Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
Particularly with renewables, you want a portfolio approach.
But I still find it astonishing that at a time when hydrocarbon prices are through the roof, a few people come out of the woodwork and say "Well, if only we'd not increased our reliance on renewables, we'd be fine."
I'm not a man to through around the "retard" word lightly. But W.T.F.
The issue with wind is it went hand in hand with the expansion of CCGT power, which was the only realistic way of balancing the load when the wind wasn't blowing.
And that's now coming home to roost with a vengeance.
If there were effective storage solutions available for wind generation things would be different. But there are none available yet.
We don't have the excess of wind energy to store. Storage only becomes an issue when there is frequently an excess that needs time-shifting. I'm confident that if we rapidly doubled our wind generation that you would see large-scale storage deployed to store the excess wind energy that would be produced at times.
Not immediately, but significant amounts of cheap surplus electricity would provide the incentive for it. The more straightforward immediate term response would be to make larger scale interconnects with Europe economically attractive. Continent wide interconnects will probably come before very large scale storage.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
But it's not really an either/or, it it? We'll be cold and hungry anyway. Gas has got much more expensive and no amount of accounting tricks will change that. Whereas we can choose whether we invite Stonewall in to our institutions to advance their gender agenda. But for the record, if government could either prevent food prices from doubling or stop schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda, I would rather they stopped schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda. I don't watch kids growing up with a sense of shame about being straight and white.
If that was happening en masse then perhaps.
But as it isn't...
But it is, Rochdale. Or at least, in a sample size of 5 secondary schools I have visited recently, the incidence of it was 100%. If you infer the schools' orders of priorities from the visibility of display materials, they are: 1) now you're in secondary school, you need to pick a sexuality and identity from this list. This is very important and if you're not sure it's probably because you're bi, rather than, you know, 11 or 12 and not actually sexual at all yet. Why not join the Rainbow Club? =2) woohoo for BLM! Mary Seacombe and Rosa Parks. Why not join the equality club? =2) the environment: we're all doomed. 4) while you're here, if you want to indulge in a little education, or perhaps sport, that would also be fine.
Seacole. Bloody autocorrect.
I agree about autocorrect. I fail to see the problem with teaching kids about Mary Seacole.
Not at all, nor Rosa Parks. But it is astonishing how ubiquitous she is. And to be clear, I'm definitely not arguing for a return to the 1950s, or even the 1980s, when growing up gay must have been very painful. (I remember nothing in my childhood to remember race being an issue - don't remember any racist attitudes being expressed, whereas there were certainly homophobic attitudes, in both sense of the word - though the number of non- white people in my year could be counted on the fingers of one hand, so maybe it just wasn't visible.) I just think the amount of prominence that schools give to woke issues is massively disproportionate. Reflecting on the way I've expressed this, the point is I don't actually oppose 'woke'. If woke means don't be racist or homophobic and treat everyone with respect, then of course I'm all in. What I'm opposed to is the prominence given to it, as if your race and gender identity and sexuality are the only important things about you, and the 'if you're not with us your against us' attitude: that if you're not prominently displaying your woke credentials at every opportunity you're a horrible old gammon.
Good morning everyone. One of the surprising things about the Conservative election for me is the fact that Kemi Badenoch managed to get past the Conservative committee in Saffron Walden! That area isn’t known as the most liberal, but I wouldn’t be happy to be told I was wrong!
On Mr C”s point I have several great nieces and great nephews going through secondary education at the moment and while there are problems with some of them I have never heard their grandparents raise any complaints about the sort of issues he discussed and, believe me, they would have!
I also have two teacher grandchildren, one of whom teaches sociology and I’ve never heard any comments. A third granddaughter is an educational psychologist and I’ve never heard of any such problems being raised.
On the hot weather, there’s going to be a decent breeze, which should take the edge off.
A Southerly, which will therefore be like turning on a hairdryer to compound the misery. There's nothing to be done but keep indoors as much as possible.
9 MPH Southerly winds where I am.
I am dreading Tuesday when I am back in work. I work in an old building on our Hospital site that has no aircon in a small office full of computers. This building keeps the heat, in three years working there I have never had to wear a jumper. I have a desk fan but that's about it. They will be delivering ice lollies on those two days.
Plus a great number of people will be coming during the day for appointments and to get their bloods tests and vaccinations. They will be masked up, sitting in a very warm waiting area and then having a blood test or vaccination which in the past has proved for some a bad combination. Will have to watch out for people feeling sick or faint all day.
Wednesday can't come quick enough!
By coincidence, my blood tests are scheduled for Tuesday. It looks as if I can get there and back before peak temperature. I just hope the 5-minute slot they've given me is reliable and not, as is often the case, prelude to a one-hour wait because, however good NHS intentions, a health worker is late, a patient overruns, and the whole thing degenerates into a first come, first served queue with no information about likely wait times.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
In 2017, there were an estimated 650,000 sexual assaults in England & Wales.
The unisex changing room figures, which also included harassment and voyeurism, totalled 120. Obviously not all of the CSEW assaults were reported, but it's pretty clear that we're talking about a very small number in comparison.
There's also no indication of how many of these involved trans individuals as clearly a unisex changing room is open to men too. Unisex changing facilities have also been around for a lot longer than the recent debates around trans rights and self-identification.
I'm not unsympathetic to your views on Self-ID, and certainly wouldn't diminish individual incidents, but unless you provide the context, comments such as "the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones", are very misleading scare-mongering. Given the number of visits to leisure centres is certainly well into the tens of millions, and likely into hundreds of millions a year, then it's divisive to present them as anything other than extremely safe spaces.
On the hot weather, there’s going to be a decent breeze, which should take the edge off.
A Southerly, which will therefore be like turning on a hairdryer to compound the misery. There's nothing to be done but keep indoors as much as possible.
9 MPH Southerly winds where I am.
I am dreading Tuesday when I am back in work. I work in an old building on our Hospital site that has no aircon in a small office full of computers. This building keeps the heat, in three years working there I have never had to wear a jumper. I have a desk fan but that's about it. They will be delivering ice lollies on those two days.
Plus a great number of people will be coming during the day for appointments and to get their bloods tests and vaccinations. They will be masked up, sitting in a very warm waiting area and then having a blood test or vaccination which in the past has proved for some a bad combination. Will have to watch out for people feeling sick or faint all day.
Wednesday can't come quick enough!
You have my sympathies. I don't know if the new build ones are any better, but every hospital I've ever been to has been overheated. Stuffy but tolerable most of the year, sweaty and oppressive in a normal Summer, probably borderline lethal in the conditions we've got coming.
And then there's all of that plus the godawful masks to contend with on top of that. You wonder what proportion of the heatwave casualties will end up expiring in hospitals.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Yes but Cyclefree makes some excellent points that "pro-trans" policies can be abused by predators, which is why many women oppose them.
To take the toilet position as an example, the rational "pro-trans" position is to get away with toilets of differing sexes and to make them unisex. However, if Cyclefree's data is right that women are greater at risk from unisex changing rooms than single-sex ones, then that is a problem.
Similarly with sport, its self-evident that allowing transwomen to compete in professional sport is unfair so should be as prohibited as doping, which shouldn't mean that transwomen can't be treated as women in other respects normally.
There needs to be some sensible compromises on this topic without the heat and fire. Personally I would want to be as supporting as possible towards transmen and transwomen so long as doing so doesn't put in jeopardy or unfairly penalise actual women.
Its interesting to note that almost none of this conversation is about transmen.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Don't be dumb. Your first para is like saying Yes guns are a problem in America but the answer to them is educating gun users about their attitude to them.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
This threader is an example of the People cannot think about more than one thing at once fallacy. It is reasonable at this stage for the conservatives to think about where as a party they want to stand on all sorts of points. It may even be strategically very smart to resolve it now to increase the chances of Labour disarray at the next GE
People might be able to think about more than one thing, but you can only talk about one thing at a time. If you waste the precious oxygen of publicity on a third-tier issue, it's a huge opportunity cost.
It isn't even third tier - going off the number of real world cases it's more like thirtieth tier. That isn't to say that there isn't the need to rethink how we manage these occasional edge cases, but the associated moral panic is more "it's ok to hate the gayers" than there is an actual societal problem.
But your preferred policy would make these sorts of events more likely to happen. Surely you can see why that would cause concern?
