed over playing with train sets.
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Put into the wrong thing based on what the people who use the wrong thing are telling the politicians.
Would help if your government was actually spending money building roads as an alternative - Greater Manchester and even more so West Yorkshire are in desperate need for more roads. Problem is they would be a massively destructive thing, and people object, so they don't happen either.
Not sure when you last went into places like Calderdale but it is not an easy place to get around. A huge number of people living in low-density developer-led housing clinging to hillsides. The only way through is down the valley where there's no room to expand the road which has become much worse thanks to all the new houses.
Which is why there is demand to make more use of the train on journeys where it would be better than the car. Which is why they needed NPR building so that there is enough capacity to stop more trains in places like Mytholmroyd and reopen other stations.
And what percentage of voters are the "people who use the wrong thing" in Red Wall seats?
The "people who use the wrong thing" are squeaky nobodies. Like the NIMBYs you've been talking to. They're not a majority.
I agree that the government isn't spending anywhere near enough money on road building, and if it wants investment that would work that is what is required.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Personally I'd like to see every single car in the world pulped into a small metal cube and launched into space to become debris that might with any luck take out one of Elon Musk's satellites, but I recognise that might not be an electoral winner.
In the core "Red Wall" - that is, the countless towns dominated by retail parks across the North of England - you and the Economist are 100% right. And it's not exactly surprising: if you plan your towns for cars, you get cars. Manchester and Leeds, with their dense city centres and largely un-Beechinged rail networks, are very different kettles of fish.
But here's a thing. Since 2012, fuel duty has been frozen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_Price_Escalator), while train fares have been consistently increased at 1% above inflation. These are both explicit Government policy.
So what more is the Government supposed to do? Cut fuel duty rather than freezing it? Put up rail ticket prices even more? Barely feasible policies in an age of climate change. The correct long-term answer, as many transport wonks will tell you, involves less use of the word "train" and more of the word "bus" - but even famed bus wanker BoJo is not really committed to that.
For so many of the hoards who pour into cities like Manchester every day, fare rises help control numbers. There aren't remotely enough rail vehicles to cope with the demand and its only a few years ago that the Northern franchise was let on a zero growth assumption dictated by the government.
There needs to be a huge investment in making trains 4- 6 coaches and running services into the evening. That means stations lengthened / fixed, more capacity at the terminals and the routes leading into them. So instead out the prices up and hope people don't travel. Its a major electoral issue hence the anger from voters about the cancellation of much of the promised investment especially in the east.
Stories that I'm surprised haven't hit the mainstream press, vol. 372:
There is a fleet of 40 modernish (mid-90s), comfortable electric trains that until this year were doing sterling service as commuter trains between Kings Cross and Peterborough/Cambridge. These were actually owned by the Government, not a leasing company.
In July, the Government sold them off on the cheap. Now they're being scrapped.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
Leythers don't want a "guided busway". It's ace but very little used. They want a train station like everywhere else. And Independence from Wigan. Leythexit as it were with their own council. 2 things which psychological mark you out as a "proper town". Those 2 hyperlocal issues were what swung the seat over the edge. I can't see how they'll get either.
Is that what people from Leigh are called? Mildly innerested cos my surname is not a million miles adrift of Leigh.
Yeah. Locally it is pronounced like "Leighther" as in eighth. But with the stress very much on the end th. And written Leyther. It is a mild term of disdain more commonly used by Wiganers these days.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
The huge sums have been put into the wrong thing by people obsessed over playing with train sets.
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Put into the wrong thing based on what the people who use the wrong thing are telling the politicians.
Would help if your government was actually spending money building roads as an alternative - Greater Manchester and even more so West Yorkshire are in desperate need for more roads. Problem is they would be a massively destructive thing, and people object, so they don't happen either.
Not sure when you last went into places like Calderdale but it is not an easy place to get around. A huge number of people living in low-density developer-led housing clinging to hillsides. The only way through is down the valley where there's no room to expand the road which has become much worse thanks to all the new houses.
Which is why there is demand to make more use of the train on journeys where it would be better than the car. Which is why they needed NPR building so that there is enough capacity to stop more trains in places like Mytholmroyd and reopen other stations.
Leeds is currently a major building site as a new (outer) ring road is being built
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Personally I'd like to see every single car in the world pulped into a small metal cube and launched into space to become debris that might with any luck take out one of Elon Musk's satellites, but I recognise that might not be an electoral winner.
In the core "Red Wall" - that is, the countless towns dominated by retail parks across the North of England - you and the Economist are 100% right. And it's not exactly surprising: if you plan your towns for cars, you get cars. Manchester and Leeds, with their dense city centres and largely un-Beechinged rail networks, are very different kettles of fish.
But here's a thing. Since 2012, fuel duty has been frozen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_Price_Escalator), while train fares have been consistently increased at 1% above inflation. These are both explicit Government policy.
So what more is the Government supposed to do? Cut fuel duty rather than freezing it? Put up rail ticket prices even more? Barely feasible policies in an age of climate change. The correct long-term answer, as many transport wonks will tell you, involves less use of the word "train" and more of the word "bus" - but even famed bus wanker BoJo is not really committed to that.
For so many of the hoards who pour into cities like Manchester every day, fare rises help control numbers. There aren't remotely enough rail vehicles to cope with the demand and its only a few years ago that the Northern franchise was let on a zero growth assumption dictated by the government.
There needs to be a huge investment in making trains 4- 6 coaches and running services into the evening. That means stations lengthened / fixed, more capacity at the terminals and the routes leading into them. So instead out the prices up and hope people don't travel. Its a major electoral issue hence the anger from voters about the cancellation of much of the promised investment especially in the east.
Stories that I'm surprised haven't hit the mainstream press, vol. 372:
There is a fleet of 40 modernish (mid-90s), comfortable electric trains that until this year were doing sterling service as commuter trains between Kings Cross and Peterborough/Cambridge. These were actually owned by the Government, not a leasing company.
In July, the Government sold them off on the cheap. Now they're being scrapped.
Its genuinely bonkers. We have both a shortage of capacity and a surplus of trains. The fools at the DfT have no idea what they are doing and the horror is that under the new set-up they have micro level control over everything on the railways.
CDC estimates Omicron is 2.9% of cases in US, up from 0.4%.
January in the US is going to be a real world experiment in vaccine, booster, unvaxxed, prior infection effectiveness vs Omicron.
Georgia and Florida are both show cases starting to rise again. They are the states to watch.
I believe NY has seen a big uptick in cases.
Not just NY state but also neighbouring ones like CT and NJ. Some other New England and Atlantic seaboard states like PA, DE, MA, NH and ME seeing big moves higher, too.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
We are not back on the trans debate again? Enough with the culture wars.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
Leythers don't want a "guided busway". It's ace but very little used. They want a train station like everywhere else. And Independence from Wigan. Leythexit as it were with their own council. 2 things which psychological mark you out as a "proper town". Those 2 hyperlocal issues were what swung the seat over the edge. I can't see how they'll get either.
Is that what people from Leigh are called? Mildly innerested cos my surname is not a million miles adrift of Leigh.
Yeah. Locally it is pronounced like "Leighther" as in eighth. But with the stress very much on the end th. And written Leyther. It is a mild term of disdain more commonly used by Wiganers these days.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
Not always.
Cameron won private renters in 2015. Blair won home owners with a mortgage in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
Plus building all over the greenbelt will send some Tory homeowners to the LDs or Greens.
Build new affordable housing to buy yes but in brownbelt land first
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
And I'm asking why you think that is the case. You see a correlation between the two, but you're claiming a causative relationship. If you build a bunch of big new houses, you might just be scooping Con voters from elsewhere.
