I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
Why are we cursed with such sub par politicians. Last night I gave at least half a dozen simple and practical steps that could be implemented immediately, at low cost (financial and social) that would have tangible benefits at slowing spread and reducing hospitalisations.
WTF wants to be a politician there are way better ways to earn money and way easier ways to perform public good.
It's amusing how the Telegraph put Truss in the FMBs next to the 'PM' headline as if she already had the gig.
It's a fascinating photo. Truss is projecting the trappings of high office. Yet there's this overwhelming sense of fake - the gilt chairs and Truss herself.
It looks like the usual suspect press is setting up Truss to take over from Johnson, based on these photos.
Absolutely. I’m not sure why she has friends in the press. Maybe it’s just that’s more photogenic.
She's the potential candidate in the era of Strictly and X factor and Love Island and every other bloody programme that relies on audience votes. Bu the only audience she has to appeal to
Worryingly I think this is Truss’s only way to become PM - so it will probably happen in April /May
Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman Prediction: in a few months time, Truss resigns as Foreign Sec, accusing Johnson of not being tough enough with the EU; repeating exactly what Johnson did to May & for same reason: to position for a leadership bid, knowing Tories will always chase rainbow of perfect hard Brexit
It will merely prove how much the Tories need the bogeyman of Europe as cover for their own shortcomings.... and we will have another blond non-entity as PM.
Liz Truss was of course a big supporter of Remain at the time of the referendum.
"Liz Truss @trussliz I am backing remain as I believe it is in Britain's economic interest and means we can focus on vital economic and social reform at home. 1:01 PM · Feb 20, 2016"
I don’t see why people think this is a point.
She backed remain for logical reasons. The voters decided they had other priorities so put more weight on other factors. She has knocked down and implemented the voters instructions to the best of her ability
Indeed. But the problem, as ever, is that the ‘instructions’ as they are, are an inchoate mess. How you perceive them depends on your own ideological views.
I know one guy, seriously, who voted Leave because he doesn’t like Peugeot cars. How do we respect his ‘instructions’?
The instructions were to leave. We’ve done that. Everything else is up to our elected representatives - and their decisions will be judged at the next election
I wish it were so easy for me to intellectually take this stunde null approach to the referendum. The warm ideological bath of a simple black/white approach to a hugely complicated issue. An airy dismissal of all the bilge sold to normal people to bring about the vote that, if the True Believers get their way, will bring about change in this country that if clearly enunciated would have been comprehensively beaten. A tearjerking belief in the wisdom of the British electorate when your party is cossetted by the gentle caress of a FPTP system that, more often than not, simply splits the non-Tory majority.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
I'll believe it when I see it given they were due in 2020...
Also it requires a whole new infrastructure so the lorries charge at night - look forward to seeing that created.
In about 4 seconds of googling you can can see it for yourself. They’ve been driving the prototypes around for ages and Pepsi’s CEO has said they’re expecting their first delivery in the next month. As I wrote above, the constraint is supply of batteries. As Tesla spools up in-house produced 4680 cells then the semi truck will be produced at scale.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
Yes, by a convincing margin too - an effective socialist-communist partnership, helped by the eccentric decision of the right to pick a Pinochet nostalgist. Though to be fair to Kast, the far-right opponent, he didn't quibble or claim fraud as so often happens in Latin America, but conceded promptly and promised cooperation. Perhaps Chile really will now move on from the ghosts of the past.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I am told by people that know Rishi from his finance days that’s he’s very impressive (ie the opposite of Javid).
Rachel Reeves’ CV is just another another state sector careerist. No thanks.
Sunak is smart and good at the day to day politics. He doesn't see the bigger picture, however, nor does he have what you might call the common sense, to keep him grounded. Hence quite a few mistakes such as the bungled social care policy..
Nevertheless much better than Johnson and almost certainly better than Truss.
The bungled social care policy - how is avoiding as Chancellor announcing a 2.5% tax increase bungling anything - offloading that to Boris to do quietly was the mark of a complete political genius.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
It's amusing how the Telegraph put Truss in the FMBs next to the 'PM' headline as if she already had the gig.
It's a fascinating photo. Truss is projecting the trappings of high office. Yet there's this overwhelming sense of fake - the gilt chairs and Truss herself.
It looks like the usual suspect press is setting up Truss to take over from Johnson, based on these photos.
It reminds me of the Garde Republicaine and the Elysee Palace. Ms Truss is a (former) republican. One almost wonders if she wants to be President of the Britannic Republic.
Astute. All that gilt is very French, and expected over there, so nothing remarkable. If you compare with the real Queen, who has been practising this for nearly a century - she's got that balance of expensive dowdiness, which seems genuine.
That's it - you've got it right. Ms Truss is not being Trumpian - nobody else could get that accident in a gold paint factory quite right - but she's not doing the '940 year old family business' thing either.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
The problem is with electric HGVs - assuming battery power - is that they will move freight far more slowly and expensively than their equivalent on rail, which can draw power from overhead wires and do 75mph with no trouble at all pulling 40 large containers. Once you factor in the extra power for hauling the weight of the battery as well, they"re not likely to be as favourable in a comparison for longer haul as rail. They still, of course, score massively in terms of flexibility in delivery to final destination.
Plus, of course, HGVs do a great deal more damage to roads than freight trains do to railways.
I think we would see a shift to more rail freight in the medium term if there was capacity. At the moment, there isn't, and until a new government green lights HS2E that will remain an issue for the NE.
The problem with rail is unless the rail depot is both the departure point and the destination of the freight, then the goods need road transport to reach their actual destination. HGVs can do that, rail can't.
That's why only approximately 4% of all freight is carried by rail. Its not because of the lack of capacity, its because it doesn't actually suit most freight.
Rail worked really well with things like coal, where you could have a depot at the mine and a depot at the power plant. For modern freight, its a different story.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
Why are we cursed with such sub par politicians. Last night I gave at least half a dozen simple and practical steps that could be implemented immediately, at low cost (financial and social) that would have tangible benefits at slowing spread and reducing hospitalisations.
WTF wants to be a politician there are way better ways to earn money and way easier ways to perform public good.
It's easy money if you're in a safe seat, but the current Lib Dem occupant of North Shropshire will need to keep her CV up to date for sure. All MPs are paid the same salary, but the job security is wildly different.
Poor Chile. After the socialist Michelle Bachelet they had the conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera for 4 years and now are back with a leftwinger again
The other candidate was a supporter of Pinochet, so ...... oh I see why you'd be upset
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
Are they really called Semis? Obviously make some truck fans very excited.
The whole point of the single market was to remove their ability to act like utter twats.
Thatcher's greatest achievement.
Utterly destroyed by those who worshipped her...
What was the UK's trade balance with the EU in the single market ?
Are you tacitly dissing Mrs Fatcha for dismantling UK primary and tertiary manufacturing?
Manufacturing output grew in the UK when Thatcher was prime minister.
She also had a belief in living within your means.
Which is what you need if you want ever freer trade.
What we've had for the last 20+ years are governments which live beyond their means and encourage voters to do likewise.
With the consequence of ever more debt funding a permanent trade deficit.
Manufacturing output grew by only 6% over the entirety of Thatcher's time in office, with an 18% decline in the first couple of years. By contrast it grew by 27% during the 97-10 Labour government, 6% under John Major and 15% since the Tories took over in 2010. So by some margin manufacturing growth was weakest under Thatcher, largely because the early 80s recession was so devastating.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
Why are we cursed with such sub par politicians. Last night I gave at least half a dozen simple and practical steps that could be implemented immediately, at low cost (financial and social) that would have tangible benefits at slowing spread and reducing hospitalisations.
WTF wants to be a politician there are way better ways to earn money and way easier ways to perform public good.