I don't believe I even have a preferred policy, not have I expressed a view on a specific policy on here. And yet you know what that is...
A bigger issue than a short heatwave is the longer-term lack of rainfall there has been in many parts of the country. That's going to be a very real problem if it continues. We need a very wet winter.
Getting rid of so many reservoirs can't have helped.
I actually think this BBC write up is a bit unfair on Raab with the 'being reminded' point. I think even he knows that, he's obviously just making a point that he thinks the members should pick the one who looks like they will do best at a GE. Dominic Raab says the UK needs "serious" and "credible" suggestions when it's put to him that other leadership candidates - notably Penny Mordaunt - are saying their suggested tax cuts can be self-funding.
On Mordaunt's favourability in polls in the last week, Raab goes back to Rishi Sunak's ability to win votes at a general election.
"He's the only one that can win," Raab says, before being reminded this isn't a general election.
He carries on, repeating that people from the north and the south of England can see Sunak is "the only one" who'll be able to win votes.
I think it's unfair on Mordaunt. She is proposing £5bn of tax cuts. Other candidates are on £30bn and £40bn. Not sure why she gets singled out.
Its clear from reading conhome and the conhome survey that the membership do not want Sunak or Mordaunt, and don't much like Truss either
If Sunak or Mordaunt is the choice we could see a very low turnout amongst members with no mandate whatsoever for the winning candidate - followed by a meltdown in the polls after many tory voters decided enough was enough.
Whatever the view on here, its clear from the enthusiasm for Badenoch on conhome that culture issues are very important for tory members.
Reading Conhome should come with a health warning.
But Misty is right on each point raised there though?
Penny is really being attacked, I am sure this can't be good for her mental health.
I don't recall anyone objecting to Boris being attacked and suggesting it can't be good for his mental health.
If she becomes Tory Prime Minister then will you object to attacks against her at the next election?
I am sure Johnson's mental health has taken a battering too. However much I despise him, I can empathise with how difficult a job it is and the tolls it takes on you.
I'd rather people didn't go for politicians like the Mail does, I'd like to talk about policy differences.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
Ken Dodd tax evasion trial
KD my accountant died Prosecutor Did that really matter? KD Well, it mattered to him
I am sure this woman will realise how trivial her problems are when she learns that she is a "fringe issue" and "edge case" to a white flightist posting on an Internet forum from somewhere near Aberdeen. Women, hey? Mountains and molehills.
Edge cases matter. But the moral panic being created with the claim that these are not edge cases but widespread?
Silly boy
You still aren't thinking about what is the correct response to this case from the point of view of justice, you are thinking in terms of what response makes you look most right on. Not convinced you have bothered to read it even but the appalling thing is not just that a woman was raped, but that the official response to the allegation from an NHS hospital was: this cannot have happened because the rapist, despite possessing a functioning penis, was legally a woman. it's not the incident, it's the framework for further such incidents which you get when you get rational adults in responsible positions signing up to looking glass gibberish like that.
"Right on" in the eyes of whom? I have no interest in fawning for the respect of people I do not know.
My point was very simple - this is a highly unusual case which should not be magnified as if it is normal and thus drive a moral panic.
I didn't express a view on the stupidity of the judges because their ruling is still self-evidently stupid that it will get overruled.
I don't know who will win this Tory leadership contest but I'm feeling increasingly disappointed. Maybe it is the need to appeal to the Tory selectorate but it doesn't feel as if the big challenges are being dealt with. I did like the fact that Kemi talked about trade offs in the C4 debate even if her solutions would be more to the right than I would probably want.
Are we prepared to have an excess of supply in the housing market? If a farmer takes rotten food to the market he has to accept that no-one will likely buy it. Housebuilders don't seem to face the same consumer pressure. I'm not convinced removing regulations is likely to improve that. Has Truss set herself against Nimbyism?
Sadly, you don't get discussions of downsides in a leadership contest, just as you don't in an election. You don't get the much between those times either, to be fair. This isn't a feature of the modern age; I don't ever remember an advocate of any given position presenting a measured consideration of its costs as well as its benefits. I agree it's a bit depressing though.
The much-maligned John McDonnell actually had a try at it in the 2017 election, where Labour had a website where you could enter your income etc. and got told what the effect on you would be of the proposed policies. I got something like "You will pay £12/week more under our proposed policies. Against that, you will have shorter NHS waiting times and more investment in schools. Thank you for taking part, and we hope you will feel the cost is worth it."
Obviously there will have been scope to massage the calculations so only a minority got "you will pay more". But I appreciated the effort to treat me like an adult.
This is a masterpiece of political ambivalence. Depending on what you put in "simplified regulations" it either means a glorious YIMBY orgy of construction, or that nobody will ever build another house.
No one can build a new house where I have to see it. Simple.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Don't be dumb. Your first para is like saying Yes guns are a problem in America but the answer to them is educating gun users about their attitude to them.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
Is the prevalence of a crime irrelevant to the measures we adopt to try to prevent it?
Lol yeah blame the civil servants and not the politicians making the decisions. If they’re too stupid to understand what the civil servants are doing then maybe they shouldn’t have gone into politics.
I can offer some partial light on the process here, as I was involved as PPS to Malcolm Wicks in the energy review in something like 2008. Malcolm used me to discuss ideas (some PPS jobs really are just bag-carrying) and we went over the data carefully. At that stage, the figures for tidal lagoons supplied by the civil service researchers were an order of magnitude worse (in terms of return on investment) than any other way of producing more energy - I forget the exact figures but they were off the scale. I'm used to analysing data in detail, though not an expert in engineering, and I couldn't see any reason to doubt the calculations. What was obviously best at that point was lots of wind, preferably on-shore if the Nimby opposition could be overcome (because installation and maintenance is far cheaper), though I think we did underestimate the need for nuclear baseload.
I don't think we were really in a position to demolish the civil service calculations, or any particular reason why they should have been biased. It's possible that they were simply wrong, or that subsequent events have changed the balance, but Occam's Razor is that the civil servants do their best to present the options and the politicians try to make sensible decisions based on them which won't be too unpopular. We don't need to demonise the people involved, but perhaps there's scope for more independent challenging of the data before decisions are made.
Nick, appreciate it was after your time but the report that went up to Theresa May on Swansea was the apotheosis of the Blob in action. The civil servants developed their own new metrics for the job. One of their numbers was £30 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear. Another £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
There is a hell of a story about what has gone on in the energy planning of this country - a story that will one day come out.
Have you had contacts with any of the candidates Mark? Would seem like a fresh opportunity to get this greenlighted. Either that or Boris does it as 'his legacy'.
This is a masterpiece of political ambivalence. Depending on what you put in "simplified regulations" it either means a glorious YIMBY orgy of construction, or that nobody will ever build another house.
No one can build a new house where I have to see it. Simple.
I'd be happy to drive down to yours and whitewash your windows if that helps?
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
We hear a lot about tidal lagoons, but I am (currently) unconvinced. The scale required to make a difference is massive, and despite what the proponents say, the costs will likewise be massive.
Having said that, I'm in favour if having as varied a power generation system in the UK as possible; we should throw everything into the mix. It's just that I doubt tidal lagoons will prove to be as cheap or effective as their proponents claim.
Whether you are convinced or not has become irrelevant because the government vetoed large scale trials, claiming it would undoubtedly be more expensive, shorter lived and less reliable than the nuclear options they were exploring. Which was clearly bullshit.
They don't have to be a silver bullet. Only more reliable than wind, cheaper than gas and longer lasting than nuclear.
Which they undoubtedly would be. There is no realistic way you can juggle the numbers to come out with a different answer.
If we'd built five lagoons five years ago we'd be in a much better situation now.
"Which they undoubtedly would be."
We are talking about new tech done on a scale that had not been attempted before. Worse, we are talking about a new tech that almost wholly involves groundworks and water: perhaps the most complex and troublesome types of civil engineering. And to make a difference, they need to be large in scale (even if individual ones are small).
If we'd started building five lagoons five years ago, we'd probably still be building them. In fact, we'd probably still be in the planning stage.
This is not a reason not to build them: but I can't see them being anywhere near as advantageous or easy as you make out.
The Swansea proposal was around the same size as the Sihwa or Rance power stations. The latter has been operating for nearly 60 years. The former for over a decade.
We are not really talking new technology here.