Because there is a causative relationship and that is in the data I showed you. Where the house building has been rampant the house price to earnings ratio is at its lowest. As a result people can get on the property ladder. As a result people vote Conservative.
There is a causative relationship between home ownership and voting. Tenants are much, much more likely to vote Labour. Owner occupiers are much, much more likely to vote Conservative. Going from tenants to owner occupiers is one key reason why the young vote Labour and the old vote Conservative and the failure to get young people onto the property ladder is a key reason why Labour has been doing better amongst the young in recent years.
Yes some of the new home owners may have been home owners elsewhere. In which case the home they owned elsewhere is now on the market ready for someone else to own.
The problem is when new homes are being bought up by landlords instead of owner occupiers. If landlords are getting their grubby hands on them, then that's when the occupants will be tenants and that's when we have a problem.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
In the True North they don't have EPL football teams
Yeah we have Rugby League teams around here.
A point which is perhaps more profound and significant than you appreciate.
I recall the disastrous effort that was a trial of Rugby League in Southend. The club used the football club's stadium; used to get very small gates I enjoy Rugby League as a spectator much more than Union, so used to go. Could be lonely!
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
We know that people do use trains at a certain price. The question is, to what extent are we happy to subsidize the railways where what is paid by users does not meet the costs?
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
Not always.
Cameron won private renters in 2015. Blair won home owners with a mortgage in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
Plus building all over the greenbelt will send some Tory homeowners to the LDs or Greens.
Build new affordable housing to buy yes but in brownbelt land first
Labour won private renters in 2015.
Blair won home owners with a mortgage because Blair was exceedingly popular so people were more likely to vote Labour despite being home owners. Still home ownership still played a positive correlation even then, its just that Blair's popularity shifted the entire chart up.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
The huge sums have been put into the wrong thing by people obsessed over playing with train sets.
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Put into the wrong thing based on what the people who use the wrong thing are telling the politicians.
Would help if your government was actually spending money building roads as an alternative - Greater Manchester and even more so West Yorkshire are in desperate need for more roads. Problem is they would be a massively destructive thing, and people object, so they don't happen either.
Not sure when you last went into places like Calderdale but it is not an easy place to get around. A huge number of people living in low-density developer-led housing clinging to hillsides. The only way through is down the valley where there's no room to expand the road which has become much worse thanks to all the new houses.
Which is why there is demand to make more use of the train on journeys where it would be better than the car. Which is why they needed NPR building so that there is enough capacity to stop more trains in places like Mytholmroyd and reopen other stations.
Also, there's a reasonable case to be made that low-density development based on road access (whether public or private) is the reason that productivity is so rubbish in the UK. (Not watertight, but reasonable). Here's an example,
The result is that our biggest non-capital cities, Manchester and Birmingham, are significantly less productive than almost all similar-sized cities in Europe, and less productive than much smaller cities such as Edinburgh, Oxford, and Bristol. One notable difference between the UK’s large cities and those in similar countries is how little public transport infrastructure they have...
And that matters, because productivity is the only thing that makes people richer in the long term.
(Interesting that Portsmouth, which doesn't feel rich, does very well for its size. But then again, it's hemmed in by the sea, so it's dense. Isn't there some principle in economics that things that are abundant get seriously misused because it's not even worth thinking about how to optimise them?)
On the doom mongers science wankers saying that prior infection might not work again Omicron, it never sat right. COVID would have to act differently to every other virus in that it could evade t-cells and b-cells with just a handful of mutations to one part of it. That didn't make sense and I'm glad we're getting data from Spector about how well a Delta infection will protect from Omicron, I'd expect it to be above 90%.
Not as good as that:
18. What about the risk of reinfection?
1. People infected with #Delta = 40% relative risk of reinfection with #Omicron 2. People infected with Beta = 60% relative risk of infection with Omicron https://t.co/8kBK8p9lCg
Are you a "science wanker" that we can just ignore?
Hope over science. Pray the pox away!
This is an increase in the *probability of the risk of re-infection*, not that 40% or 60% of people previously infected are vulnerable to being re-infected with Omicron.
As suspected, prior infection by Delta gives very high level protection against Omicron. Professor Tim Spector will outline the final data soon but early indications are that a Delta infection in the last 6 months will protect from symptomatic Omicron.
Far from Omicron not caring about prior infections, it's highly likely that prior infections offer the best immunity overall, even more than three doses of vaccine.
Good thing 80% of our unvaccinated adults got Delta over the summer and autumn. Going into Omicron with an additional 8-10m unvaccinated, non-immune people would have meant a lockdown to protect the NHS from stupid people dying from their stupid decisions.
Have you done the maths on this? If Omicron is less deadly, then that is a counterbalance to the sharper healthcare usage. In other words, is it better to get the milder form with everyone else, or the deadlier form when capacity isn't as strained?
I asked this yesterday in a different form but nobody seemed to want to take it on.
From an individual perspective it may be better to get Omicron, from a public health perspective Omicron infects at a rate 4x faster than Delta, so even if the hospitalisation rate is halved, double the number of people end up in hospital and we still have ~3-4m adults with no vaccines and no prior infections, Omicron will find these people very quickly and put ~200k in hospital. If that number was 8-10m higher we'd expect up to 600k hospitalisations in a very short space of time.
So, what about the scenario I put last night and being taken seriously in research circles, where hospitalisation risk in the vaccinated goes up more in multiplier terms than infection risk (say 1% -> 4% of the unvaccinated hospitalisation risk, and 40 -> 70% of the infection risk), so the case hospitalisation rate goes up, even though Omicron is milder.
So, you have masses of cases, and the proportion of infected vaccinated people needing hospitals goes up (immune escape come with some severity uplift), even as the proportion of infected covid naive needing hospital goes down a bit (because it's milder). On an individual basis being vaccinated still gives massively better outcomes than not being, Omicron is milder, but societally you still end up in a worse position than with Delta.
This is clearly the risk being countered by boosters.
This is certainly a possible scenario - as you say, hence the boosters.
As with much of the pandemic, the only point where we will know the answer for *sure*, is well after the fact.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
We know that people do use trains at a certain price. The question is, to what extent are we happy to subsidize the railways where what is paid by users does not meet the costs?
Whatever level is required so that there's not horrific congestion on the roads, and we aren't tempted to build urban motorways to accommodate the increased number of cars - i.e. There is a wider benefit to people who drive and don't use the train, and to people who neither drive or take the train.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
No we don't, we know they don't. Because there's no demand for them, there is a demand for cars.
The solution is to expand and improve roads that people actually want and need to use. Where Red Wallers use public transport its buses not trains. If you want to be serious in improving public transport here then you'd be thinking about buses, but unfortunately those who love playing with train sets seem to consider buses a joke and not real public transport.
Of course if you build more and better roads, then the buses can use those roads too. So public transport and cars can both be improved simultaneously by improving the roads. Two for the price of one!
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
You've never been to Manchester or Leeds then?
How are Manchester or Leeds "Red Wall"? They're cities, they're the exception they're not the true north.
Considering how close you live to Manchester its amazing how dense that comment is.
Red wall voters in red wall seats commute into the big cities. By train.
Data says no.
Eyeballs and brain say yes. Hence the need to keep pouring money into capacity expansion into Manchester and Leeds by train, the promised Leeds metro, Leigh guided busway etc etc etc.
So 'eyeballs and brain' matter more than reality and truth?
You really are turning into HYUFD. No wonder you and he sing from the same NIMBY hymnsheet.
No, its when you say "trains barely figure at all" that it doesn't match the huge sums that have needed to be invested in recent years trying to cope with the explosion in passengers numbers and the even vaster sums now needed to cope for the future.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
The huge sums have been put into the wrong thing by people obsessed over playing with train sets.