It's easy money if you're in a safe seat, but the current Lib Dem occupant of North Shropshire will need to keep her CV up to date for sure. All MPs are paid the same salary, but the job security is wildly different.
Being blunt job security really isn't great in most jobs, you are there while your face fits and the work comes in. If / when either changes you will be quickly gone.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
Are they really called Semis? Obviously make some truck fans very excited.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I am told by people that know Rishi from his finance days that’s he’s very impressive (ie the opposite of Javid).
Rachel Reeves’ CV is just another another state sector careerist. No thanks.
Sunak is smart and good at the day to day politics. He doesn't see the bigger picture, however, nor does he have what you might call the common sense, to keep him grounded. Hence quite a few mistakes such as the bungled social care policy..
Nevertheless much better than Johnson and almost certainly better than Truss.
The bungled social care policy - how is avoiding as Chancellor announcing a 2.5% tax increase bungling anything - offloading that to Boris to do quietly was the mark of a complete political genius.
As I say, Sunak is good at the politics. I am assuming the policy itself is slightly important, not just how you announce it.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
The problem is with electric HGVs - assuming battery power - is that they will move freight far more slowly and expensively than their equivalent on rail, which can draw power from overhead wires and do 75mph with no trouble at all pulling 40 large containers. Once you factor in the extra power for hauling the weight of the battery as well, they"re not likely to be as favourable in a comparison for longer haul as rail. They still, of course, score massively in terms of flexibility in delivery to final destination.
Plus, of course, HGVs do a great deal more damage to roads than freight trains do to railways.
I think we would see a shift to more rail freight in the medium term if there was capacity. At the moment, there isn't, and until a new government green lights HS2E that will remain an issue for the NE.
Rail is cheaper on a per mile basis to ship goods than HGVs.
But obviously, you can only ship where the railheads are & need some HGV transport at the end-points. The two forms are not actually in conflict, or shouldn’t be. The easiest way to get aggregate for your building site into London is often by train & then HGV for the last mile or so I believe.
Ironically, freight traffic is usually directly profitable for train lines. In the UK we prioritise subsidised passenger traffic. This is yet another reason why failing to build HS2 out is such a short-sighted decision. Freeing up space on the old UK mainlines for freight traffic as well as local passenger traffic would have had significant positive economic impact on the whole of the UK.
(My understanding is the rail freight in the UK is mostly capacity constrained - if more capacity was available, industry would happily pay to it.)
It's amusing how the Telegraph put Truss in the FMBs next to the 'PM' headline as if she already had the gig.
It's a fascinating photo. Truss is projecting the trappings of high office. Yet there's this overwhelming sense of fake - the gilt chairs and Truss herself.
It looks like the usual suspect press is setting up Truss to take over from Johnson, based on these photos.
Absolutely. I’m not sure why she has friends in the press. Maybe it’s just that’s more photogenic.
She's the potential candidate in the era of Strictly and X factor and Love Island and every other bloody programme that relies on audience votes. Bu the only audience she has to appeal to
Worryingly I think this is Truss’s only way to become PM - so it will probably happen in April /May
Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman Prediction: in a few months time, Truss resigns as Foreign Sec, accusing Johnson of not being tough enough with the EU; repeating exactly what Johnson did to May & for same reason: to position for a leadership bid, knowing Tories will always chase rainbow of perfect hard Brexit
It will merely prove how much the Tories need the bogeyman of Europe as cover for their own shortcomings.... and we will have another blond non-entity as PM.
Liz Truss was of course a big supporter of Remain at the time of the referendum.
"Liz Truss @trussliz I am backing remain as I believe it is in Britain's economic interest and means we can focus on vital economic and social reform at home. 1:01 PM · Feb 20, 2016"
I don’t see why people think this is a point.
She backed remain for logical reasons. The voters decided they had other priorities so put more weight on other factors. She has knocked down and implemented the voters instructions to the best of her ability
Indeed. But the problem, as ever, is that the ‘instructions’ as they are, are an inchoate mess. How you perceive them depends on your own ideological views.
I know one guy, seriously, who voted Leave because he doesn’t like Peugeot cars. How do we respect his ‘instructions’?
The instructions were to leave. We’ve done that. Everything else is up to our elected representatives - and their decisions will be judged at the next election
I wish it were so easy for me to intellectually take this stunde null approach to the referendum. The warm ideological bath of a simple black/white approach to a hugely complicated issue. An airy dismissal of all the bilge sold to normal people to bring about the vote that, if the True Believers get their way, will bring about change in this country that if clearly enunciated would have been comprehensively beaten. A tearjerking belief in the wisdom of the British electorate when your party is cossetted by the gentle caress of a FPTP system that, more often than not, simply splits the non-Tory majority.
A very well expressed post. If the same people wanted to persuade their followers that hanging and flogging was the way to go I've no doubt that the same majority could be won without the implications being considered
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
I Doubt it. A 500 mile range doesn't put it in competition with US long distance rail freight. That range puts it in the range of local deliveries from a warehouse.
It's amusing how the Telegraph put Truss in the FMBs next to the 'PM' headline as if she already had the gig.
It's a fascinating photo. Truss is projecting the trappings of high office. Yet there's this overwhelming sense of fake - the gilt chairs and Truss herself.
It looks like the usual suspect press is setting up Truss to take over from Johnson, based on these photos.
It reminds me of the Garde Republicaine and the Elysee Palace. Ms Truss is a (former) republican. One almost wonders if she wants to be President of the Britannic Republic.
Astute. All that gilt is very French, and expected over there, so nothing remarkable. If you compare with the real Queen, who has been practising this for nearly a century - she's got that balance of expensive dowdiness, which seems genuine.
That's it - you've got it right. Ms Truss is not being Trumpian - nobody else could get that accident in a gold paint factory quite right - but she's not doing the '940 year old family business' thing either.
It's got a bit of a budget Basic Instinct vibe if you ask me. No wonder the Telegraph put it on the front page.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
Why are we cursed with such sub par politicians. Last night I gave at least half a dozen simple and practical steps that could be implemented immediately, at low cost (financial and social) that would have tangible benefits at slowing spread and reducing hospitalisations.
I thought those suggestions were excellent, @moonshine
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
£37 billion thrown at Test and Trace. Described as an "eye watering waste of money" which failed to achieve its objective.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
His record as CotE would suggest the opposite. Spaffer in Chief
And one who loads the costs onto working people, especially the working poor.
This reminds me of that silly saga from about a year ago, about whether or not a shadow was in the wrong place on a photo, or something like that.
Do you mean the picture of Boris on the phone to Biden that lots and lots of anti Boris dimwits thought was faked because of the angle of the phone cable in the mirror?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
Why are we cursed with such sub par politicians. Last night I gave at least half a dozen simple and practical steps that could be implemented immediately, at low cost (financial and social) that would have tangible benefits at slowing spread and reducing hospitalisations.
WTF wants to be a politician there are way better ways to earn money and way easier ways to perform public good.
Money isn't everything, there are many other motivators.
Power and influence spring to mind.
Wanting to make the world 'a better place' is another.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
In the interview I heard she talked about sick pay and grants.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
From memory rail carries 4% of all freight and HGVs carry about 80% of all freight, so if your solution for "net zero" is rail investment instead of clean HGVs then you've got as much chance of getting that right as you do removing a headache by banging your head against the wall.
Yeah, road is dominant for freight. This govt pdf puts the share by road (both HGV and smaller) at 87-90%, with rail at ~9%. Rail freight overall has been declining because we don't shift coal around any more, but rail-freight-excluding-coal is increasing. Miles-travelled by HGV declining slowly; miles-travelled by light commercial vehicles rising pretty quickly. Water-borne is a surprisingly large chunk of our domestic freight too.