We are at this scale. The proponents of the Swansea scheme refer to it thus: "Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will be the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant."
Now, dams have been built. Barriers have been built. Barrages have been built. The Sihwa scheme is impressive. But the scale of these schemes is still impressive from a civ eng point of view.
Well, they were talking nonsense then, because their projected output for the initial lagoon AIUI was around 230 MWH - slightly less than Rance at 240.
Swansea was a small scale proof of concept project. It would have had 15 operative turbines. It was a testbed for the Cardiff lagoon that will have 160 operative turbines that power 1.6 million homes.
The anti-tidal lobby (largely nuclear) have cleverly extrapolated the Swansea numbers when the prize (and the economics) is a series of Cardiff-scale projects around our coast.
To make it clear: I am not anti-tidal. I am not even anti tidal-lagoons ('tidal' power covers a multitude of technologies). I am rather amused by some of the claims made by the pro-tidal barrage lobby, though.
And the difference in scale between the Swansea and Cardiff schemes is one of my points. Scale matters: but just because something is bigger, it is not necessarily cheaper per unit of power generated.
What do you base your confidence on the viability of the schemes on, e.g. the construction costs?
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Yes but Cyclefree makes some excellent points that "pro-trans" policies can be abused by predators, which is why many women oppose them.
To take the toilet position as an example, the rational "pro-trans" position is to get away with toilets of differing sexes and to make them unisex. However, if Cyclefree's data is right that women are greater at risk from unisex changing rooms than single-sex ones, then that is a problem.
Similarly with sport, its self-evident that allowing transwomen to compete in professional sport is unfair so should be as prohibited as doping, which shouldn't mean that transwomen can't be treated as women in other respects normally.
There needs to be some sensible compromises on this topic without the heat and fire. Personally I would want to be as supporting as possible towards transmen and transwomen so long as doing so doesn't put in jeopardy or unfairly penalise actual women.
Its interesting to note that almost none of this conversation is about transmen.
I agree with all of that. The entire debate has become completely hysterical where almost any position is seen as either screaming transphobia or supporting the mass rape of women. It's bonkers.
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Don't be dumb. Your first para is like saying Yes guns are a problem in America but the answer to them is educating gun users about their attitude to them.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
Is the prevalence of a crime irrelevant to the measures we adopt to try to prevent it?
Pretty much yes, if it's serious enough, and especially if it is the state itself which has provided the framework which enabled it to happen and then to be covered up.
Yes focusing on the cost of living crisis is key and that means targeted tax cuts, controlling spending and increasing energy supplies.
However that does not mean there are no votes to be had in the culture wars, especially if it means pushing back at the extremes of the left attacking our culture and heritage, even ballet now under threat
Ah, yes, defending ballet, guaranteed Red Wall vote winner.
Guaranteed blue wall winner in Kensington, Westminster and the Home counties, defending Churchill and our history guaranteed red wall winner and ensuring trans rights are balanced with womens' rights important to win the latter
The way to win the red wall is to tax the blue wall until the pips squeak.
The blue wall pips squeaking = blue wall house prices falling.
This is a masterpiece of political ambivalence. Depending on what you put in "simplified regulations" it either means a glorious YIMBY orgy of construction, or that nobody will ever build another house.
No one can build a new house where I have to see it. Simple.
I'd be happy to drive down to yours and whitewash your windows if that helps?
Yes, these are crowded islands with competing interests. Which is one of the reasons planning is not simple and cannot be unless some interests are just ignored. It is never simple and anyone claiming it can be made so is either simplistic or dishonest.
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
It's certainly an interesting take on things for a conservative.
Do the members care about economic positions? Or will it all be decided on who looks the part the most and who can say the right things on woke matters?
I actually think this BBC write up is a bit unfair on Raab with the 'being reminded' point. I think even he knows that, he's obviously just making a point that he thinks the members should pick the one who looks like they will do best at a GE. Dominic Raab says the UK needs "serious" and "credible" suggestions when it's put to him that other leadership candidates - notably Penny Mordaunt - are saying their suggested tax cuts can be self-funding.
On Mordaunt's favourability in polls in the last week, Raab goes back to Rishi Sunak's ability to win votes at a general election.
"He's the only one that can win," Raab says, before being reminded this isn't a general election.
He carries on, repeating that people from the north and the south of England can see Sunak is "the only one" who'll be able to win votes.
I think it's unfair on Mordaunt. She is proposing £5bn of tax cuts. Other candidates are on £30bn and £40bn. Not sure why she gets singled out.
She's the relatively unknown amongst the front three. She also (possibly unfairly) is seen as the one with the flakiest support? It's that simple.
Kensington is going Red whatever happens, it went Red under Corbyn in 2017 it will go red again under Starmer. I don't think HYUFD has a clue about the makeup of this seat.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
Particularly with renewables, you want a portfolio approach.
But I still find it astonishing that at a time when hydrocarbon prices are through the roof, a few people come out of the woodwork and say "Well, if only we'd not increased our reliance on renewables, we'd be fine."
I'm not a man to through around the "retard" word lightly. But W.T.F.
The issue with wind is it went hand in hand with the expansion of CCGT power, which was the only realistic way of balancing the load when the wind wasn't blowing.
And that's now coming home to roost with a vengeance.
If there were effective storage solutions available for wind generation things would be different. But there are none available yet.
We don't have the excess of wind energy to store. Storage only becomes an issue when there is frequently an excess that needs time-shifting. I'm confident that if we rapidly doubled our wind generation that you would see large-scale storage deployed to store the excess wind energy that would be produced at times.
Not immediately, but significant amounts of cheap surplus electricity would provide the incentive for it. The more straightforward immediate term response would be to make larger scale interconnects with Europe economically attractive. Continent wide interconnects will probably come before very large scale storage.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Green hydrogen can be used as a storage medium. And you don't need a big hill. Just the same storage infrastructure we use for natural gas.
We already use pumped storage hydro, but we don't have suitable geographical features for much more.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
Particularly with renewables, you want a portfolio approach.
But I still find it astonishing that at a time when hydrocarbon prices are through the roof, a few people come out of the woodwork and say "Well, if only we'd not increased our reliance on renewables, we'd be fine."
I'm not a man to through around the "retard" word lightly. But W.T.F.
The issue with wind is it went hand in hand with the expansion of CCGT power, which was the only realistic way of balancing the load when the wind wasn't blowing.
And that's now coming home to roost with a vengeance.
If there were effective storage solutions available for wind generation things would be different. But there are none available yet.
We don't have the excess of wind energy to store. Storage only becomes an issue when there is frequently an excess that needs time-shifting. I'm confident that if we rapidly doubled our wind generation that you would see large-scale storage deployed to store the excess wind energy that would be produced at times.
Not immediately, but significant amounts of cheap surplus electricity would provide the incentive for it. The more straightforward immediate term response would be to make larger scale interconnects with Europe economically attractive. Continent wide interconnects will probably come before very large scale storage.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
That is the classic, proven method. Used round the world. Essentially hydro-electric dams, where you have the option of pumping water uphill, behind the dam.
The problem is locations capable of storing more than a tiny fraction of the capacity of the grid.
The big problem tidal ponds face is the concentrated NIMBY/Green nexus, which will fight them with the enthusiasm normally used for new nuclear power station sites.
By contrast, the government quietly changed the rules so that small scale power storage sites (up to 20MWH IIRC) don’t require planning permission as power stations. This means that it is essentially impossible to stop small scale storage being twinned with the supercharging sites that are being set up electric cars. Storage there has a number of uses - time shifting cheaper electricity, demand smoothing etc.
Several of the companies building such sites are looking at over provisioning their storage so that they can make money selling power back to the grid.
What that could mean, if the right incentives are put in place, is that within a decade or so, you’d have enough storage to run the entire country for an extended period of time. Distributed as well - no single points of failure.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
We hear a lot about tidal lagoons, but I am (currently) unconvinced. The scale required to make a difference is massive, and despite what the proponents say, the costs will likewise be massive.
Having said that, I'm in favour if having as varied a power generation system in the UK as possible; we should throw everything into the mix. It's just that I doubt tidal lagoons will prove to be as cheap or effective as their proponents claim.
Whether you are convinced or not has become irrelevant because the government vetoed large scale trials, claiming it would undoubtedly be more expensive, shorter lived and less reliable than the nuclear options they were exploring. Which was clearly bullshit.