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Put into the wrong thing based on what the people who use the wrong thing are telling the politicians.
Would help if your government was actually spending money building roads as an alternative - Greater Manchester and even more so West Yorkshire are in desperate need for more roads. Problem is they would be a massively destructive thing, and people object, so they don't happen either.
Not sure when you last went into places like Calderdale but it is not an easy place to get around. A huge number of people living in low-density developer-led housing clinging to hillsides. The only way through is down the valley where there's no room to expand the road which has become much worse thanks to all the new houses.
Which is why there is demand to make more use of the train on journeys where it would be better than the car. Which is why they needed NPR building so that there is enough capacity to stop more trains in places like Mytholmroyd and reopen other stations.
Leeds is currently a major building site as a new (outer) ring road is being built
Yes, a bypass for the Crossgates section of the A6120. Which then stops and dumps all the traffic onto the single carriageway to the west which was already jammed. If they were serious the new road wouldn't be a glorified distribution park spine road full of roundabouts, and they would continue west all the way to Stanningley.
West Yorkshire is a horrible country to try and drive around.
I understand the Sunak abstention will be explained as a pairing, for convenience.
The decisions what to vote on were made by the "Quad" (Johnson, Sunak, Javid, Barclay) not the Cabinet. Sunak was the only one against the decision, so they grabbed the opportunity to let him abstain rather than resign when his Shadow was sick.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
We know that people do use trains at a certain price. The question is, to what extent are we happy to subsidize the railways where what is paid by users does not meet the costs?
You'd have to start paying me to use the train/bus regularly into the office, either is 2 hours (Compared to 1/2 hr in the car) and that's if I time everything perfectly.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
Obviously some people use trains. Most don't.
If you took a measure of, say, "five train journeys of any length in a normal (non pandemic) 12 months period", I'd guess less than 10% of the population "use trains". Maybe less than 5%.
Data question (already asked the Dashboard people)
In nearly every single LTLA in Scotland, for a number of the elderly groups, more people have been vaccinated than either the ONS mid 2020 numbers *or* the provided (in dataset) population counts.
What are Scotland using? Not NIMS data, for sure....
Do we have any hard evidence of Red Wall voters switching back to Labour? Haven't seen or heard much of what they think
The Opinium subsamples are small, but they do point that way. Labour leading in the seats gained by the Tories at GE2019 by 50%-37%, sample size a mere 115.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
I understand the Sunak abstention will be explained as a pairing, for convenience.
The decisions what to vote on were made by the "Quad" (Johnson, Sunak, Javid, Barclay) not the Cabinet. Sunak was the only one against the decision, so they grabbed the opportunity to let him abstain rather than resign when his Shadow was sick.
If I was a Tory leadership candidate not named Sunak I would be doing everything possible now to point out the lack of support for the hospitality industry due to Sunak.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
Obviously some people use trains. Most don't.
If you took a measure of, say, "five train journeys of any length in a normal (non pandemic) 12 months period", I'd guess less than 10% of the population "use trains". Maybe less than 5%.
Question is whether that's because people don't want to, or because they can't (either because there was no train or it made the Central Line feel spacious and civilised).
When I was living in a classic West Yorkshire Marginal Constituency and had to go into/out of Leeds during rush hour, the trains were rammed.
On the doom mongers science wankers saying that prior infection might not work again Omicron, it never sat right. COVID would have to act differently to every other virus in that it could evade t-cells and b-cells with just a handful of mutations to one part of it. That didn't make sense and I'm glad we're getting data from Spector about how well a Delta infection will protect from Omicron, I'd expect it to be above 90%.
Not as good as that:
18. What about the risk of reinfection?
1. People infected with #Delta = 40% relative risk of reinfection with #Omicron 2. People infected with Beta = 60% relative risk of infection with Omicron https://t.co/8kBK8p9lCg
Are you a "science wanker" that we can just ignore?
Hope over science. Pray the pox away!
This is an increase in the *probability of the risk of re-infection*, not that 40% or 60% of people previously infected are vulnerable to being re-infected with Omicron.
Sure! The "doom monger science wankers" are still assessing Omicron and its impacts. Its clear that if you have been infested with one of the previous strains of Covid that you should then have good protection against reinfection. And yet they remain worried - that SA study suggesting 3x the reinfection risk vs Delta. May be accurate, may not be - we still don't know.
So until we do know the science powers that be want everyone triple jabbed by new year - a task that is so vast as to be almost impossible. But we must try. They could ease the pressure by saying "if you have had Covid before you can wait", but they haven't. So there is clearly some risk that concerns them in the great unknown that is Omicron.
Do have to laugh at "Doom monger Sciene Wankers" though. Feels like it needs to be counter-balanced by "there is no threat" preachers of the kind who keep being picked off by Covid in America. We only have wazzocks like Fox or Corbyn and who wants to listen to them?
Public transport is great. I have a lovely big Audi which is great for long journeys via motorway, but if I’m heading into town I’ll use the train, tube and bus. Much more convenient. No faffing around with parking and I can read PB. The key with public transport is to regulate it, and invest in it.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
You mean people hire-purchasing phones on 25% interest (effectively)
Another reason why financial planning should be taught in schools....
This debate reminds me of that commentator who was furious when the tube closed during lockdown, claiming that the vast majority could no longer get to work. Cars dominate everywhere except southern cities.
This is a bad thing though. I'm lucky to live in a city with a brilliant, publicly owned bus service. I only have the car go get to the hills, cycle every where else.
The big question is the legalisation of those mad electric scooter things, which I'm broadly supportive of given lack of emissions and space taken up on streets by cars. The alternative is to make push bikes cheaper and more widely available (also helps with obesity).
The other is whether electric cars will be cheap enough to be my next car (about 5 years away) or the one after (10), on a middling salary.
Public transport is great. I have a lovely big Audi which is great for long journeys via motorway, but if I’m heading into town I’ll use the train, tube and bus. Much more convenient. No faffing around with parking and I can read PB. The key with public transport is to regulate it, and invest in it.
The Tories love public transport, as long as foreign Governments own it.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
No we don't, we know they don't. Because there's no demand for them, there is a demand for cars.
The solution is to expand and improve roads that people actually want and need to use. Where Red Wallers use public transport its buses not trains. If you want to be serious in improving public transport here then you'd be thinking about buses, but unfortunately those who love playing with train sets seem to consider buses a joke and not real public transport.
Of course if you build more and better roads, then the buses can use those roads too. So public transport and cars can both be improved simultaneously by improving the roads. Two for the price of one!
Just to be clear. Your position is that there is "no demand for them [trains]" in places like Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
And I'm asking why you think that is the case. You see a correlation between the two, but you're claiming a causative relationship. If you build a bunch of big new houses, you might just be scooping Con voters from elsewhere.
Because there is a causative relationship and that is in the data I showed you. Where the house building has been rampant the house price to earnings ratio is at its lowest. As a result people can get on the property ladder. As a result people vote Conservative.
There is a causative relationship between home ownership and voting. Tenants are much, much more likely to vote Labour. Owner occupiers are much, much more likely to vote Conservative. Going from tenants to owner occupiers is one key reason why the young vote Labour and the old vote Conservative and the failure to get young people onto the property ladder is a key reason why Labour has been doing better amongst the young in recent years.
Yes some of the new home owners may have been home owners elsewhere. In which case the home they owned elsewhere is now on the market ready for someone else to own.
The problem is when new homes are being bought up by landlords instead of owner occupiers. If landlords are getting their grubby hands on them, then that's when the occupants will be tenants and that's when we have a problem.
You state that the age-voting relationship is driven by a causative relationship between property ownership and voting. What if someone else states that the property ownership-voting relationship is driven by age? What if they're right and you're wrong?