I suspect in practice we'll need to do a bit of everything -- some of the longer distance HGV freight getting shifted to rail (in particular journeys starting at container ports), and electric HGV for shorter distance railhead-to-destination, and also making sure all those last-mile vans with our Amazon parcels are electric. Easiest to do immediately would be pushing the light-commercial fleet towards electric, maybe?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
The problem is with electric HGVs - assuming battery power - is that they will move freight far more slowly and expensively than their equivalent on rail, which can draw power from overhead wires and do 75mph with no trouble at all pulling 40 large containers. Once you factor in the extra power for hauling the weight of the battery as well, they"re not likely to be as favourable in a comparison for longer haul as rail. They still, of course, score massively in terms of flexibility in delivery to final destination.
Plus, of course, HGVs do a great deal more damage to roads than freight trains do to railways.
I think we would see a shift to more rail freight in the medium term if there was capacity. At the moment, there isn't, and until a new government green lights HS2E that will remain an issue for the NE.
The problem with rail is unless the rail depot is both the departure point and the destination of the freight, then the goods need road transport to reach their actual destination. HGVs can do that, rail can't.
That's why only approximately 4% of all freight is carried by rail. Its not because of the lack of capacity, its because it doesn't actually suit most freight.
Rail worked really well with things like coal, where you could have a depot at the mine and a depot at the power plant. For modern freight, its a different story.
But it's about moving it to points where it can be transported for that last few miles (as @Phil said). The trick is to move containers between rail depots and then put them on lorries for that last little bit.
That dramatically reduces both the ton/km carried on roads, and congestion, and wear and tear.
For heavy freight over a couple of hundred miles it's a no-brainer - if there were the capacity.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
The Tesla Semi that they’ve effectively pushed into the long grass? That they promised for 2019 originally, but are now saying they might start producing them in 2023?
US rail freight is dominated by bulk goods. A 2 mile long freight train full to the brim of aggregate, bricks, steel, is going to outperform 200+ Teslsa trucks every time - the economics just don’t work any other way.
If they can make those trucks driverless? Then maybe, just maybe the economics might shift, but even then you’re shipping extra weight and complexity for no good reason compared to a train.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road. A dedicated ‘airside’ train from Holyhead to Dover might work too.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
Are they really called Semis? Obviously make some truck fans very excited.
They are called Semi Trucks because they pull Semi Trailers. i.e. trailers with no front axle.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I am told by people that know Rishi from his finance days that’s he’s very impressive (ie the opposite of Javid).
Rachel Reeves’ CV is just another another state sector careerist. No thanks.
Sunak is smart and good at the day to day politics. He doesn't see the bigger picture, however, nor does he have what you might call the common sense, to keep him grounded. Hence quite a few mistakes such as the bungled social care policy..
Nevertheless much better than Johnson and almost certainly better than Truss.
Also add. Interesting and apparently automatic assumption that someone working in the "finance industry" is better qualified to run the state than someone working for the state.
Especially when you look at the finance places where he has worked. Hedge funds don't teach you much about the problems facing ordinary people. A closer look at the hedge fund where Rishi worked is warranted. There are a number of interesting court judgments.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Brexit as a political and ideological project is dead.
It’s now an administrative clear up job, with an inexorable pull back toward closer arrangements with the EU.
I must have missed Canada becoming a satrapy of the US
I’m afraid your language reveals why Brexit is not a serious project.
Canada is not a satrap of the US, the U.K. was never a satrap of the EU.
Really idiotic stuff.
Satrap=claptrap.
As I said upthread, Brexit is dead. All it has left is tabloidesque guff like “satrapy”.
No wonder Philip T has tried to change the subject to “roads” (where is is also fantastically wrong, see also his ideas on housing and labour economics).
Philip seems to think he lives in Waco, Texas, rather than Warrington, Lancs (that’s right, Lancs).
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
But Philip says that Electric HGVs solve all the problems...
Should we ask about the downtime for recharging and where he thinks that can be achieved?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
To be clear the "any" was a reference to for climate chance purposes which is what I was replying to.
Taking scores of HGVs off the road is a drop in the ocean. It sounds impressive, but it really isn't. Scores of HGVs is nothing on a national basis which is where climate change considerations come into effect.
Even if you doubled freight-by-rail overnight, even if you tripled it, HGVs would still dominate transportation.
There had been some speculation this was being delayed while they waited for US reform to go through congress, but it looks like they decided to click send anyway.
From 2023 onwards there will basically be 3 types of tax regime for multinationals. Most countries will have rates around 25%, a few outliers - generally in developing countries - will still tax at over 30%, and a handful will have a 15% rate. Britain will be in the middle of the pack and marginally higher tax than the US for the first time in decades. We'd better have other compelling reasons to attract FDI.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
Interestingly, the Germans are trialling installing overhead power lines above the outer lanes of motorways to power long distance vehicles. Currently experimental, but something we might see rolled out in the future.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
AIUI, the vast majority of the NHS staff opposed to vaccination are well into the back offices. Find it difficult to believe that any front- or second- line staff have any such concerns.
Long-term forecasting of the COVID-19 epidemic Dynamic Causal Modelling, UCL, UK
Note on Omicron: if contact rates continue to fall as predicted, hospital admissions will peak on 7 Jan 2022 at 1,279 per day—with deaths peaking at 137 per day. These (7-day average) estimates are likely to rise if case rates do not fall within the next few days.
The real-time estimate of the R-number is 0.96 (credible interval from 0.77 to 1.16) on 18 Dec 2021. The 7-day average of daily deaths will remain at about 150 per day over the next weeks and then fall slowly, reaching a minimum (of about 40 per day) in April 2022.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Brexit as a political and ideological project is dead.
It’s now an administrative clear up job, with an inexorable pull back toward closer arrangements with the EU.
I must have missed Canada becoming a satrapy of the US
I’m afraid your language reveals why Brexit is not a serious project.
Canada is not a satrap of the US, the U.K. was never a satrap of the EU.
Really idiotic stuff.
Satrap=claptrap.
As I said upthread, Brexit is dead. All it has left is tabloidesque guff like “satrapy”.
No wonder Philip T has tried to change the subject to “roads” (where is is also fantastically wrong, see also his ideas on housing and labour economics).
Philip seems to think he lives in Waco, Texas, rather than Warrington, Lancs (that’s right, Lancs).
Warrington is north of the Mersey, so no argument there, the 1974 mess still has to be fully sorted out
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
The problem is with electric HGVs - assuming battery power - is that they will move freight far more slowly and expensively than their equivalent on rail, which can draw power from overhead wires and do 75mph with no trouble at all pulling 40 large containers. Once you factor in the extra power for hauling the weight of the battery as well, they"re not likely to be as favourable in a comparison for longer haul as rail. They still, of course, score massively in terms of flexibility in delivery to final destination.
Plus, of course, HGVs do a great deal more damage to roads than freight trains do to railways.
I think we would see a shift to more rail freight in the medium term if there was capacity. At the moment, there isn't, and until a new government green lights HS2E that will remain an issue for the NE.
The problem with rail is unless the rail depot is both the departure point and the destination of the freight, then the goods need road transport to reach their actual destination. HGVs can do that, rail can't.
That's why only approximately 4% of all freight is carried by rail. Its not because of the lack of capacity, its because it doesn't actually suit most freight.
Rail worked really well with things like coal, where you could have a depot at the mine and a depot at the power plant. For modern freight, its a different story.
But it's about moving it to points where it can be transported for that last few miles (as @Phil said). The trick is to move containers between rail depots and then put them on lorries for that last little bit.
That dramatically reduces both the ton/km carried on roads, and congestion, and wear and tear.