They don't have to be a silver bullet. Only more reliable than wind, cheaper than gas and longer lasting than nuclear.
Which they undoubtedly would be. There is no realistic way you can juggle the numbers to come out with a different answer.
If we'd built five lagoons five years ago we'd be in a much better situation now.
"Which they undoubtedly would be."
We are talking about new tech done on a scale that had not been attempted before. Worse, we are talking about a new tech that almost wholly involves groundworks and water: perhaps the most complex and troublesome types of civil engineering. And to make a difference, they need to be large in scale (even if individual ones are small).
If we'd started building five lagoons five years ago, we'd probably still be building them. In fact, we'd probably still be in the planning stage.
This is not a reason not to build them: but I can't see them being anywhere near as advantageous or easy as you make out.
The Swansea proposal was around the same size as the Sihwa or Rance power stations. The latter has been operating for nearly 60 years. The former for over a decade.
We are not really talking new technology here.
We are at this scale. The proponents of the Swansea scheme refer to it thus: "Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will be the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant."
Now, dams have been built. Barriers have been built. Barrages have been built. The Sihwa scheme is impressive. But the scale of these schemes is still impressive from a civ eng point of view.
Well, they were talking nonsense then, because their projected output for the initial lagoon AIUI was around 230 MWH - slightly less than Rance at 240.
If they are 'talking nonsense' on one of the first lines on the front page of their website, why should we take any of the rest of it as anywhere near accurate?
(There is a chance that the claim on the front page was written before the SK scheme came online, and they just have not updated it.)
A perfectly fair question, to which if I'm honest I have no answer. The most likely scenario is the intro was written by a management consultant who didn't have a clue what they were talking about.
That said, the fact the nuclear industry and their stooges at energy and climate change were so desperate not even to allow a trial suggests they were afraid the figures would not be in their favour.
And tidal power is ours. Not reliant on Canada orRussia. As long as we have a moon, we'll have tides. That's 'strategic resilience' for you.
Edit - and Rance is France, notSouth Korea. I don't think it was written before 1966.
I was thinking about the SK scheme, which only came online ten years ago (the seawall was originally built for a different reason, and the generation capability added later. Interestingly, the reason it was done was to 'clean' the water behind the barrage, as it was becoming too polluted to be used for agriculture.
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
Okay, Sunak has replaced Penny as my second choice.
Correct. My new strategy is to believe the reasonable worst case about any prospective leader, and, crucially, that "growing in to the role" is a myth. She is batshit and a fibber.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Don't be dumb. Your first para is like saying Yes guns are a problem in America but the answer to them is educating gun users about their attitude to them.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
Is the prevalence of a crime irrelevant to the measures we adopt to try to prevent it?
Pretty much yes, if it's serious enough, and especially if it is the state itself which has provided the framework which enabled it to happen and then to be covered up.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
Particularly with renewables, you want a portfolio approach.
But I still find it astonishing that at a time when hydrocarbon prices are through the roof, a few people come out of the woodwork and say "Well, if only we'd not increased our reliance on renewables, we'd be fine."
I'm not a man to through around the "retard" word lightly. But W.T.F.
The issue with wind is it went hand in hand with the expansion of CCGT power, which was the only realistic way of balancing the load when the wind wasn't blowing.
And that's now coming home to roost with a vengeance.
If there were effective storage solutions available for wind generation things would be different. But there are none available yet.
We don't have the excess of wind energy to store. Storage only becomes an issue when there is frequently an excess that needs time-shifting. I'm confident that if we rapidly doubled our wind generation that you would see large-scale storage deployed to store the excess wind energy that would be produced at times.
Not immediately, but significant amounts of cheap surplus electricity would provide the incentive for it. The more straightforward immediate term response would be to make larger scale interconnects with Europe economically attractive. Continent wide interconnects will probably come before very large scale storage.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
That is the classic, proven method. Used round the world. Essentially hydro-electric dams, where you have the option of pumping water uphill, behind the dam.
The problem is locations capable of storing more than a tiny fraction of the capacity of the grid.
The big problem tidal ponds face is the concentrated NIMBY/Green nexus, which will fight them with the enthusiasm normally used for new nuclear power station sites.
By contrast, the government quietly changed the rules so that small scale power storage sites (up to 20MWH IIRC) don’t require planning permission as power stations. This means that it is essentially impossible to stop small scale storage being twinned with the supercharging sites that are being set up electric cars. Storage there has a number of uses - time shifting cheaper electricity, demand smoothing etc.
Several of the companies building such sites are looking at over provisioning their storage so that they can make money selling power back to the grid.
What that could mean, if the right incentives are put in place, is that within a decade or so, you’d have enough storage to run the entire country for an extended period of time. Distributed as well - no single points of failure.
As used 250+ years ago - eg at the top of Coalbrookdale valley, Shropshire. Steam engine, cheap local slack coal, pumping water to refill rseservoir for when water power is needed for the mills downstream in the dry summer months.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Don't be dumb. Your first para is like saying Yes guns are a problem in America but the answer to them is educating gun users about their attitude to them.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
I didn't raise statistics - others have posted some actual numbers. But as you raise stats yes this case would be an outlier.
Does that mean we ignore it? No. Does that mean we hype a moral panic where this case sets moral policy in political debate? No.
As for my first para, it isn't dumb. There is a damaging macho bullshit culture amongst certain groups of men. It needs to be called out by men and eradicated by men. We have managed to make wolf-whistling and catcalling unacceptable, we've made today's tits are on page 3 newspapers unacceptable. Because the majority of men have said the behaviour of the minority is unacceptable.
We have to go further. "Incel" - where some men think they have the right to get sex. WFT is the mentality there? We know that rape is predominantly about power, so when you get cases like the met cop branded "rapey" by colleagues before he becomes a rapist - that is something that men can stop.
How often to we get responses to these cases where women are told to stay at home? Fuck that, it's men who should stay at home because we can't be trusted outside. As a culture we can make so much of this unacceptable, and the trans dogwhistle stops that happening.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
We hear a lot about tidal lagoons, but I am (currently) unconvinced. The scale required to make a difference is massive, and despite what the proponents say, the costs will likewise be massive.
Having said that, I'm in favour if having as varied a power generation system in the UK as possible; we should throw everything into the mix. It's just that I doubt tidal lagoons will prove to be as cheap or effective as their proponents claim.
Whether you are convinced or not has become irrelevant because the government vetoed large scale trials, claiming it would undoubtedly be more expensive, shorter lived and less reliable than the nuclear options they were exploring. Which was clearly bullshit.
They don't have to be a silver bullet. Only more reliable than wind, cheaper than gas and longer lasting than nuclear.
Which they undoubtedly would be. There is no realistic way you can juggle the numbers to come out with a different answer.
If we'd built five lagoons five years ago we'd be in a much better situation now.
"Which they undoubtedly would be."
We are talking about new tech done on a scale that had not been attempted before. Worse, we are talking about a new tech that almost wholly involves groundworks and water: perhaps the most complex and troublesome types of civil engineering. And to make a difference, they need to be large in scale (even if individual ones are small).
If we'd started building five lagoons five years ago, we'd probably still be building them. In fact, we'd probably still be in the planning stage.
This is not a reason not to build them: but I can't see them being anywhere near as advantageous or easy as you make out.
The Swansea proposal was around the same size as the Sihwa or Rance power stations. The latter has been operating for nearly 60 years. The former for over a decade.
We are not really talking new technology here.
We are at this scale. The proponents of the Swansea scheme refer to it thus: "Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will be the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant."
Now, dams have been built. Barriers have been built. Barrages have been built. The Sihwa scheme is impressive. But the scale of these schemes is still impressive from a civ eng point of view.
Well, they were talking nonsense then, because their projected output for the initial lagoon AIUI was around 230 MWH - slightly less than Rance at 240.
Swansea was a small scale proof of concept project. It would have had 15 operative turbines. It was a testbed for the Cardiff lagoon that will have 160 operative turbines that power 1.6 million homes.
The anti-tidal lobby (largely nuclear) have cleverly extrapolated the Swansea numbers when the prize (and the economics) is a series of Cardiff-scale projects around our coast.
To make it clear: I am not anti-tidal. I am not even anti tidal-lagoons ('tidal' power covers a multitude of technologies). I am rather amused by some of the claims made by the pro-tidal barrage lobby, though.