All you've done is restate your assertion. I'm asking why you think the causative relationship exists, not for you to just re-assert it. I understand the claim, and I have doubts.
There is a plethora of evidence that it is a causative relationship both from the data showing such a relationship and from scholarly articles.
"Its hard to sell capitalism to people without capital" - the reason why previously solidly Tory seats in London and the South have swung massively left in recent years is because the home ownership rates there are collapsing.
While in the North the opposite is true. There's been a construction boom up here that has kept house prices low and gotten people onto the property ladder.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
What do you get for £100 month that you dont get for £10 month? Do you have to pay extra for the carrier pigeons up north or something? Down south we can get 10GB data, unlimited minutes and texts for £7 per month.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
I will shortly do both - and I am the most anti-Tory I've been in my life
I don't see the moral substance of Philip's position anyway. His thesis is that tories are nimbies and vv, so he is cheering on a kind of zombie apocalypse.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
No we don't, we know they don't. Because there's no demand for them, there is a demand for cars.
The solution is to expand and improve roads that people actually want and need to use. Where Red Wallers use public transport its buses not trains. If you want to be serious in improving public transport here then you'd be thinking about buses, but unfortunately those who love playing with train sets seem to consider buses a joke and not real public transport.
Of course if you build more and better roads, then the buses can use those roads too. So public transport and cars can both be improved simultaneously by improving the roads. Two for the price of one!
Just to be clear. Your position is that there is "no demand for them [trains]" in places like Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.
No demand, as in none?
Most of Greater Manchester isn't the Red Wall and no of course not literally none. There will always be some demand, just as there's some people who vote Lib Dem.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Eh ?
I'm on 20 odd quid a month and that includes the phone. In Bassetlaw - as red wall a place as any.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
I know and its lunacy. There are some ludicrously cheap Sim-only deals out there and unless you *have* to have the high end flagship there are brilliant midfield phones (usually specced the same as the previous year's flagships) for reasonable money with plenty of sales.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
And I'm asking why you think that is the case. You see a correlation between the two, but you're claiming a causative relationship. If you build a bunch of big new houses, you might just be scooping Con voters from elsewhere.
Because there is a causative relationship and that is in the data I showed you. Where the house building has been rampant the house price to earnings ratio is at its lowest. As a result people can get on the property ladder. As a result people vote Conservative.
There is a causative relationship between home ownership and voting. Tenants are much, much more likely to vote Labour. Owner occupiers are much, much more likely to vote Conservative. Going from tenants to owner occupiers is one key reason why the young vote Labour and the old vote Conservative and the failure to get young people onto the property ladder is a key reason why Labour has been doing better amongst the young in recent years.
Yes some of the new home owners may have been home owners elsewhere. In which case the home they owned elsewhere is now on the market ready for someone else to own.
The problem is when new homes are being bought up by landlords instead of owner occupiers. If landlords are getting their grubby hands on them, then that's when the occupants will be tenants and that's when we have a problem.
You state that the age-voting relationship is driven by a causative relationship between property ownership and voting. What if someone else states that the property ownership-voting relationship is driven by age? What if they're right and you're wrong?
All you've done is restate your assertion. I'm asking why you think the causative relationship exists, not for you to just re-assert it. I understand the claim, and I have doubts.
There is a plethora of evidence that it is a causative relationship both from the data showing such a relationship and from scholarly articles.
"Its hard to sell capitalism to people without capital" - the reason why previously solidly Tory seats in London and the South have swung massively left in recent years is because the home ownership rates there are collapsing.
While in the North the opposite is true. There's been a construction boom up here that has kept house prices low and gotten people onto the property ladder.
Which is why Labour now has a massive lead in the South while the Tories are miles ahead in the North on the latest polls? Oh wait.
The truth is lack of home ownership is only really a big problem in London. In the South most still own their own homes as they do in the North and Midlands and Wales
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
I will shortly do both - and I am the most anti-Tory I've been in my life
I don't see the moral substance of Philip's position anyway. His thesis is that tories are nimbies and vv, so he is cheering on a kind of zombie apocalypse.
No its not my thesis. My thesis is that NIMBYs are a noisy minority who should be told politely to **** **** *** **** off and then to **** **** **** **** themselves some more and then to keep on ***** themselves.
Ignore the NIMBYs. Get houses done, get people onto the property ladder. Its what worked for Thatcher, its what worked for Cameron, its what works.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
We know that people do use trains at a certain price. The question is, to what extent are we happy to subsidize the railways where what is paid by users does not meet the costs?
You'd have to start paying me to use the train/bus regularly into the office, either is 2 hours (Compared to 1/2 hr in the car) and that's if I time everything perfectly.
Well, that's the old chicken and egg thing.
Mrs Capitano has taken the bus to work a few times recently. It takes her about an hour vs 30 minutes in the car.
Why the difference? They're the same roads and it's not like you can go much over 40 on country roads anyway. No, it's because she has to change buses in Witney and that's a 20 minute wait; and the buses are only every half-hour because that fits the level of demand.
As soon as you can get people out of their cars then buses, at least, will get better by simple supply-and-demand logic. But that either requires restrictions on car travel, or big investment in bus services, and the Government has shown no serious willingness to do either.
This debate reminds me of that commentator who was furious when the tube closed during lockdown, claiming that the vast majority could no longer get to work. Cars dominate everywhere except southern cities.
This is a bad thing though. I'm lucky to live in a city with a brilliant, publicly owned bus service. I only have the car go get to the hills, cycle every where else.
The big question is the legalisation of those mad electric scooter things, which I'm broadly supportive of given lack of emissions and space taken up on streets by cars. The alternative is to make push bikes cheaper and more widely available (also helps with obesity).
The other is whether electric cars will be cheap enough to be my next car (about 5 years away) or the one after (10), on a middling salary.
There's a trial in my area of the legalised e-scooters. I am in favour - they seem to have included geo-locking of the speed, so idiots can't do 20mph though the parks. Which has upset a number of people trying to use them.
I would suggest as a compromise that there be a no-bag limit hunt for the morons who think that every paved surface is theirs for speeding as 20+ on a sloped up e-scooter.
The other night, A moron was speeding through the pedestrians on the riverside walkway. Literally screaming at people to get out of the way. Fortunately a boat was being brought out of a clubhouse to the river. Even more fortunately it was a tub (heavy built training boat). So when he smacked into it, it was completely undamaged.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Eh ?
I'm on 20 odd quid a month and that includes the phone. In Bassetlaw - as red wall a place as any.
I thought he was joking, but perhaps not?
seems mad, you can get a new moto g for 100 notes and 12 gb a month sim only for a tenner.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
And I'm asking why you think that is the case. You see a correlation between the two, but you're claiming a causative relationship. If you build a bunch of big new houses, you might just be scooping Con voters from elsewhere.
Because there is a causative relationship and that is in the data I showed you. Where the house building has been rampant the house price to earnings ratio is at its lowest. As a result people can get on the property ladder. As a result people vote Conservative.
There is a causative relationship between home ownership and voting. Tenants are much, much more likely to vote Labour. Owner occupiers are much, much more likely to vote Conservative. Going from tenants to owner occupiers is one key reason why the young vote Labour and the old vote Conservative and the failure to get young people onto the property ladder is a key reason why Labour has been doing better amongst the young in recent years.
Yes some of the new home owners may have been home owners elsewhere. In which case the home they owned elsewhere is now on the market ready for someone else to own.
The problem is when new homes are being bought up by landlords instead of owner occupiers. If landlords are getting their grubby hands on them, then that's when the occupants will be tenants and that's when we have a problem.
You state that the age-voting relationship is driven by a causative relationship between property ownership and voting. What if someone else states that the property ownership-voting relationship is driven by age? What if they're right and you're wrong?