For heavy freight over a couple of hundred miles it's a no-brainer - if there were the capacity.
The problem is roughly the whole of England can be regarded as 'the last few miles' though.
We aren't a massive country.
For most transportation the disruption to take a good from starting point loading in onto a HGV, taking to a rail depot, transfer over, have a rail journey, transfer back again, get back onto a HGV and then take it to a destination is much more disruption and probably cost than simply loading it into a HGV and taking it direct to its destination.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
AIUI, the vast majority of the NHS staff opposed to vaccination are well into the back offices. Find it difficult to believe that any front- or second- line staff have any such concerns.
Earlier in the year, Foxy was reporting that some of his frontline colleagues weren't getting jabbed.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
Why are we cursed with such sub par politicians. Last night I gave at least half a dozen simple and practical steps that could be implemented immediately, at low cost (financial and social) that would have tangible benefits at slowing spread and reducing hospitalisations.
I thought those suggestions were excellent, @moonshine
It’s very frustrating. I’m just some bloke on the internet with no background in policy and I came up with it in 5 minutes. What is this massive state machine for if they can’t do better than that?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
It's a common experience on the (two lane) M11 to be held in a long queue while one heavy lorry passes another. Then they swap places again.
I'm not really in favour of mandates (certainly not in general - I can see the argument for NHS front line and care homes etc) but the really shocking thing is the apparent level of anti-vaccination sentiment. To take the midwife example given in the article, what kind of advice are these midvives giving pregnant women on the vaccine and how many lives is that costing? What kind of evidence-free (or against evidence) advice are they giving on other things?
Anecdote - a pregnant colleague went for her booster jab last week. The person administering the vaccine suggested to her that she might like to wait until after giving birth. She (colleague, who is an epidemiologist) quoted the Royal College advice and stats on serious illness among unprotected women and went ahead (and hopefully prevented such nonsense being presented to other, less informed, women).
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
The problem is with electric HGVs - assuming battery power - is that they will move freight far more slowly and expensively than their equivalent on rail, which can draw power from overhead wires and do 75mph with no trouble at all pulling 40 large containers. Once you factor in the extra power for hauling the weight of the battery as well, they"re not likely to be as favourable in a comparison for longer haul as rail. They still, of course, score massively in terms of flexibility in delivery to final destination.
Plus, of course, HGVs do a great deal more damage to roads than freight trains do to railways.
I think we would see a shift to more rail freight in the medium term if there was capacity. At the moment, there isn't, and until a new government green lights HS2E that will remain an issue for the NE.
The problem with rail is unless the rail depot is both the departure point and the destination of the freight, then the goods need road transport to reach their actual destination. HGVs can do that, rail can't.
That's why only approximately 4% of all freight is carried by rail. Its not because of the lack of capacity, its because it doesn't actually suit most freight.
Rail worked really well with things like coal, where you could have a depot at the mine and a depot at the power plant. For modern freight, its a different story.
But it's about moving it to points where it can be transported for that last few miles (as @Phil said). The trick is to move containers between rail depots and then put them on lorries for that last little bit.
That dramatically reduces both the ton/km carried on roads, and congestion, and wear and tear.
For heavy freight over a couple of hundred miles it's a no-brainer - if there were the capacity.
The problem is roughly the whole of England can be regarded as 'the last few miles' though.
We aren't a massive country.
For most transportation the disruption to take a good from starting point loading in onto a HGV, taking to a rail depot, transfer over, have a rail journey, transfer back again, get back onto a HGV and then take it to a destination is much more disruption and probably cost than simply loading it into a HGV and taking it direct to its destination.
It really isn't otherwise why has the logistics industry has spent the past 20 years moving to a hub and spoke solution with various pallet networks using unused pallet space to maximise load capacity and so reduce pallet transportation costs.
All the railway will do is reduce the number of hub to hub movements as they go via train instead (at an even lower cost per pallet mile)
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
The Tesla Semi that they’ve effectively pushed into the long grass? That they promised for 2019 originally, but are now saying they might start producing them in 2023?
US rail freight is dominated by bulk goods. A 2 mile long freight train full to the brim of aggregate, bricks, steel, is going to outperform 200+ Teslsa trucks every time - the economics just don’t work any other way.
If they can make those trucks driverless? Then maybe, just maybe the economics might shift, but even then you’re shipping extra weight and complexity for no good reason compared to a train.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
AIUI, the vast majority of the NHS staff opposed to vaccination are well into the back offices. Find it difficult to believe that any front- or second- line staff have any such concerns.
Earlier in the year, Foxy was reporting that some of his frontline colleagues weren't getting jabbed.
Noted. Thanks. 'Some', though. Not 'many'!
I'm not in touch with any of those with whom I worked, who are still working, so can't check
Rishi is a very strong communicator. But he is an Ayn Rand ultra, and supported Brexit from the start. He therefore clearly has a screw loose somewhere.
I don’t want a plutocrat as PM, I think on balance I’d prefer Truss even though she is actually ghastly.
Stephen Bush in the Staggers' morning email today:
"The line-to-take from the government is that work gatherings took place outside in the Downing Street garden all the time and that the photo, in which some people are portrayed sitting on the grass, cheese and wine are being enjoyed, and the Prime Minister’s wife is present just depicts a regular working day, which goes some way to explaining the United Kingdom’s low productivity if true."
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
The problem is with electric HGVs - assuming battery power - is that they will move freight far more slowly and expensively than their equivalent on rail, which can draw power from overhead wires and do 75mph with no trouble at all pulling 40 large containers. Once you factor in the extra power for hauling the weight of the battery as well, they"re not likely to be as favourable in a comparison for longer haul as rail. They still, of course, score massively in terms of flexibility in delivery to final destination.
Plus, of course, HGVs do a great deal more damage to roads than freight trains do to railways.
I think we would see a shift to more rail freight in the medium term if there was capacity. At the moment, there isn't, and until a new government green lights HS2E that will remain an issue for the NE.
The problem with rail is unless the rail depot is both the departure point and the destination of the freight, then the goods need road transport to reach their actual destination. HGVs can do that, rail can't.
That's why only approximately 4% of all freight is carried by rail. Its not because of the lack of capacity, its because it doesn't actually suit most freight.
Rail worked really well with things like coal, where you could have a depot at the mine and a depot at the power plant. For modern freight, its a different story.
But it's about moving it to points where it can be transported for that last few miles (as @Phil said). The trick is to move containers between rail depots and then put them on lorries for that last little bit.
That dramatically reduces both the ton/km carried on roads, and congestion, and wear and tear.
For heavy freight over a couple of hundred miles it's a no-brainer - if there were the capacity.
The problem is roughly the whole of England can be regarded as 'the last few miles' though.
We aren't a massive country.
For most transportation the disruption to take a good from starting point loading in onto a HGV, taking to a rail depot, transfer over, have a rail journey, transfer back again, get back onto a HGV and then take it to a destination is much more disruption and probably cost than simply loading it into a HGV and taking it direct to its destination.
Not necessarily. A lot of container goods come through the ports. So you can remove step 1 as it gets loaded on direct. Then assume a train driver is paid about three times an HGV driver, so you're still saving the wages of 37 others for a large chunk of the journey. As HGV driver wages rise that will in itself become a consideration. Then remember there are a very large number of container depots and many of them are next to railways that are either open or could be quickly reopened. And finally consider that the train lines aren't closed for five hours every ten days because some twat has got drunk and smashed into the central reservation.
It's feasible and economic and even desirable - if you have somewhere to run the trains.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
The Tesla Semi that they’ve effectively pushed into the long grass? That they promised for 2019 originally, but are now saying they might start producing them in 2023?
US rail freight is dominated by bulk goods. A 2 mile long freight train full to the brim of aggregate, bricks, steel, is going to outperform 200+ Teslsa trucks every time - the economics just don’t work any other way.