And the difference in scale between the Swansea and Cardiff schemes is one of my points. Scale matters: but just because something is bigger, it is not necessarily cheaper per unit of power generated.
What do you base your confidence on the viability of the schemes on, e.g. the construction costs?
I have had access to thousands of pages of data.
The case can be made. It always was made - see the Hendry Review. A "no regrets decision" he termed it.
And any claims I make you find amusing - just pm me to set you straight.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Don't be dumb. Your first para is like saying Yes guns are a problem in America but the answer to them is educating gun users about their attitude to them.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
Is the prevalence of a crime irrelevant to the measures we adopt to try to prevent it?
Pretty much yes, if it's serious enough, and especially if it is the state itself which has provided the framework which enabled it to happen and then to be covered up.
A bigger issue than a short heatwave is the longer-term lack of rainfall there has been in many parts of the country. That's going to be a very real problem if it continues. We need a very wet winter.
Getting rid of so many reservoirs can't have helped.
Oh, hadn't heard of that?
There’s been an odd “war on reservoirs” in Green circles - the mantra goes that water companies waste too much water in leaks. No new reservoirs should be allowed and water must be rationed as a scarce commodity.
One bizarre example was where a Victorian gravel pit was going to be converted into a reservoir - it was actually hard to stop It flooding. No ground contamination on the site, excellent geology. Just turn it into a nice lake full of fish with some nice wetlands next to it. Huge efforts have been made to date to stop it.
Kensington is going Red whatever happens, it went Red under Corbyn in 2017 it will go red again under Starmer. I don't think HYUFD has a clue about the makeup of this seat.
It's nominal Labour anyways under new boundaries. Many southern wards have gone. And it's got three solid Labour wards from Westminster North. It's Kensington and Westbourne soon.
Kensington is going Red whatever happens, it went Red under Corbyn in 2017 it will go red again under Starmer. I don't think HYUFD has a clue about the makeup of this seat.
It's nominal Labour anyways under new boundaries. Many southern wards have gone. And it's got three solid Labour wards from Westminster North. It's Kensington and Westbourne soon.
People assume it's full of rich poshos which in places is true but also has immense poverty in others. A place not in need of levelling up according to today's Tory Party because it is in London. And the Tories have pissed off the rich poshos by ignoring them and going on about culture wars in a liberal seat. They are muppets.
I actually think this BBC write up is a bit unfair on Raab with the 'being reminded' point. I think even he knows that, he's obviously just making a point that he thinks the members should pick the one who looks like they will do best at a GE. Dominic Raab says the UK needs "serious" and "credible" suggestions when it's put to him that other leadership candidates - notably Penny Mordaunt - are saying their suggested tax cuts can be self-funding.
On Mordaunt's favourability in polls in the last week, Raab goes back to Rishi Sunak's ability to win votes at a general election.
"He's the only one that can win," Raab says, before being reminded this isn't a general election.
He carries on, repeating that people from the north and the south of England can see Sunak is "the only one" who'll be able to win votes.
I think it's unfair on Mordaunt. She is proposing £5bn of tax cuts. Other candidates are on £30bn and £40bn. Not sure why she gets singled out.
She's the relatively unknown amongst the front three. She also (possibly unfairly) is seen as the one with the flakiest support? It's that simple.
I don't think it is that simple. Personally I think 'the blob' backs Sunak and whoever he can beat. The Truss-bashing would start minute one of her selection. I also don't think it will work; it's so aggressive as to seem desperate.
One Labour insider sums up how the leadership race is proving the gap between voters priorities and Tory priorities. “Our problem was we thought Twitter was Britain. Their problem is they think the Spectator magazine is Britain.”
“Their obsession with things like trans and university campus platforms is a million miles from where the public are. People on the doorstep are saying they can’t afford Christmas because of the energy bill rises coming this autumn.”
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Quite a few hills here in Scotland, lots in Wales too.
Wait, Penny is suggesting we axe the fiscal rules?!
Wtf, Tory MPs need to axe her. Borrowing to fund current spending is a terrible idea.
I can't think what she meant - unless it pertained to the covid emergency? But if (at best) her tongue is not in gear with her brain it is an awful trait for a potential PM, never mind an actual one. We had enough of that already.
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
Particularly with renewables, you want a portfolio approach.
But I still find it astonishing that at a time when hydrocarbon prices are through the roof, a few people come out of the woodwork and say "Well, if only we'd not increased our reliance on renewables, we'd be fine."
I'm not a man to through around the "retard" word lightly. But W.T.F.
The issue with wind is it went hand in hand with the expansion of CCGT power, which was the only realistic way of balancing the load when the wind wasn't blowing.
And that's now coming home to roost with a vengeance.
If there were effective storage solutions available for wind generation things would be different. But there are none available yet.
We don't have the excess of wind energy to store. Storage only becomes an issue when there is frequently an excess that needs time-shifting. I'm confident that if we rapidly doubled our wind generation that you would see large-scale storage deployed to store the excess wind energy that would be produced at times.
Not immediately, but significant amounts of cheap surplus electricity would provide the incentive for it. The more straightforward immediate term response would be to make larger scale interconnects with Europe economically attractive. Continent wide interconnects will probably come before very large scale storage.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
That is the classic, proven method. Used round the world. Essentially hydro-electric dams, where you have the option of pumping water uphill, behind the dam.
The problem is locations capable of storing more than a tiny fraction of the capacity of the grid.
The big problem tidal ponds face is the concentrated NIMBY/Green nexus, which will fight them with the enthusiasm normally used for new nuclear power station sites.
By contrast, the government quietly changed the rules so that small scale power storage sites (up to 20MWH IIRC) don’t require planning permission as power stations. This means that it is essentially impossible to stop small scale storage being twinned with the supercharging sites that are being set up electric cars. Storage there has a number of uses - time shifting cheaper electricity, demand smoothing etc.
Several of the companies building such sites are looking at over provisioning their storage so that they can make money selling power back to the grid.
What that could mean, if the right incentives are put in place, is that within a decade or so, you’d have enough storage to run the entire country for an extended period of time. Distributed as well - no single points of failure.
The location issue is key. What you need is a large 'head' of water; i.e. a great height difference between the upper pond and the lower pond. And to reduce tunneling and running costs, you need them to be as near as possible horizontally. This dramatically reduces the number of available sites.
They are also massive structures: 12 million tonnes of stone had to be dug out to create the Dinorwig power station, along with 9.9 miles of tunnels. Yet it paid for itself in a couple of years (source: wiki)
Kensington is going Red whatever happens, it went Red under Corbyn in 2017 it will go red again under Starmer. I don't think HYUFD has a clue about the makeup of this seat.
It's nominal Labour anyways under new boundaries. Many southern wards have gone. And it's got three solid Labour wards from Westminster North. It's Kensington and Westbourne soon.
People assume it's full of rich poshos which in places is true but also has immense poverty in others. A place not in need of levelling up according to today's Tory Party because it is in London. And the Tories have pissed off the rich poshos by ignoring them and going on about culture wars in a liberal seat. They are muppets.
It doesn't need levelling up but it might need wealth redistribution.
Lol yeah blame the civil servants and not the politicians making the decisions. If they’re too stupid to understand what the civil servants are doing then maybe they shouldn’t have gone into politics.
I can offer some partial light on the process here, as I was involved as PPS to Malcolm Wicks in the energy review in something like 2008. Malcolm used me to discuss ideas (some PPS jobs really are just bag-carrying) and we went over the data carefully. At that stage, the figures for tidal lagoons supplied by the civil service researchers were an order of magnitude worse (in terms of return on investment) than any other way of producing more energy - I forget the exact figures but they were off the scale. I'm used to analysing data in detail, though not an expert in engineering, and I couldn't see any reason to doubt the calculations. What was obviously best at that point was lots of wind, preferably on-shore if the Nimby opposition could be overcome (because installation and maintenance is far cheaper), though I think we did underestimate the need for nuclear baseload.
I don't think we were really in a position to demolish the civil service calculations, or any particular reason why they should have been biased. It's possible that they were simply wrong, or that subsequent events have changed the balance, but Occam's Razor is that the civil servants do their best to present the options and the politicians try to make sensible decisions based on them which won't be too unpopular. We don't need to demonise the people involved, but perhaps there's scope for more independent challenging of the data before decisions are made.