All you've done is restate your assertion. I'm asking why you think the causative relationship exists, not for you to just re-assert it. I understand the claim, and I have doubts.
There is a plethora of evidence that it is a causative relationship both from the data showing such a relationship and from scholarly articles.
"Its hard to sell capitalism to people without capital" - the reason why previously solidly Tory seats in London and the South have swung massively left in recent years is because the home ownership rates there are collapsing.
While in the North the opposite is true. There's been a construction boom up here that has kept house prices low and gotten people onto the property ladder.
You are correct. Although prices have risen at eye watering levels recently. Of course 10-15% of a relatively small amount is manageable. But not forever.
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
No we don't, we know they don't. Because there's no demand for them, there is a demand for cars.
The solution is to expand and improve roads that people actually want and need to use. Where Red Wallers use public transport its buses not trains. If you want to be serious in improving public transport here then you'd be thinking about buses, but unfortunately those who love playing with train sets seem to consider buses a joke and not real public transport.
Of course if you build more and better roads, then the buses can use those roads too. So public transport and cars can both be improved simultaneously by improving the roads. Two for the price of one!
Just to be clear. Your position is that there is "no demand for them [trains]" in places like Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.
No demand, as in none?
No expert on this, but isn't the problem in the north that it's just way too spread out? You'd have to have hundreds of new stations, or a huge investment in buses or space for bikes on trains?
The station in my home town has terrible pedestrian/cycle links (have to cross a very busy A road), and is explicitly designed for people to drive to it.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
I will shortly do both - and I am the most anti-Tory I've been in my life
Every rule has an exception. But if you will shortly do both, that means you're not currently both doesn't it? You don't currently own both your own home and your own transport do you?
Lets see if after a decade of owning your own car and your own transport if you're more or less anti-Tory than you are now when you're not?
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
I will shortly do both - and I am the most anti-Tory I've been in my life
Every rule has an exception. But if you will shortly do both, that means you're not currently both doesn't it? You don't currently own both your own home and your own transport do you?
Lets see if after a decade of owning your own car and your own transport if you're more or less anti-Tory than you are now when you're not?
It's not a rule though is it, what evidence do you have?
I think the Tory Party should listen to Mr Thompson, and their next manifesto should be based on his ideas. This would feature:
- huge investment in a turbo-charged, world-beating road building programme that would enable everybody to drive in short order from A to B - absolutely no more investment in pointless railways - unfettered house building - anywhere, any time, any place - each new house must have parking space for at least three cars - huge private investment in out-of-town shopping malls with huge amounts of parking, so that nobody has to ever go into towns or cities.
I could add to the list. I think this would be a winning manifesto (for the opposition).
Leaving aside the by election, In 2022 there are series of elephant traps that now seem set to engulf the Conservatives.
The most serious is that the mutated ERG has now become a permanent rebel alliance and will be a long term thorn in the side of the PM. Problem is that most of their ideas are either unpopular or unworkable and many members are borderline batsh%t crazy. However they ground May´s government into the dirt and are quite capable of making Johnson´s life a living hell.
Even if the Covid crisis gradually eases (which is likely, given the vaccines and the overall infection rate with low reinfections) there are a series of further "events" which will be at least as challenging. Even if the government performed well, they will get little to no credit.
In the end "its the economy stupid". Inflation will require interest rate rises sooner rather than later. Government expenditure will need to fall, simply to meet a higher interest bill. Local government will go to the brink of collapse and several councils (including Tory ones) will go bust. Growth after a small post Covid bounce will be anemic at best and the ball and chain of post Brexit paperwork is already causing an exodus of investment and a sharp fall in both exports and imports. The UK is already lagging behind the EU and in the coming months that gap will get bigger. The weakness of the City will become a bigger talking point. There is little to no good news on the economic front. A slow puncture of misery.
Sir Kier and Sir Ed are engaged in a pincer movement which will see a very poor Tory perfomance at the locals. The Tories will lose any by election. The ennui of 12 years of the Tories in power is making people bored and fed up with the circus.
So much for the strategic picture
Meanwhile Johnson will face big problems over his own personal conduct and will have to face a series of investigations and any of them could blow up in his face. A fragile PM with a mutinous party behind him may see a forced change of leader (that would be the fourth in 12 years). However a change of face at the front and the retirement of gargoyles like JRM would not be like John Major rescuing the Tories in 91: "First as tragedy the as farce" is more likely, and any leadership campaign may have to reward the Steve Baker tendency and raising their profile will remind the punters that they are mostly nuts. The problem is that the good alternatives are not powerful and the powerful alternatives are not good.
So "Never glad confident morning again" for the Tories and 3 years of misery for the rest of us as they put off their inevitible destruction by delaying the general election as long as possible..
Have a nice day.
From that list you also miss out fuel prices which are going to be up 30% minimum come April when the price cap needs to be reset to reflect the actual market prices.
Which is fine, I'm paying as I go so the price will go up but I'll stop using gas in the warmer weather. I have already started reducing my thermostat progressively by 0.5 degrees every few days to see what I can put up with. My SIM only deal is £10 a month so I can afford an inflationary rise. I am already only using the car when necessary, as petrol is expensive.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
You mean people hire-purchasing phones on 25% interest (effectively)
Another reason why financial planning should be taught in schools....
Nah, with the likes of O2 the phone and airtime contract is split and the phone plan is on 0% APR.
On the doom mongers science wankers saying that prior infection might not work again Omicron, it never sat right. COVID would have to act differently to every other virus in that it could evade t-cells and b-cells with just a handful of mutations to one part of it. That didn't make sense and I'm glad we're getting data from Spector about how well a Delta infection will protect from Omicron, I'd expect it to be above 90%.
Not as good as that:
18. What about the risk of reinfection?
1. People infected with #Delta = 40% relative risk of reinfection with #Omicron 2. People infected with Beta = 60% relative risk of infection with Omicron https://t.co/8kBK8p9lCg
Are you a "science wanker" that we can just ignore?
Hope over science. Pray the pox away!
This is an increase in the *probability of the risk of re-infection*, not that 40% or 60% of people previously infected are vulnerable to being re-infected with Omicron.
Sure! The "doom monger science wankers" are still assessing Omicron and its impacts. Its clear that if you have been infested with one of the previous strains of Covid that you should then have good protection against reinfection. And yet they remain worried - that SA study suggesting 3x the reinfection risk vs Delta. May be accurate, may not be - we still don't know.
So until we do know the science powers that be want everyone triple jabbed by new year - a task that is so vast as to be almost impossible. But we must try. They could ease the pressure by saying "if you have had Covid before you can wait", but they haven't. So there is clearly some risk that concerns them in the great unknown that is Omicron.
Do have to laugh at "Doom monger Sciene Wankers" though. Feels like it needs to be counter-balanced by "there is no threat" preachers of the kind who keep being picked off by Covid in America. We only have wazzocks like Fox or Corbyn and who wants to listen to them?
Keeping a balance between
"We are all dead, fuck it, lets fire the nukes at the Russians for LOLs"
And
"Nothing will happen"
seems to be a be a tricky one. I mean, personally I think an all out thermonuclear war would be a good thing. But I'm like that......
This debate reminds me of that commentator who was furious when the tube closed during lockdown, claiming that the vast majority could no longer get to work. Cars dominate everywhere except southern cities.
This is a bad thing though. I'm lucky to live in a city with a brilliant, publicly owned bus service. I only have the car go get to the hills, cycle every where else.
The big question is the legalisation of those mad electric scooter things, which I'm broadly supportive of given lack of emissions and space taken up on streets by cars. The alternative is to make push bikes cheaper and more widely available (also helps with obesity).