If they can make those trucks driverless? Then maybe, just maybe the economics might shift, but even then you’re shipping extra weight and complexity for no good reason compared to a train.
Freight goes by train for a reason though.
You’ll see.
Man, Musk lickers are all the same. No actual arguments, just pure, un-adultered belief in a Musk-ridden future.
Go on, explain to me /why/ the Tesla Semi will drive US rail freight out of business. How is that going to work? Is there actually sufficient road capacity in the US to take that rail freight in the first place? If so, how expensive is it going to be to roll out these trucks & what do the amortised costs look like compared to current freight costs?
If it’s so obvious, then the numbers must be staring people in the face. Where are they?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Which shows the flaw in your logic.
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
Interestingly, the Germans are trialling installing overhead power lines above the outer lanes of motorways to power long distance vehicles. Currently experimental, but something we might see rolled out in the future.
Good luck doing that in this country. Have you seen our railway electrification project success rate on existing infrastructure?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
The M6 Toll is my favourite British road. The only thing wrong with it, is that it has a speed limit.
Long-term forecasting of the COVID-19 epidemic Dynamic Causal Modelling, UCL, UK
Note on Omicron: if contact rates continue to fall as predicted, hospital admissions will peak on 7 Jan 2022 at 1,279 per day—with deaths peaking at 137 per day. These (7-day average) estimates are likely to rise if case rates do not fall within the next few days.
The real-time estimate of the R-number is 0.96 (credible interval from 0.77 to 1.16) on 18 Dec 2021. The 7-day average of daily deaths will remain at about 150 per day over the next weeks and then fall slowly, reaching a minimum (of about 40 per day) in April 2022.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
AIUI, the vast majority of the NHS staff opposed to vaccination are well into the back offices. Find it difficult to believe that any front- or second- line staff have any such concerns.
I heard that a frightening percentage of nurses, ie most of them, at Homerton Hospital in Hackney were unvaxxed.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
The Tesla Semi that they’ve effectively pushed into the long grass? That they promised for 2019 originally, but are now saying they might start producing them in 2023?
US rail freight is dominated by bulk goods. A 2 mile long freight train full to the brim of aggregate, bricks, steel, is going to outperform 200+ Teslsa trucks every time - the economics just don’t work any other way.
If they can make those trucks driverless? Then maybe, just maybe the economics might shift, but even then you’re shipping extra weight and complexity for no good reason compared to a train.
Freight goes by train for a reason though.
You’ll see.
Man, Musk lickers are all the same. No actual arguments, just pure, un-adultered belief in a Musk-ridden future.
Go on, explain to me /why/ the Tesla Semi will drive US rail freight out of business. How is that going to work? Is there actually sufficient road capacity in the US to take that rail freight in the first place? If so, how expensive is it going to be to roll out these trucks & what do the amortised costs look like compared to current freight costs?
If it’s so obvious, then the numbers must be staring people in the face. Where are they?
There will always be a role to play for rail, especially for large countries like the USA, or for bulky and large volume goods.
As a follow on from yesterday's embarrassing ST story on "the dishy blokes of COVID" a reminder of one of the first, and most impactful people who used graphics to explain disease. Also not a bloke:
On Friday 15th May 2020 at 1 pm we held a minute’s silence on our ward (and throughout our hospital) in memory of those who died from Covid - little did we know that the PM & friends were enjoying a garden party that same afternoon.https://twitter.com/UKGastroDr/status/1472841398483402755/photo/1
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Which shows the flaw in your logic.
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
Remarkably little.
HS2E will allow 4 freight trains an hour on ECML and 4 on Midland mainline.
At 30 to 45 container per train that's 240 to 360 containers an hour or 3-6000+ a day...
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
The M6 Toll is my favourite British road. The only thing wrong with it, is that it has a speed limit.
Speaking as somebody who would use it both ways daily if I could afford it, the worst part about it are the toll booths being 400 yards *before* the junction for Cannock.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
What electric HGVs? They don't exist and given the market for them you would expect them to already be here.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
AIUI, the vast majority of the NHS staff opposed to vaccination are well into the back offices. Find it difficult to believe that any front- or second- line staff have any such concerns.
I heard that a frightening percentage of nurses, ie most of them, at Homerton Hospital in Hackney were unvaxxed.
Colour me amazed, TBH. It's a long, long time ago now, but as I recall it, when I started with the NHS there was an interview with Occupational Health which included vaccinations, if necessary.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Which shows the flaw in your logic.
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
Remarkably little.
HS2E will allow 4 freight trains an hour on ECML and 4 on Midland mainline.
At 30 to 45 container per train that's 240 to 360 containers an hour or 3-6000+ a day...
And what percentage of road transportation is that removed from the roads? Is that 100% of freight taken of the motorways? 95%? 1%?
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
Interestingly, the Germans are trialling installing overhead power lines above the outer lanes of motorways to power long distance vehicles. Currently experimental, but something we might see rolled out in the future.
Good luck doing that in this country. Have you seen our railway electrification project success rate on existing infrastructure?
Ah, but as demonstrated so clearly in this discussion, roads are special & benefit from a kind of limitless futurism that trains don’t.
Driverless electric cars may well be to the 2020s as flying cars were to the 1950s - an excuse to not invest in technology that we know works because “flying cars / driverless electric trucks” are coming real soon now!
Long-term forecasting of the COVID-19 epidemic Dynamic Causal Modelling, UCL, UK
Note on Omicron: if contact rates continue to fall as predicted, hospital admissions will peak on 7 Jan 2022 at 1,279 per day—with deaths peaking at 137 per day. These (7-day average) estimates are likely to rise if case rates do not fall within the next few days.
The real-time estimate of the R-number is 0.96 (credible interval from 0.77 to 1.16) on 18 Dec 2021. The 7-day average of daily deaths will remain at about 150 per day over the next weeks and then fall slowly, reaching a minimum (of about 40 per day) in April 2022.
Rishi is a very strong communicator. But he is an Ayn Rand ultra, and supported Brexit from the start. He therefore clearly has a screw loose somewhere.
I don’t want a plutocrat as PM, I think on balance I’d prefer Truss even though she is actually ghastly.
Is he such a good communicator? In the election debates he was pretty ordinary. He is certainly good at getting his photo taken while smiling a lot.
On topic there is little practical benefit to putting in restrictions for Christmas at this stage. Plans have been made. People are travelling as we speak. Food has been bought.
The chances of getting the population to comply this year are nigh on impossible, given how late it is in the day and all the news stories that are coming out about last year (“it was OK for you guys then,” etc…)
I suspect we’ll get advisory warnings not to mix more than 2 households or whatever which will be promptly ignored by all and sundry.
I’m not even sure restrictions after Christmas are going to be particularly closely followed. The festive season isn’t just Christmas Day: it’s often a chain of events leading up to and including New Year’s Day.
The first day where meaningful restrictions can probably be introduced is from 2 January - the miserable weeks where nothing much happens anyway.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
£37 billion thrown at Test and Trace. Described as an "eye watering waste of money" which failed to achieve its objective.
But at least the money was spent with the "right sort of people"
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Which shows the flaw in your logic.
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
Remarkably little.
HS2E will allow 4 freight trains an hour on ECML and 4 on Midland mainline.
At 30 to 45 container per train that's 240 to 360 containers an hour or 3-6000+ a day...
And what percentage of road transportation is that removed from the roads? Is that 100% of freight taken of the motorways? 95%? 1%?
This is a kind of weird defeatism - we shouldn’t do anything because no one thing is enough?
We can do all the things! In aggregate they add up to real impacts.