Nick, appreciate it was after your time but the report that went up to Theresa May on Swansea was the apotheosis of the Blob in action. The civil servants developed their own new metrics for the job. One of their numbers was £30 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear. Another £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
There is a hell of a story about what has gone on in the energy planning of this country - a story that will one day come out.
Have you had contacts with any of the candidates Mark? Would seem like a fresh opportunity to get this greenlighted. Either that or Boris does it as 'his legacy'.
Boris has had nearly three years to deliver on his pro-tidal comments out n the stump for the leadership when in Wales.
Instead, he has promoted nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. He isn't going to do anything now to change tack.
A bigger issue than a short heatwave is the longer-term lack of rainfall there has been in many parts of the country. That's going to be a very real problem if it continues. We need a very wet winter.
Getting rid of so many reservoirs can't have helped.
Oh, hadn't heard of that?
There’s been an odd “war on reservoirs” in Green circles - the mantra goes that water companies waste too much water in leaks. No new reservoirs should be allowed and water must be rationed as a scarce commodity.
One bizarre example was where a Victorian gravel pit was going to be converted into a reservoir - it was actually hard to stop It flooding. No ground contamination on the site, excellent geology. Just turn it into a nice lake full of fish with some nice wetlands next to it. Huge efforts have been made to date to stop it.
Where was that? Thames Valley?
Though I can see the sense in putting pressure on companies to sort the leaks.
Kensington is going Red whatever happens, it went Red under Corbyn in 2017 it will go red again under Starmer. I don't think HYUFD has a clue about the makeup of this seat.
It's nominal Labour anyways under new boundaries. Many southern wards have gone. And it's got three solid Labour wards from Westminster North. It's Kensington and Westbourne soon.
People assume it's full of rich poshos which in places is true but also has immense poverty in others. A place not in need of levelling up according to today's Tory Party because it is in London. And the Tories have pissed off the rich poshos by ignoring them and going on about culture wars in a liberal seat. They are muppets.
It's simply split. Into North and South. The nation in microcosm. Grenfell was one of several similar buildings in Kensington.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
But it's not really an either/or, it it? We'll be cold and hungry anyway. Gas has got much more expensive and no amount of accounting tricks will change that. Whereas we can choose whether we invite Stonewall in to our institutions to advance their gender agenda. But for the record, if government could either prevent food prices from doubling or stop schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda, I would rather they stopped schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda. I don't watch kids growing up with a sense of shame about being straight and white.
If that was happening en masse then perhaps.
But as it isn't...
But it is, Rochdale. Or at least, in a sample size of 5 secondary schools I have visited recently, the incidence of it was 100%. If you infer the schools' orders of priorities from the visibility of display materials, they are: 1) now you're in secondary school, you need to pick a sexuality and identity from this list. This is very important and if you're not sure it's probably because you're bi, rather than, you know, 11 or 12 and not actually sexual at all yet. Why not join the Rainbow Club? =2) woohoo for BLM! Mary Seacombe and Rosa Parks. Why not join the equality club? =2) the environment: we're all doomed. 4) while you're here, if you want to indulge in a little education, or perhaps sport, that would also be fine.
Seacole. Bloody autocorrect.
I agree about autocorrect. I fail to see the problem with teaching kids about Mary Seacole.
I must admit that I do find the focus on such an obscure figure rather odd.
Surely Seacole is only 'an obscure figure' because she was overlooked for a century due to her skin colour. C.f. Florence Nightingale.
But it's not as if Florence Nightingale was ever a core figure of primary school history.
In the BBC's "Great Britons" series, Nightingale ended up in position 52. Bafflingly, James Clerk Maxwell comes in at 91, below Robbie Williams, the Queen Mum, and Bono.
Sounds like a helluva party. (I know it's an old line, but it tickles me nonetheless.)
Agreed with the thread header. Unfortunately Badenoch especially seems to be too interested in the "woke" issues, so I'd have her as my last choice preference.
From what I've seen of the candidates so far, ignoring my betting position (which puts Sunak as #1 preference for entirely book-related reasons) my preference would be:
1. Truss - Seems very sound on the economy etc, also came up with the excellent NI solution 2. Tugendhat - Less dry, but pro more housing which is always a big tick 3. Mordaunt - Neutral, seems to change her positions based on what's popular today, ironically like a continuity Boris 4. Sunak - Too high tax 5. Badenoch - Anti-woke
I appreciate that's probably a pretty unusual preference list.
I'm surprised that you have Truss as sound on the economy when her policy is to massively expand public borrowing in order to add masses more money to an inflation crisis.
I can't imagine you regarding the policy as sound if it were suggested by a Labour politician. I can understand that you would be well-disposed towards Truss because of her Brexit policy, but I think you're showing that to distort your judgement.
From what I understand she's suggesting that Covid-related borrowing should be spread over a longer time period, like war bonds.
That's exactly what I suggested at the time of Sunak's stupid NI tax rise.
Day to day spending should not be getting borrowed, but Covid-spending should be
A large sum of the money Sunak's tax rise is going to clear the Covid backlog, despite hundreds of billions of borrowing. What I suggested is that previously was that the Treasury should calculate the cost of clearing the Covid backlog and add that to the Covid borrowing. That borrowing should then be amortised over a timespan rather than just a couple of years as Sunak wanted. We should then return to standard borrowing targets, taking into account the amortisation of Covid borrowing.
That's completely different to Brownian borrowing for day-to-day expenditure.
I don't think you can just magic half our existing debt into war bonds. But that's by-the-by, because, when challenged on the policy during the debate, Truss defended it by explicitly arguing we could borrow more because our current debt levels were lower than other countries.
That is an explicit argument for borrowing to pay for tax cuts, to borrow to cover day-to-day expenditure rather than take the hard choice of taxing or cutting spending. And it's a massive inflationary kick to the economy when inflation is already high.
Of course you can treat half our existing debt as war bonds, war bonds are just bonds with an attitude attached to them not a different type of bond.
Borrowing to reverse the tax rise may be a tax cut but limited to Covid borrowing is also absolutely the right thing to do and what should have been done all along.
Reversing the NI hike may be "inflationary" but it is the right thing to do. If non-working people have to face a bit more inflation rather than putting all the burden on working people, then that's not an issue for me.
You can't unilaterally change the terms of a bond issued without defaulting. That's the point of the bonds issue. So talk about turning them into war bonds is just a distraction from more borrowing.
And on inflation, my pay is up 5%, my Dad's pensions are up by the rate of inflation. It's the working people who are losing out from inflation and will lose out from more inflation.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
But it's not really an either/or, it it? We'll be cold and hungry anyway. Gas has got much more expensive and no amount of accounting tricks will change that. Whereas we can choose whether we invite Stonewall in to our institutions to advance their gender agenda. But for the record, if government could either prevent food prices from doubling or stop schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda, I would rather they stopped schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda. I don't watch kids growing up with a sense of shame about being straight and white.
If that was happening en masse then perhaps.
But as it isn't...
But it is, Rochdale. Or at least, in a sample size of 5 secondary schools I have visited recently, the incidence of it was 100%. If you infer the schools' orders of priorities from the visibility of display materials, they are: 1) now you're in secondary school, you need to pick a sexuality and identity from this list. This is very important and if you're not sure it's probably because you're bi, rather than, you know, 11 or 12 and not actually sexual at all yet. Why not join the Rainbow Club? =2) woohoo for BLM! Mary Seacombe and Rosa Parks. Why not join the equality club? =2) the environment: we're all doomed. 4) while you're here, if you want to indulge in a little education, or perhaps sport, that would also be fine.
Seacole. Bloody autocorrect.
I agree about autocorrect. I fail to see the problem with teaching kids about Mary Seacole.
I must admit that I do find the focus on such an obscure figure rather odd.
Surely Seacole is only 'an obscure figure' because she was overlooked for a century due to her skin colour. C.f. Florence Nightingale.
But it's not as if Florence Nightingale was ever a core figure of primary school history.
In the BBC's "Great Britons" series, Nightingale ended up in position 52. Bafflingly, James Clerk Maxwell comes in at 91, below Robbie Williams, the Queen Mum, and Bono.
Sounds like a helluva party. (I know it's an old line, but it tickles me nonetheless.)
I wouldn't want to be at any party that allowed me Bono to attend
Net Zero is a much bigger and juicier target than trans bathrooms during an energy crisis.