The other is whether electric cars will be cheap enough to be my next car (about 5 years away) or the one after (10), on a middling salary.
There's a trial in my area of the legalised e-scooters. I am in favour - they seem to have included geo-locking of the speed, so idiots can't do 20mph though the parks. Which has upset a number of people trying to use them.
I would suggest as a compromise that there be a no-bag limit hunt for the morons who think that every paved surface is theirs for speeding as 20+ on a sloped up e-scooter.
The other night, A moron was speeding through the pedestrians on the riverside walkway. Literally screaming at people to get out of the way. Fortunately a boat was being brought out of a clubhouse to the river. Even more fortunately it was a tub (heavy built training boat). So when he smacked into it, it was completely undamaged.
Ffs I’m being pressured back to work really quickly by my boss. I already turned down a post Christmas sick note in order to be available to help out but it’s been less than 48 hours and I’m being pestered.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
What do you get for £100 month that you dont get for £10 month? Do you have to pay extra for the carrier pigeons up north or something? Down south we can get 10GB data, unlimited minutes and texts for £7 per month.
As @Malmesbury pointed out. Because your phone is on HP. Which is nuts cos you can outright buy a perfectly serviceable new phone adequate for most needs for £80. I just did. Won't be flashy or have farcical bells and whistle features you'll never use mind.
As predicted, Vodafone have brought back roaming packages to Europe and RoW. It never made sense for them to get rid of it, now it's just available in the higher tier contracts, happily the one I have is already included.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Eh ?
I'm on 20 odd quid a month and that includes the phone. In Bassetlaw - as red wall a place as any.
Aye but you’re sensible. Have you seen how much an iphone 13 pro costs?
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
I will shortly do both - and I am the most anti-Tory I've been in my life
I don't see the moral substance of Philip's position anyway. His thesis is that tories are nimbies and vv, so he is cheering on a kind of zombie apocalypse.
No its not my thesis. My thesis is that NIMBYs are a noisy minority who should be told politely to **** **** *** **** off and then to **** **** **** **** themselves some more and then to keep on ***** themselves.
Ignore the NIMBYs. Get houses done, get people onto the property ladder. Its what worked for Thatcher, its what worked for Cameron, its what works.
You talk a good game of rage, but I know that deep down you instinctively approve my vision of a sparsely populated rural landscape of Conservative voters enjoying their richly deserved reward of property price growth as they gaze out at the grazing livestock.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
Now I have contract envy, use it or lose it for me. Mind you I don't think I have ever used more than half of it...
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
That isn’t the norm
What makes you say that?
And if you're paying for a phone on contract then most firms will split the contract in two now, so the phone-element of the contract will be fixed and the data element will be the bit that goes up.
Ffs I’m being pressured back to work really quickly by my boss. I already turned down a post Christmas sick note in order to be available to help out but it’s been less than 48 hours and I’m being pestered.
Push back hard.
My employer is giving me till the 10th after my op, no questions asked.
I think the Tory Party should listen to Mr Thompson, and their next manifesto should be based on his ideas. This would feature:
- huge investment in a turbo-charged, world-beating road building programme that would enable everybody to drive in short order from A to B - absolutely no more investment in pointless travel on railways - unfettered house building - anywhere, any time, any place - each new house must have parking space for at least three cars -last trip out was to a huge private investment in out-of-town shopping malls with huge amounts of parkingGod Bless Doncaster leisure park, so that nobody has to ever go into towns or cities.
I could add to the list. I think this would be a winning manifesto (for the opposition).
I'll be perfectly honest this is completely how I lead my life.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
Hello.
Pre plague I used to use of 600GB of mobile data per month.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
That isn’t the norm
Most people use the contract to buy the phone
They rarely buy the phone outright and then a separate sim-only contract
What's interesting is that public transport, where it exists in the Red Wall, is primarily buses and not trains. The way to commute in the red wall as shown by that chart is overwhelmingly cars, then walking, then buses.
Trains barely figure at all. Indeed on that chart fewer people use trains in the Red Wall than use bicycles in other types of seat.
Trains are a non-northern obsession. Fuel prices and roads are what matters here.
The reason for not building train lines is that people don't use trains? That's a view, I suppose.
It's a view :-).
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
We know that people do use trains at a certain price. The question is, to what extent are we happy to subsidize the railways where what is paid by users does not meet the costs?
Whatever level is required so that there's not horrific congestion on the roads, and we aren't tempted to build urban motorways to accommodate the increased number of cars - i.e. There is a wider benefit to people who drive and don't use the train, and to people who neither drive or take the train.
I'm not arguing against any subsidy - as you say, there is a lot to consider - but railways at any cost is not an option.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
Hello.
Pre plague I used to use of 600GB of mobile data per month.
I think the Tory Party should listen to Mr Thompson, and their next manifesto should be based on his ideas. This would feature:
- huge investment in a turbo-charged, world-beating road building programme that would enable everybody to drive in short order from A to B - absolutely no more investment in pointless travel on railways - unfettered house building - anywhere, any time, any place - each new house must have parking space for at least three cars -last trip out was to a huge private investment in out-of-town shopping malls with huge amounts of parkingGod Bless Doncaster leisure park, so that nobody has to ever go into towns or cities.
I could add to the list. I think this would be a winning manifesto (for the opposition).
I'll be perfectly honest this is completely how I lead my life.
Mobile phone and internet bills. In March all the major networks and MVNOs have in contract rises of CPI +3.9%.
So for most consumers their bills are going up 10%.
It's fuel. The moment when the machine imposed limit of £99 does not get me a full tank of diesel is imminent. The highest so far is £96.
That's going to hit people more, indeed.
As this excellent article from The Economist a while back put it, its all about cars and houses. The Red Wall is full of houses with 2 cars each, its not train sets. The mantra for keeping it needs to be cars and houses, cars and houses, cars and houses. Deal with those and you've got it.
Not sure that Wazza counts as the red wall. We know your personal views on developers building houses everywhere with no impediment. But red wall voters tend to not want that. So what you advocate is the opposite of what they will vote for. Labour are seen as the party of stupid planning applications, the Tories as the ones who oppose them and defend their communities.
You're turning into @HYUFD - "pull up the drawbridge, I own my home, so screw everyone else." You'll be banging on about the evils of inheritance tax and the importance of inheritances next.
The point is that if you own your own home and own your own transport then that is the making of a Conservative voter.
Conservative voters might say they don't want more houses built as they want to protect their house prices, but then if that means their neighbours have no choice but to live in privately rented accommodation then their neighbours will be Labour voters. If new houses are built then the neighbours can also own their own home and transport, while they still own their own.
Ensuring everyone owns their own home and transport is the far most important thing, not having a few people that do then pandering to those NIMBY scumbags.
I am? I've moved to a village where every other house is building another house in their extended back garden - mine had it done already...
I am talking about red wall voters. You can sit here and say how they are wrong but that doesn't change how they think or vote.
They do not want their parks and gardens building on and they are voting to stop that happening. I also love the "private rented" = "Labour voter". You sound like one of the Tory activists who came up from dahn sarf on the Tory bus a few elections ago. Found himself arguing on the doorstep with repeated people that "but you can't be a Labour voter, look at your house, and your car!"
How they think or vote matters far more whether they themselves are a home owner, and whether they themselves can afford their own transport, than their neighbours.
Forget your anecdata from talking with whinging NIMBY scumbags and look at the actual evidence. Look at the data I supplied. The Red Wall (and places like Wazza too) has seen rampant house building in recent years and has the lowest house price to wage multiple in the country as a result. As a result people have been able to afford their own homes. As a result more people are now home owners. As a result more people vote Tory.