Rishi is a very strong communicator. But he is an Ayn Rand ultra, and supported Brexit from the start. He therefore clearly has a screw loose somewhere.
I don’t want a plutocrat as PM, I think on balance I’d prefer Truss even though she is actually ghastly.
Is he such a good communicator? In the election debates he was pretty ordinary. He is certainly good at getting his photo taken while smiling a lot.
He learned fast. I think along with Gove he’s the strongest communicator in the government. And he doesn’t irritate like Gove does.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Brexit as a political and ideological project is dead.
It’s now an administrative clear up job, with an inexorable pull back toward closer arrangements with the EU.
I must have missed Canada becoming a satrapy of the US
I’m afraid your language reveals why Brexit is not a serious project.
Canada is not a satrap of the US, the U.K. was never a satrap of the EU.
Really idiotic stuff.
Satrap=claptrap.
As I said upthread, Brexit is dead. All it has left is tabloidesque guff like “satrapy”.
No wonder Philip T has tried to change the subject to “roads” (where is is also fantastically wrong, see also his ideas on housing and labour economics).
Philip seems to think he lives in Waco, Texas, rather than Warrington, Lancs (that’s right, Lancs).
Warrington is north of the Mersey, so no argument there, the 1974 mess still has to be fully sorted out
Far be it from me to be so pedantic on PT's patch, but plenty of Warrington isn't. Latchford is slap bang Town centre, South of Mersey. Pretty much half is.
Rishi is a very strong communicator. But he is an Ayn Rand ultra, and supported Brexit from the start. He therefore clearly has a screw loose somewhere.
I don’t want a plutocrat as PM, I think on balance I’d prefer Truss even though she is actually ghastly.
If he is an Ayn Rand ultra how come he has spent far more than George Osborne or Philip Hammond did as Chancellor or indeed more than Gordon Brown did in New Labour's first term? He has also raised corporation tax and NI
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
Interestingly, the Germans are trialling installing overhead power lines above the outer lanes of motorways to power long distance vehicles. Currently experimental, but something we might see rolled out in the future.
Good luck doing that in this country. Have you seen our railway electrification project success rate on existing infrastructure?
Yes, Germany is amazing and we would never have the chance of doing that in this country……
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
10% of all freight "tonne-kilometres" last year according to Statistica.
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
The UK is a different freight market to the US. But I’m pretty confident that Tesla Semis will be bankrupting the US rail freight industry in pretty short order.
The Tesla Semi that they’ve effectively pushed into the long grass? That they promised for 2019 originally, but are now saying they might start producing them in 2023?
US rail freight is dominated by bulk goods. A 2 mile long freight train full to the brim of aggregate, bricks, steel, is going to outperform 200+ Teslsa trucks every time - the economics just don’t work any other way.
If they can make those trucks driverless? Then maybe, just maybe the economics might shift, but even then you’re shipping extra weight and complexity for no good reason compared to a train.
Freight goes by train for a reason though.
You’ll see.
Man, Musk lickers are all the same. No actual arguments, just pure, un-adultered belief in a Musk-ridden future.
Go on, explain to me /why/ the Tesla Semi will drive US rail freight out of business. How is that going to work? Is there actually sufficient road capacity in the US to take that rail freight in the first place? If so, how expensive is it going to be to roll out these trucks & what do the amortised costs look like compared to current freight costs?
If it’s so obvious, then the numbers must be staring people in the face. Where are they?
Around 80% of US freight is moved by road; it will take a decade to displace ICE trucks. The only rail likely to go out of business anytime soon is the freight hauling coal.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
You might like to look up the CV of Rachel Reeves.
I like Rachel but not labour's throw billions at each and every problem
She was very unspecific on R4 this morning: "What would Labour do?" "What ever it takes to protect the NHS" "Specifically, what? Waffle, waffle, waffle.
She said communicate now and clearly what is required to protect the family Christmas and then a plan for after that which ensures the NHS doesn't collapse. She also stressed sick pay as a priority if we need people to self-isolate. It was not a waffly performance. Indeed I think with this new team Starmer is starting to build up a mood of not just "Oh god enough of this shower" but also "Labour would be better." I have Lab majority laid for chunky money @ 6 and I am, for the first time, just beginning to doubt the wisdom of that.
That said, the government is in a difficult position on this even without the noise from the batshit crazy likes of Dezzy Swayne. With Covid it's better to act early, the history of the pandemic shows us this, but Omicron spreads so fast that acting early - ie now at the latest - means acting when it's still uncertain what and when the peak of cases will otherwise be and how those cases will translate to demands on hospitals. A risk, therefore, of imposing unnecessary measures.
But if they instead hold off until the projections are firmed up, that's a risk too. If they turn out to be at the milder end on numbers and/or severity, great, the decision to delay was a great one. We've been saved a needless lockdown or near lockdown. OTOH if the firmed up projections say Omicron is set to overwhelm the NHS, now the delay looks like a dereliction of duty, because the measures now need to be more severe, and maybe last longer, and perhaps it's too late anyway and a large number of people die as a direct consequence.
It's very tricky, the more so because this sort of calculus can't easily be presented to the public. You've got stats, models, confidence levels, probabilities, cost v benefit, upside v downside risk analysis, the whole thing is just very very tricky even ignoring the politics. And with so much riding on it. I just hope Johnson can focus on the matter properly, putting all the other shit to one side, or if he can't that he lets somebody more switched on and competent make the decisions.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
Interestingly, the Germans are trialling installing overhead power lines above the outer lanes of motorways to power long distance vehicles. Currently experimental, but something we might see rolled out in the future.
Good luck doing that in this country. Have you seen our railway electrification project success rate on existing infrastructure?
Ah, but as demonstrated so clearly in this discussion, roads are special & benefit from a kind of limitless futurism that trains don’t.
Driverless electric cars may well be to the 2020s as flying cars were to the 1950s - an excuse to not invest in technology that we know works because “flying cars / driverless electric trucks” are coming real soon now!
You will note that the people on here who understand IT know that driverless cars are a 99.999%/0.0001% problem that means they are never going to occur.
Even when Waymo / Google did everything they could possibly do to game the system they've been unable to get their test locations to work.
Driving on motorways will be made easier but people will still need to be behind the wheel and ready to react quickly.
Rishi is a very strong communicator. But he is an Ayn Rand ultra, and supported Brexit from the start. He therefore clearly has a screw loose somewhere.
I don’t want a plutocrat as PM, I think on balance I’d prefer Truss even though she is actually ghastly.
If he is an Ayn Rand ultra how come he has spent far more than George Osborne or Philip Hammond did as Chancellor or indeed more than Gordon Brown did in New Labour's first term? He has also raised corporation tax and NI
Some confusion, I think: Javid is the Ayn Rand ultra; I'm not aware that Sunak is.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Which shows the flaw in your logic.
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
Remarkably little.
HS2E will allow 4 freight trains an hour on ECML and 4 on Midland mainline.
At 30 to 45 container per train that's 240 to 360 containers an hour or 3-6000+ a day...
And what percentage of road transportation is that removed from the roads? Is that 100% of freight taken of the motorways? 95%? 1%?
Let's assume each container weighs 25 tons on average. 25 x 17 gives 425 billion ton miles.
Let's then assume that these 5,000 containers on the railways are carried 200 miles each. That's 10,000 miles, times 25, that's 2.5 million ton miles per day, multiplied by 300 (for the number of days used after Sundays and public holidays) I make that 7.5 billion ton miles or 40% of road freight.
Those figures are very rough and may easily be wrong (you're the mathematician not me) but anywhere in that ballpark would make a pretty significant different.
Edit - well, now I look at it that 10,000 figure is clearly BS, should have been 100,000!
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Because 1 train can take scores of HGVs off the road. And there will be no electric HGVs - hydrogen is the only realistic play.