Yes, because we'd be in a much better position today if we still got all our energy from hydrocarbons.
Back in 2021, you could (rightly) claim that renewables were increasing the price of our electricity.
Today, the government paying a guaranteed £43/MWh for wind looks like like utter genius.
Building tidal lagoons instead of endlessly faffing around with overpriced and probably never to be built nuclear power stations would have looked much more like utter genius.
We hear a lot about tidal lagoons, but I am (currently) unconvinced. The scale required to make a difference is massive, and despite what the proponents say, the costs will likewise be massive.
Having said that, I'm in favour if having as varied a power generation system in the UK as possible; we should throw everything into the mix. It's just that I doubt tidal lagoons will prove to be as cheap or effective as their proponents claim.
Whether you are convinced or not has become irrelevant because the government vetoed large scale trials, claiming it would undoubtedly be more expensive, shorter lived and less reliable than the nuclear options they were exploring. Which was clearly bullshit.
They don't have to be a silver bullet. Only more reliable than wind, cheaper than gas and longer lasting than nuclear.
Which they undoubtedly would be. There is no realistic way you can juggle the numbers to come out with a different answer.
If we'd built five lagoons five years ago we'd be in a much better situation now.
"Which they undoubtedly would be."
We are talking about new tech done on a scale that had not been attempted before. Worse, we are talking about a new tech that almost wholly involves groundworks and water: perhaps the most complex and troublesome types of civil engineering. And to make a difference, they need to be large in scale (even if individual ones are small).
If we'd started building five lagoons five years ago, we'd probably still be building them. In fact, we'd probably still be in the planning stage.
This is not a reason not to build them: but I can't see them being anywhere near as advantageous or easy as you make out.
The Swansea proposal was around the same size as the Sihwa or Rance power stations. The latter has been operating for nearly 60 years. The former for over a decade.
We are not really talking new technology here.
We are at this scale. The proponents of the Swansea scheme refer to it thus: "Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will be the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant."
Now, dams have been built. Barriers have been built. Barrages have been built. The Sihwa scheme is impressive. But the scale of these schemes is still impressive from a civ eng point of view.
Well, they were talking nonsense then, because their projected output for the initial lagoon AIUI was around 230 MWH - slightly less than Rance at 240.
Swansea was a small scale proof of concept project. It would have had 15 operative turbines. It was a testbed for the Cardiff lagoon that will have 160 operative turbines that power 1.6 million homes.
The anti-tidal lobby (largely nuclear) have cleverly extrapolated the Swansea numbers when the prize (and the economics) is a series of Cardiff-scale projects around our coast.
To make it clear: I am not anti-tidal. I am not even anti tidal-lagoons ('tidal' power covers a multitude of technologies). I am rather amused by some of the claims made by the pro-tidal barrage lobby, though.
And the difference in scale between the Swansea and Cardiff schemes is one of my points. Scale matters: but just because something is bigger, it is not necessarily cheaper per unit of power generated.
What do you base your confidence on the viability of the schemes on, e.g. the construction costs?
I have had access to thousands of pages of data.
The case can be made. It always was made - see the Hendry Review. A "no regrets decision" he termed it.
And any claims I make you find amusing - just pm me to set you straight.
Thanks. I'm particularly interested in the construction costs, and you reasons for your confidence in them. And TBF, I need to re-read the Hendry report. I read it when it came out, so I might be misremembering stuff.
A bigger issue than a short heatwave is the longer-term lack of rainfall there has been in many parts of the country. That's going to be a very real problem if it continues. We need a very wet winter.
Getting rid of so many reservoirs can't have helped.
Oh, hadn't heard of that?
There’s been an odd “war on reservoirs” in Green circles - the mantra goes that water companies waste too much water in leaks. No new reservoirs should be allowed and water must be rationed as a scarce commodity.
One bizarre example was where a Victorian gravel pit was going to be converted into a reservoir - it was actually hard to stop It flooding. No ground contamination on the site, excellent geology. Just turn it into a nice lake full of fish with some nice wetlands next to it. Huge efforts have been made to date to stop it.
It was European policy to encourage water scarcity. Christopher Booker (I think) wrote a lot about it. It seems that the fifth column in the UK wants that to continue. I suspect the closing of gas storage facilities can also be attributed to this agenda. We badly need an alternative vision, and for such people to be completely removed from any decision making capacity.
Whether we agree or disagree about borrowing, nobody can deny that if Keir Starmer stood up tomorrow and said let's borrow more he would be ripped to shreds.
Lol yeah blame the civil servants and not the politicians making the decisions. If they’re too stupid to understand what the civil servants are doing then maybe they shouldn’t have gone into politics.
I can offer some partial light on the process here, as I was involved as PPS to Malcolm Wicks in the energy review in something like 2008. Malcolm used me to discuss ideas (some PPS jobs really are just bag-carrying) and we went over the data carefully. At that stage, the figures for tidal lagoons supplied by the civil service researchers were an order of magnitude worse (in terms of return on investment) than any other way of producing more energy - I forget the exact figures but they were off the scale. I'm used to analysing data in detail, though not an expert in engineering, and I couldn't see any reason to doubt the calculations. What was obviously best at that point was lots of wind, preferably on-shore if the Nimby opposition could be overcome (because installation and maintenance is far cheaper), though I think we did underestimate the need for nuclear baseload.
I don't think we were really in a position to demolish the civil service calculations, or any particular reason why they should have been biased. It's possible that they were simply wrong, or that subsequent events have changed the balance, but Occam's Razor is that the civil servants do their best to present the options and the politicians try to make sensible decisions based on them which won't be too unpopular. We don't need to demonise the people involved, but perhaps there's scope for more independent challenging of the data before decisions are made.
Nick, appreciate it was after your time but the report that went up to Theresa May on Swansea was the apotheosis of the Blob in action. The civil servants developed their own new metrics for the job. One of their numbers was £30 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear. Another £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
There is a hell of a story about what has gone on in the energy planning of this country - a story that will one day come out.
Have you had contacts with any of the candidates Mark? Would seem like a fresh opportunity to get this greenlighted. Either that or Boris does it as 'his legacy'.
Boris has had nearly three years to deliver on his pro-tidal comments out n the stump for the leadership when in Wales.
Instead, he has promoted nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. He isn't going to do anything now to change tack.
He continues to say nuclear nuclear nuclear. Without making any progress whatsoever towards even commissioning any never mind getting them underway.
Wait, Penny is suggesting we axe the fiscal rules?!
Wtf, Tory MPs need to axe her. Borrowing to fund current spending is a terrible idea.
It seems to be a widespread mentality in real life:
The research revealed one in four adults in the UK feel they are financially stretched, but are still reluctant to let worrying about the rising cost of living impact their spending habits.
These "squeezed spenders" recognise the need to cut back some of their spending but generally prefer to borrow, dip into savings or use buy-now-pay-later schemes, rather than allow money worries to get in the way of purchases.
Any discretionary income is typically spent on non-essential items, with a lack of willpower cited as the main barrier to saving more regularly.
"This group of squeezed spenders is interesting, precisely because it's counterintuitive," Richard Lim, head of Retail Economics, told the BBC.
"These people realise their personal finances are under pressure, but at the same time, they really don't want to cut back and so they carry on spending, including on things that aren't essential."
Wait, Penny is suggesting we axe the fiscal rules?!
Wtf, Tory MPs need to axe her. Borrowing to fund current spending is a terrible idea.
So is Truss. Both argue, to varying degrees that we are not borrowing as much as many other countries and this is one of the reason we are forecast to grow more slowly.
Personally, I think that this is rubbish. We are running a huge trade deficit. We have virtually full employment. We already have a large fiscal deficit. We have a serious problem with inflation. Rishi made the last point very forcefully in the Friday debate: more borrowing and spending is not an answer to inflation.
To get more growth we need to improve productivity. That is the key. It reduces inflation, increases wages, makes domestic production more competitive, reduces the pressure on the supply of labour. What do the candidates have to say about that?
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Quite a few hills here in Scotland, lots in Wales too.
But it's not just about having 'hills': it's about having the right conditions, both in terms of height and geology. Then wait until the environmentalists complain that the upper pond's are going to destroy the environment (and I do have some sympathy with that...)