If the NIMBY shiteating scumbags were listened to then you'd have a few people happy to look at theoretical £££££££s on their house price while far more people would be living in privately rented accommodation and voting Labour.
Why would they listen to me? I am not important.
My anecdata is what is happening. The surge in Tory and independent councillors and now Tory MPs has a direct link to the "rampant house building" which is being done by Labour councils who the government are forcing into it.
People do not want "rampant house building". So they vote against the people they think are responsible and instead elect people who say they will stop it.
Being all in favour of personal liberties I would have thought democratic free will would be something you support. Not branding your fellow travellers "NIMBY shit-eating scumbags"
Voters in areas of large house building aren't voting Conservative in protest against large house building.
They're voting Conservative because of the large house building.
They're really not. Go talk to them.
They really are.
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
What do you mean "lost"? These people would be somewhere, voting for someone. Who says they wouldn't be voting Conservative? You need a longitudinal study here, not a cross sectional one. And certainly not a cross sectional one designed around a selection bias.
That's my point!
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
Not always.
Cameron won private renters in 2015. Blair won home owners with a mortgage in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
Plus building all over the greenbelt will send some Tory homeowners to the LDs or Greens.
Build new affordable housing to buy yes but in brownbelt land first
Labour won private renters in 2015.
Blair won home owners with a mortgage because Blair was exceedingly popular so people were more likely to vote Labour despite being home owners. Still home ownership still played a positive correlation even then, its just that Blair's popularity shifted the entire chart up.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned but £60-£100 a month phone contracts are very normal for the red wall. People talking of £10 sim only deals are very much out of touch. Christ.
Who are you speaking to that spends that much on their phone? 😲
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
That isn’t the norm
Most people use the contract to buy the phone
They rarely buy the phone outright and then a separate sim-only contract
Indeed but that's typically two contracts nowadays. You'll have a repayment contract for the phone and a separate contract for the SIM. They may be bundled together, but they're not the same.
With inflation, its the SIM element that goes up. So even a 10% increase in SIM costs, if you're paying for a phone too, might only be ~2-3% increase in your phone bill.
Comments
Rachel Maskell resigns.
The most serious is that the mutated ERG has now become a permanent rebel alliance and will be a long term thorn in the side of the PM. Problem is that most of their ideas are either unpopular or unworkable and many members are borderline batsh%t crazy. However they ground May´s government into the dirt and are quite capable of making Johnson´s life a living hell.
Even if the Covid crisis gradually eases (which is likely, given the vaccines and the overall infection rate with low reinfections) there are a series of further "events" which will be at least as challenging. Even if the government performed well, they will get little to no credit.
In the end "its the economy stupid". Inflation will require interest rate rises sooner rather than later. Government expenditure will need to fall, simply to meet a higher interest bill. Local government will go to the brink of collapse and several councils (including Tory ones) will go bust. Growth after a small post Covid bounce will be anemic at best and the ball and chain of post Brexit paperwork is already causing an exodus of investment and a sharp fall in both exports and imports. The UK is already lagging behind the EU and in the coming months that gap will get bigger. The weakness of the City will become a bigger talking point. There is little to no good news on the economic front. A slow puncture of misery.
Sir Kier and Sir Ed are engaged in a pincer movement which will see a very poor Tory perfomance at the locals. The Tories will lose any by election. The ennui of 12 years of the Tories in power is making people bored and fed up with the circus.
So much for the strategic picture
Meanwhile Johnson will face big problems over his own personal conduct and will have to face a series of investigations and any of them could blow up in his face. A fragile PM with a mutinous party behind him may see a forced change of leader (that would be the fourth in 12 years). However a change of face at the front and the retirement of gargoyles like JRM would not be like John Major rescuing the Tories in 91: "First as tragedy the as farce" is more likely, and any leadership campaign may have to reward the Steve Baker tendency and raising their profile will remind the punters that they are mostly nuts. The problem is that the good alternatives are not powerful and the powerful alternatives are not good.
So "Never glad confident morning again" for the Tories and 3 years of misery for the rest of us as they put off their inevitible destruction by delaying the general election as long as possible..
Have a nice day.
The key point is full employment for the first time in two generations.
Everything stems from that.
Leave school, minimum wage job, live with parents rent free for a few years, affordable house prices mean bingo you can buy.
Something your parents and grandparents couldn't. Because there was a fear that if, or when, you lost your job it was a decade or a lifetime on the Dole.
In any event, watch out for what happens in January.
Leisure travel is already at insane levels. Kings Cross was busier than I've ever seen it on Sunday night and I used to travel home from there on a Friday at 18:30...
There needs to be a huge investment in making trains 4- 6 coaches and running services into the evening. That means stations lengthened / fixed, more capacity at the terminals and the routes leading into them. So instead out the prices up and hope people don't travel. Its a major electoral issue hence the anger from voters about the cancellation of much of the promised investment especially in the east.
Party before country, eh @HYUFD?
You go talk to the people in those new homes and ask them how they're voting. If the houses weren't built, the people wouldn't be there, and their votes would be lost.
If you're talking to NIMBY shitheads like our own Essicks Massiv you're talking to the wrong people.
Yes of course more people drive. But trains are not a southern issue as you suggest. Even Tory MPs in the red wall are banging the drum for trains - my old MP has done two videos celebrating the one train a day direct to London that has started running from the Boro.
The world is not black and white where you are the only truth and anything else is wrong. Especially when faced with so many Tory MPs and Tory councillors campaigning in and being elected on platforms to oppose Labour housebuilding then you say no they're not.
New building should always be in brownbelt land first. In any case as your chart showed most people in the RedWall already own their own property anyway
The data is crystal clear. It is roads that matter, but roads aren't as shiny as Thomas the Tank Engine.
Trains are less popular than the Lib Dems. They're Official Monster Raving Loony Party levels of support.
We have seen political opinion Balkanised and previously fringe at best ideas brought mainstream...
In which case Boris would be safe anyway
If they were living in privately rented accommodation (which is where a lot of first time new build owners were living before they buy their first home) then they'd have been voting Labour.
Build a new home and sell it to someone renting and ultimately you have probably 2 fewer Labour voters, and 2 extra Tory voters.
Would help if your government was actually spending money building roads as an alternative - Greater Manchester and even more so West Yorkshire are in desperate need for more roads. Problem is they would be a massively destructive thing, and people object, so they don't happen either.
Not sure when you last went into places like Calderdale but it is not an easy place to get around. A huge number of people living in low-density developer-led housing clinging to hillsides. The only way through is down the valley where there's no room to expand the road which has become much worse thanks to all the new houses.
Which is why there is demand to make more use of the train on journeys where it would be better than the car. Which is why they needed NPR building so that there is enough capacity to stop more trains in places like Mytholmroyd and reopen other stations.
Nottm, Sheffield and Manchester light rail / tram networks are now working towards 100 million passengers a year between them, and they are only partial networks. That's the number without buses.
The "people who use the wrong thing" are squeaky nobodies. Like the NIMBYs you've been talking to. They're not a majority.
I agree that the government isn't spending anywhere near enough money on road building, and if it wants investment that would work that is what is required.
There is a fleet of 40 modernish (mid-90s), comfortable electric trains that until this year were doing sterling service as commuter trains between Kings Cross and Peterborough/Cambridge. These were actually owned by the Government, not a leasing company.
In July, the Government sold them off on the cheap. Now they're being scrapped.
Here's one booked on its last journey to the scrapyard tomorrow: https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:K02112/2021-12-16/detailed
And here's one waiting at the scrapyard a couple of days ago: https://twitter.com/Rail_Photter/status/1470123441596641284
It is a mild term of disdain more commonly used by Wiganers these days.
But we know people do use trains.