Interestingly, the Germans are trialling installing overhead power lines above the outer lanes of motorways to power long distance vehicles. Currently experimental, but something we might see rolled out in the future.
Good luck doing that in this country. Have you seen our railway electrification project success rate on existing infrastructure?
Ah, but as demonstrated so clearly in this discussion, roads are special & benefit from a kind of limitless futurism that trains don’t.
Driverless electric cars may well be to the 2020s as flying cars were to the 1950s - an excuse to not invest in technology that we know works because “flying cars / driverless electric trucks” are coming real soon now!
Like this flying taxi? I wonder how many people can afford to ride in it.
I think Stuart’s right. In 10 years time nobody will remember having voted for it. Not even Charles.
Boris is a corpse, too. He’ll be lucky to last into Spring.
What a frabjous day, though it’s a bit chilly here in Portugal after several days of balmy, t-shirt weather.
I don't see how brexit is dead. Its over. We are out. To make brexit dead surely implies rejoin?
Indeed we will be dealing with it forever. Brexit might one day be over as a state of mind, but the fact of it remains.
I'm not convinced a Tory coup where anti lockdown Truss or Sunak gets chosen in the midst of a pandemic meltdown is optimal timing.
The quicker Johnson is gone, the better. Even Rishi and Truss are improvements.
Neither will restore Tory fortunes; but that’s a different matter.
I suspect his mps want him to continue for a while to absorb the flak and I would expect post the May locals they will act
I agree with you. Also best for Truss, as the NI changes will have kicked in.
I prefer Rishi but that choice is upto his mps and then the members which this time I will not be one
Rishi represents the polish and connections that money can buy. If you like that and think that's helpful in solving the nation's problems then go for it. I think that there others that might be a little more connected.
It would also suggest he knows how to deal with finance unlike labour whose only answer to any question is spend billions and billions with no care as to how it is paid for
Investment isn't a problem - it's throwing money at day to day spending for pet projects that was Brown's and Labour's problem.
Prime example - to hit our CO2 commitments we need 50% of freight going via rail.
That requires HS2E and NPR to hit those commitments and we cancelled those within a month of COP26 to be replaced with nothing to fixes the commitment.
Why do we need any of our freight to go via rail? Let alone 50% of it when rail is currently from memory just 4%?
Investing in electric HGVs surely gets us there instead.
Getting long-distance freight off the roads and onto rail should be a priority. HS2 is needed for that reason alone, and government need to sell it as such.
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
The problem is there isn't really such a thing as long distance transportation in England.
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
It’s definitely much easier to justify in larger countries, where road shipping can take several days - but there’s definitely a case for rail freight, which is currently capacity constrained by the need to accommodate higher-speed passenger traffic on the same lines.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road.
And make the lives of many car drivers much pleasanter. My totally unscientific guess is that it would cut congestion on the local motorways and the A5 by 40%, given their size and speeds. Think what a difference that would make to us all.*
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Which shows the flaw in your logic.
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
Remarkably little.
HS2E will allow 4 freight trains an hour on ECML and 4 on Midland mainline.
At 30 to 45 container per train that's 240 to 360 containers an hour or 3-6000+ a day...
And what percentage of road transportation is that removed from the roads? Is that 100% of freight taken of the motorways? 95%? 1%?
This is a kind of weird defeatism - we shouldn’t do anything because no one thing is enough?
We can do all the things! In aggregate they add up to real impacts.
Absolutely we can, and as I said I have no qualms with investing in rail so long as it isn't done to the exclusion of investing in roads.
Building a string of roads linking all the towns and cities of the north would do far more to improve capacity for both freight and passengers than investing in rail will. Still in vest in rail too if you want, but on top of roads not instead of it.
Comments
(pre-pandemic 2018 is much the same).
I believe rail freight in theis country is pretty much supply constrained - if we had more capacity then industry would use it.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/20/england-hospital-units-may-close-as-staff-revolt-over-jab-mandate-says-nhs-leader
Trucks add to congestion and are responsible for pretty much all the wear on the roads (which is related to the fourth power of axle weight).
Where you are totally correct though, is that voters in Red Wall towns (not cities) almost exclusively travel primarily by car, and that they see road improvements as a much higher priority than rail. Levelling up means investment in roads, which also has the political advantage of not taking several decades to come to fruition.
That's why only approximately 4% of all freight is carried by rail. Its not because of the lack of capacity, its because it doesn't actually suit most freight.
Rail worked really well with things like coal, where you could have a depot at the mine and a depot at the power plant. For modern freight, its a different story.
All MPs are paid the same salary, but the job security is wildly different.
The other candidate was a supporter of Pinochet, so ...... oh I see why you'd be upset
Don't you know that self-driving, electric HGVs, charged with fusion-generated electricity are just a few years away?
That's the way it is, and that's not going to change.
Canada is not a satrap of the US, the U.K. was never a satrap of the EU.
Really idiotic stuff.
But obviously, you can only ship where the railheads are & need some HGV transport at the end-points. The two forms are not actually in conflict, or shouldn’t be. The easiest way to get aggregate for your building site into London is often by train & then HGV for the last mile or so I believe.
Ironically, freight traffic is usually directly profitable for train lines. In the UK we prioritise subsidised passenger traffic. This is yet another reason why failing to build HS2 out is such a short-sighted decision. Freeing up space on the old UK mainlines for freight traffic as well as local passenger traffic would have had significant positive economic impact on the whole of the UK.
(My understanding is the rail freight in the UK is mostly capacity constrained - if more capacity was available, industry would happily pay to it.)
In Canada or America where freight is transported thousands of miles that's one thing, but in this country nowhere is thousands of miles from anywhere else.
A very good point that roads don't take decades too though.
Power and influence spring to mind.
Wanting to make the world 'a better place' is another.
I suspect in practice we'll need to do a bit of everything -- some of the longer distance HGV freight getting shifted to rail (in particular journeys starting at container ports), and electric HGV for shorter distance railhead-to-destination, and also making sure all those last-mile vans with our Amazon parcels are electric. Easiest to do immediately would be pushing the light-commercial fleet towards electric, maybe?
That dramatically reduces both the ton/km carried on roads, and congestion, and wear and tear.
For heavy freight over a couple of hundred miles it's a no-brainer - if there were the capacity.
The Tesla Semi that they’ve effectively pushed into the long grass? That they promised for 2019 originally, but are now saying they might start producing them in 2023?
US rail freight is dominated by bulk goods. A 2 mile long freight train full to the brim of aggregate, bricks, steel, is going to outperform 200+ Teslsa trucks every time - the economics just don’t work any other way.
If they can make those trucks driverless? Then maybe, just maybe the economics might shift, but even then you’re shipping extra weight and complexity for no good reason compared to a train.
Freight goes by train for a reason though.
I'm in favour of vaccination, though against any compulsion. But I'd say that NHS staff refusing the jab makes the argument of doing things like masking 'out of respect for the NHS' [(c) Burnham] rather harder to make.
Going from Southampton or Felixstowe to Manchester or Newcastle, would be much easier by rail than road. A dedicated ‘airside’ train from Holyhead to Dover might work too.
All it has left is tabloidesque guff like “satrapy”.
No wonder Philip T has tried to change the subject to “roads” (where is is also fantastically wrong, see also his ideas on housing and labour economics).
Philip seems to think he lives in Waco, Texas, rather than Warrington, Lancs (that’s right, Lancs).
Should we ask about the downtime for recharging and where he thinks that can be achieved?
Taking scores of HGVs off the road is a drop in the ocean. It sounds impressive, but it really isn't. Scores of HGVs is nothing on a national basis which is where climate change considerations come into effect.
Even if you doubled freight-by-rail overnight, even if you tripled it, HGVs would still dominate transportation.
https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/tax-challenges-arising-from-the-digitalisation-of-the-economy-global-anti-base-erosion-model-rules-pillar-two.htm
There had been some speculation this was being delayed while they waited for US reform to go through congress, but it looks like they decided to click send anyway.
From 2023 onwards there will basically be 3 types of tax regime for multinationals. Most countries will have rates around 25%, a few outliers - generally in developing countries - will still tax at over 30%, and a handful will have a 15% rate. Britain will be in the middle of the pack and marginally higher tax than the US for the first time in decades. We'd better have other compelling reasons to attract FDI.
The fall was largely driven by the unprecedented number of vacancies http://ow.ly/jfhO50HfeOs
https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1472864594917998596?s=20
And at the same time solve many of the problems around driver shortages.
*and it would bankrupt the M6 Toll. So no downside whatsoever.
Long-term forecasting of the COVID-19 epidemic
Dynamic Causal Modelling, UCL, UK
Note on Omicron: if contact rates continue to fall as predicted, hospital admissions will peak on 7 Jan 2022 at 1,279 per day—with deaths peaking at 137 per day. These (7-day average) estimates are likely to rise if case rates do not fall within the next few days.
The real-time estimate of the R-number is 0.96 (credible interval from 0.77 to 1.16) on 18 Dec 2021.
The 7-day average of daily deaths will remain at about 150 per day over the next weeks and then fall slowly, reaching a minimum (of about 40 per day) in April 2022.
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/forecasting/
We aren't a massive country.
For most transportation the disruption to take a good from starting point loading in onto a HGV, taking to a rail depot, transfer over, have a rail journey, transfer back again, get back onto a HGV and then take it to a destination is much more disruption and probably cost than simply loading it into a HGV and taking it direct to its destination.
Which rather started me...
Anecdote - a pregnant colleague went for her booster jab last week. The person administering the vaccine suggested to her that she might like to wait until after giving birth. She (colleague, who is an epidemiologist) quoted the Royal College advice and stats on serious illness among unprotected women and went ahead (and hopefully prevented such nonsense being presented to other, less informed, women).
All the railway will do is reduce the number of hub to hub movements as they go via train instead (at an even lower cost per pallet mile)
I'm not in touch with any of those with whom I worked, who are still working, so can't check
But he is an Ayn Rand ultra, and supported Brexit from the start. He therefore clearly has a screw loose somewhere.
I don’t want a plutocrat as PM, I think on balance I’d prefer Truss even though she is actually ghastly.
"The line-to-take from the government is that work gatherings took place outside in the Downing Street garden all the time and that the photo, in which some people are portrayed sitting on the grass, cheese and wine are being enjoyed, and the Prime Minister’s wife is present just depicts a regular working day, which goes some way to explaining the United Kingdom’s low productivity if true."
It's feasible and economic and even desirable - if you have somewhere to run the trains.
Go on, explain to me /why/ the Tesla Semi will drive US rail freight out of business. How is that going to work? Is there actually sufficient road capacity in the US to take that rail freight in the first place? If so, how expensive is it going to be to roll out these trucks & what do the amortised costs look like compared to current freight costs?
If it’s so obvious, then the numbers must be staring people in the face. Where are they?
Currently rail transportation is between 4-10% of of all tonne-miles transportation depending upon how you measure it. Currently road transportation is ~90%.
How are you going to remove 40% of all road transportation off the roads? What increase in rail capacity would be required to achieve that?
There seems to be a thought of "invest in rails and HGVs will disappear" but that's quite simply not going to happen.
It simply isn't the be all and end all though.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/aug/13/florence-nightingale-graphics
HS2E will allow 4 freight trains an hour on ECML and 4 on Midland mainline.
At 30 to 45 container per train that's 240 to 360 containers an hour or 3-6000+ a day...
This was still countryside in 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8zx7gnhBpE
All the major vehicle manufacturers are also now building their equivalents.
Driverless electric cars may well be to the 2020s as flying cars were to the 1950s - an excuse to not invest in technology that we know works because “flying cars / driverless electric trucks” are coming real soon now!
The chances of getting the population to comply this year are nigh on impossible, given how late it is in the day and all the news stories that are coming out about last year (“it was OK for you guys then,” etc…)
I suspect we’ll get advisory warnings not to mix more than 2 households or whatever which will be promptly ignored by all and sundry.
I’m not even sure restrictions after Christmas are going to be particularly closely followed. The festive season isn’t just Christmas Day: it’s often a chain of events leading up to and including New Year’s Day.
The first day where meaningful restrictions can probably be introduced is from 2 January - the miserable weeks where nothing much happens anyway.
I’m just trying to figure out what’s best for the country, among potential candidates.
I rather think Hunt is a busted flush, I don’t think he’s viable.
I think my pref is something like Zahawi or Tugendhat or Wallace, with Gove in the Treasury.
We can do all the things! In aggregate they add up to real impacts.
I think along with Gove he’s the strongest communicator in the government. And he doesn’t irritate like Gove does.
Latchford is slap bang Town centre, South of Mersey. Pretty much half is.
Shame ramp up was not just 2 weeks earlier, would have neutered a lot of the panicking.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/27/uk-government-backs-scheme-for-motorway-cables-to-power-lorries
The only rail likely to go out of business anytime soon is the freight hauling coal.
That said, the government is in a difficult position on this even without the noise from the batshit crazy likes of Dezzy Swayne. With Covid it's better to act early, the history of the pandemic shows us this, but Omicron spreads so fast that acting early - ie now at the latest - means acting when it's still uncertain what and when the peak of cases will otherwise be and how those cases will translate to demands on hospitals. A risk, therefore, of imposing unnecessary measures.
But if they instead hold off until the projections are firmed up, that's a risk too. If they turn out to be at the milder end on numbers and/or severity, great, the decision to delay was a great one. We've been saved a needless lockdown or near lockdown. OTOH if the firmed up projections say Omicron is set to overwhelm the NHS, now the delay looks like a dereliction of duty, because the measures now need to be more severe, and maybe last longer, and perhaps it's too late anyway and a large number of people die as a direct consequence.
It's very tricky, the more so because this sort of calculus can't easily be presented to the public. You've got stats, models, confidence levels, probabilities, cost v benefit, upside v downside risk analysis, the whole thing is just very very tricky even ignoring the politics. And with so much riding on it. I just hope Johnson can focus on the matter properly, putting all the other shit to one side, or if he can't that he lets somebody more switched on and competent make the decisions.
Even when Waymo / Google did everything they could possibly do to game the system they've been unable to get their test locations to work.
Driving on motorways will be made easier but people will still need to be behind the wheel and ready to react quickly.
https://www.fueltek.co.uk/population-of-lorries-on-uk-roads-whats-the-impact/
Let's assume each container weighs 25 tons on average. 25 x 17 gives 425 billion ton miles.
Let's then assume that these 5,000 containers on the railways are carried 200 miles each. That's 10,000 miles, times 25, that's 2.5 million ton miles per day, multiplied by 300 (for the number of days used after Sundays and public holidays) I make that 7.5 billion ton miles or 40% of road freight.
Those figures are very rough and may easily be wrong (you're the mathematician not me) but anywhere in that ballpark would make a pretty significant different.
Edit - well, now I look at it that 10,000 figure is clearly BS, should have been 100,000!
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/air-taxi-arrives-smithsonian-180978703/
Building a string of roads linking all the towns and cities of the north would do far more to improve capacity for both freight and passengers than investing in rail will. Still in vest in rail too if you want, but on top of roads not instead of it.
Is that unreasonable?
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/vaccination-have-a-third-of-londoners-really-not-had-any-covid-19-jabs/