So the reply to Philip's argument is to expand and improve train services, so they can be used.
Cameron won private renters in 2015. Blair won home owners with a mortgage in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
Plus building all over the greenbelt will send some Tory homeowners to the LDs or Greens.
Build new affordable housing to buy yes but in brownbelt land first
There is a causative relationship between home ownership and voting. Tenants are much, much more likely to vote Labour. Owner occupiers are much, much more likely to vote Conservative. Going from tenants to owner occupiers is one key reason why the young vote Labour and the old vote Conservative and the failure to get young people onto the property ladder is a key reason why Labour has been doing better amongst the young in recent years.
Yes some of the new home owners may have been home owners elsewhere. In which case the home they owned elsewhere is now on the market ready for someone else to own.
The problem is when new homes are being bought up by landlords instead of owner occupiers. If landlords are getting their grubby hands on them, then that's when the occupants will be tenants and that's when we have a problem.
I enjoy Rugby League as a spectator much more than Union, so used to go. Could be lonely!
Blair won home owners with a mortgage because Blair was exceedingly popular so people were more likely to vote Labour despite being home owners. Still home ownership still played a positive correlation even then, its just that Blair's popularity shifted the entire chart up.
https://productivityinsightsnetwork.co.uk/2019/01/real-journey-time-real-city-size-and-the-disappearing-productivity-puzzle/
The result is that our biggest non-capital cities, Manchester and Birmingham, are significantly less productive than almost all similar-sized cities in Europe, and less productive than much smaller cities such as Edinburgh, Oxford, and Bristol.
One notable difference between the UK’s large cities and those in similar countries is how little public transport infrastructure they have...
And that matters, because productivity is the only thing that makes people richer in the long term.
(Interesting that Portsmouth, which doesn't feel rich, does very well for its size. But then again, it's hemmed in by the sea, so it's dense. Isn't there some principle in economics that things that are abundant get seriously misused because it's not even worth thinking about how to optimise them?)
As with much of the pandemic, the only point where we will know the answer for *sure*, is well after the fact.
The solution is to expand and improve roads that people actually want and need to use. Where Red Wallers use public transport its buses not trains. If you want to be serious in improving public transport here then you'd be thinking about buses, but unfortunately those who love playing with train sets seem to consider buses a joke and not real public transport.
Of course if you build more and better roads, then the buses can use those roads too. So public transport and cars can both be improved simultaneously by improving the roads. Two for the price of one!
West Yorkshire is a horrible country to try and drive around.
The decisions what to vote on were made by the "Quad" (Johnson, Sunak, Javid, Barclay) not the Cabinet. Sunak was the only one against the decision, so they grabbed the opportunity to let him abstain rather than resign when his Shadow was sick.
If you took a measure of, say, "five train journeys of any length in a normal (non pandemic) 12 months period", I'd guess less than 10% of the population "use trains". Maybe less than 5%.
In nearly every single LTLA in Scotland, for a number of the elderly groups, more people have been vaccinated than either the ONS mid 2020 numbers *or* the provided (in dataset) population counts.
What are Scotland using? Not NIMS data, for sure....
When I was living in a classic West Yorkshire Marginal Constituency and had to go into/out of Leeds during rush hour, the trains were rammed.
So until we do know the science powers that be want everyone triple jabbed by new year - a task that is so vast as to be almost impossible. But we must try. They could ease the pressure by saying "if you have had Covid before you can wait", but they haven't. So there is clearly some risk that concerns them in the great unknown that is Omicron.
Do have to laugh at "Doom monger Sciene Wankers" though. Feels like it needs to be counter-balanced by "there is no threat" preachers of the kind who keep being picked off by Covid in America. We only have wazzocks like Fox or Corbyn and who wants to listen to them?
Another reason why financial planning should be taught in schools....
This is a bad thing though. I'm lucky to live in a city with a brilliant, publicly owned bus service. I only have the car go get to the hills, cycle every where else.
The big question is the legalisation of those mad electric scooter things, which I'm broadly supportive of given lack of emissions and space taken up on streets by cars. The alternative is to make push bikes cheaper and more widely available (also helps with obesity).
The other is whether electric cars will be cheap enough to be my next car (about 5 years away) or the one after (10), on a middling salary.
No demand, as in none?
"Its hard to sell capitalism to people without capital" - the reason why previously solidly Tory seats in London and the South have swung massively left in recent years is because the home ownership rates there are collapsing.
While in the North the opposite is true. There's been a construction boom up here that has kept house prices low and gotten people onto the property ladder.
I'm on 20 odd quid a month and that includes the phone. In Bassetlaw - as red wall a place as any.
The truth is lack of home ownership is only really a big problem in London. In the South most still own their own homes as they do in the North and Midlands and Wales
Ignore the NIMBYs. Get houses done, get people onto the property ladder. Its what worked for Thatcher, its what worked for Cameron, its what works.
Mrs Capitano has taken the bus to work a few times recently. It takes her about an hour vs 30 minutes in the car.
Why the difference? They're the same roads and it's not like you can go much over 40 on country roads anyway. No, it's because she has to change buses in Witney and that's a 20 minute wait; and the buses are only every half-hour because that fits the level of demand.
As soon as you can get people out of their cars then buses, at least, will get better by simple supply-and-demand logic. But that either requires restrictions on car travel, or big investment in bus services, and the Government has shown no serious willingness to do either.
I would suggest as a compromise that there be a no-bag limit hunt for the morons who think that every paved surface is theirs for speeding as 20+ on a sloped up e-scooter.
The other night, A moron was speeding through the pedestrians on the riverside walkway. Literally screaming at people to get out of the way. Fortunately a boat was being brought out of a clubhouse to the river. Even more fortunately it was a tub (heavy built training boat). So when he smacked into it, it was completely undamaged.
seems mad, you can get a new moto g for 100 notes and 12 gb a month sim only for a tenner.
Of course 10-15% of a relatively small amount is manageable. But not forever.
The station in my home town has terrible pedestrian/cycle links (have to cross a very busy A road), and is explicitly designed for people to drive to it.
Lets see if after a decade of owning your own car and your own transport if you're more or less anti-Tory than you are now when you're not?
- huge investment in a turbo-charged, world-beating road building programme that would enable everybody to drive in short order from A to B
- absolutely no more investment in pointless railways
- unfettered house building - anywhere, any time, any place
- each new house must have parking space for at least three cars
- huge private investment in out-of-town shopping malls with huge amounts of parking, so that nobody has to ever go into towns or cities.
I could add to the list. I think this would be a winning manifesto (for the opposition).
People have options.
"We are all dead, fuck it, lets fire the nukes at the Russians for LOLs"
And
"Nothing will happen"
seems to be a be a tricky one. I mean, personally I think an all out thermonuclear war would be a good thing. But I'm like that......
Which is nuts cos you can outright buy a perfectly serviceable new phone adequate for most needs for £80.
I just did.
Won't be flashy or have farcical bells and whistle features you'll never use mind.
My contract is with Sky Mobile and I spend £10 a month getting 10GB a data and that's plenty for me. Any I don't use is rolled over to a pot too, so I have hundreds of GB in my family pot that can be accessed on demand if I have a data-heavy month for some reason.
And if you're paying for a phone on contract then most firms will split the contract in two now, so the phone-element of the contract will be fixed and the data element will be the bit that goes up.
My employer is giving me till the 10th after my op, no questions asked.
Pre plague I used to use of 600GB of mobile data per month.
They rarely buy the phone outright and then a separate sim-only contract
Blackburn lad.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2015/06/08/general-election-2015-how-britain-really-voted
With inflation, its the SIM element that goes up. So even a 10% increase in SIM costs, if you're paying for a phone too, might only be ~2-3% increase in your phone bill.