I don't know who will win this Tory leadership contest but I'm feeling increasingly disappointed. Maybe it is the need to appeal to the Tory selectorate but it doesn't feel as if the big challenges are being dealt with. I did like the fact that Kemi talked about trade offs in the C4 debate even if her solutions would be more to the right than I would probably want.
Are we prepared to have an excess of supply in the housing market? If a farmer takes rotten food to the market he has to accept that no-one will likely buy it. Housebuilders don't seem to face the same consumer pressure. I'm not convinced removing regulations is likely to improve that. Has Truss set herself against Nimbyism?
Sadly, you don't get discussions of downsides in a leadership contest, just as you don't in an election. You don't get the much between those times either, to be fair. This isn't a feature of the modern age; I don't ever remember an advocate of any given position presenting a measured consideration of its costs as well as its benefits. I agree it's a bit depressing though.
The much-maligned John McDonnell actually had a try at it in the 2017 election, where Labour had a website where you could enter your income etc. and got told what the effect on you would be of the proposed policies. I got something like "You will pay £12/week more under our proposed policies. Against that, you will have shorter NHS waiting times and more investment in schools. Thank you for taking part, and we hope you will feel the cost is worth it."
Obviously there will have been scope to massage the calculations so only a minority got "you will pay more". But I appreciated the effort to treat me like an adult.
True, though there was something of a credibility problem (not least the assumption that those at the top end singled out for higher contributions would just grit their teeth and pay them, rather than being disincentived to do taxable work in the UK). But a bronze star for sort of trying. I'd add that I'd consider you a shining exception to this Nick in that you do try to accept that there are costs and benefits to decisions Nick - though perhaps it helps that I have come across you in forums where a more thoughtful debate is more possible (though that doesn't necessarily encourage everyone to take such an approach).
One Labour insider sums up how the leadership race is proving the gap between voters priorities and Tory priorities. “Our problem was we thought Twitter was Britain. Their problem is they think the Spectator magazine is Britain.”
“Their obsession with things like trans and university campus platforms is a million miles from where the public are. People on the doorstep are saying they can’t afford Christmas because of the energy bill rises coming this autumn.”
None of them have much to say about the future of this country, beyond the usual motherhood and apple pie blather. All the candidates are poor, Sunak is the least bad because he does appear to be numerate.
Lol yeah blame the civil servants and not the politicians making the decisions. If they’re too stupid to understand what the civil servants are doing then maybe they shouldn’t have gone into politics.
I can offer some partial light on the process here, as I was involved as PPS to Malcolm Wicks in the energy review in something like 2008. Malcolm used me to discuss ideas (some PPS jobs really are just bag-carrying) and we went over the data carefully. At that stage, the figures for tidal lagoons supplied by the civil service researchers were an order of magnitude worse (in terms of return on investment) than any other way of producing more energy - I forget the exact figures but they were off the scale. I'm used to analysing data in detail, though not an expert in engineering, and I couldn't see any reason to doubt the calculations. What was obviously best at that point was lots of wind, preferably on-shore if the Nimby opposition could be overcome (because installation and maintenance is far cheaper), though I think we did underestimate the need for nuclear baseload.
I don't think we were really in a position to demolish the civil service calculations, or any particular reason why they should have been biased. It's possible that they were simply wrong, or that subsequent events have changed the balance, but Occam's Razor is that the civil servants do their best to present the options and the politicians try to make sensible decisions based on them which won't be too unpopular. We don't need to demonise the people involved, but perhaps there's scope for more independent challenging of the data before decisions are made.
Nick, appreciate it was after your time but the report that went up to Theresa May on Swansea was the apotheosis of the Blob in action. The civil servants developed their own new metrics for the job. One of their numbers was £30 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear. Another £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
There is a hell of a story about what has gone on in the energy planning of this country - a story that will one day come out.
Have you had contacts with any of the candidates Mark? Would seem like a fresh opportunity to get this greenlighted. Either that or Boris does it as 'his legacy'.
Boris has had nearly three years to deliver on his pro-tidal comments out n the stump for the leadership when in Wales.
Instead, he has promoted nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. He isn't going to do anything now to change tack.
He continues to say nuclear nuclear nuclear. Without making any progress whatsoever towards even commissioning any never mind getting them underway.
But now he's on his way out, he might be feeling frisky. It's very like Boris to steal the limelight in that way.
Wait, Penny is suggesting we axe the fiscal rules?!
Wtf, Tory MPs need to axe her. Borrowing to fund current spending is a terrible idea.
So is Truss. Both argue, to varying degrees that we are not borrowing as much as many other countries and this is one of the reason we are forecast to grow more slowly.
Personally, I think that this is rubbish. We are running a huge trade deficit. We have virtually full employment. We already have a large fiscal deficit. We have a serious problem with inflation. Rishi made the last point very forcefully in the Friday debate: more borrowing and spending is not an answer to inflation.
To get more growth we need to improve productivity. That is the key. It reduces inflation, increases wages, makes domestic production more competitive, reduces the pressure on the supply of labour. What do the candidates have to say about that?
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
Not a trans deviant probably, a heterosexual shit who got in a position to do what he did because of tedious dweebs who think they are being right on. Amusing post though.
You've just reinforced my argument. These are fringe of the fringe cases - how many real world examples like the one in the McExpress are there? Vs how many real world examples of people really feeling the squeeze and by the autumn the onset of rising panic/anger.
The number of women raped on hospital wards - microscopic. By trans people? Even more so. The number of people already in a dreadful mess trying to pay their bills? Millions. And in the autumn? Millions more.
So the trans "threat" isn't a threat except for in extremely rare edge cases, whereas the COL crisis is a direct threat to vast numbers. So if the Tories want to foam on about the cock-tucking deviants thats their loss.
The threat is not from trans people ie those who are genuinely trans. It is those who wrongly claim to be so in order to get access to the vulnerable. That is already happening: a recent FoI request showed that in 2018 the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones. Self-ID creates an open door for sexual predators. The proposed Self-ID reforms in Scotland for instance would allow any man or boy over the age of 16 to legally call themselves a woman after 6 months with no evidence of dysphoria or anything at all - simply a statement by them. The Scottish government has rejected a proposal to prevent those with convictions for sexual offences from taking advantage of this.
The reference to sexual assaults on women as "edge" cases is frankly revolting. Sexual assaults on women are widespread. They are not edge cases. They are not trivial. A government has a duty to prevent the vulnerable from being put in a position where they are at risk. And it is something which governments can and should do in addition to everything else.
I wasn't describing sexual assaults on women as edge cases - just the example given. Men need to be stopped from assaulting women and there is a huge amount that men need to do to educate and motivate ourselves as a gender to not have this macho predatory women as chattel bullshit that drives it.
My point is that if you want to go and assault and rape women you don't need to pretend to be trans to do it - just drag them off as the vast majority of cases are. The endless obsession about the trans threat let's this government off the hook who seemingly make little effort to bother investigating and prosecuting rapists.
Most rapes don't involve the victim being dragged off.
Wait, Penny is suggesting we axe the fiscal rules?!
Wtf, Tory MPs need to axe her. Borrowing to fund current spending is a terrible idea.
So is Truss. Both argue, to varying degrees that we are not borrowing as much as many other countries and this is one of the reason we are forecast to grow more slowly.
Personally, I think that this is rubbish. We are running a huge trade deficit. We have virtually full employment. We already have a large fiscal deficit. We have a serious problem with inflation. Rishi made the last point very forcefully in the Friday debate: more borrowing and spending is not an answer to inflation.
To get more growth we need to improve productivity. That is the key. It reduces inflation, increases wages, makes domestic production more competitive, reduces the pressure on the supply of labour. What do the candidates have to say about that?
Improving productivity requires investment and usually some hard work.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Quite a few hills here in Scotland, lots in Wales too.
The problem is that people like those hills as they are.
Chopping the top of mountains will be strongly resisted.
If it hasn't been mentioned already - For electricity generation, Pros and Cons of different methods, there is a free downloadable book here https://www.withouthotair.com/ That is an excellent read - click "download pdf" (or just browse the chapters in the website)
Labour has probably been presented here with its best chance to win an election in about 10 years. A Tory Party with no strategy and no ideas and no sense of where the country is and where it is going.
It really is judgment time for Keir Starmer, if he can emulate Wilson he will win and win big. But otherwise he will lose.
Paul Waugh @paulwaugh · 28m Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this. Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
Which was the last government that did not borrow to fund day to day funding? As opposed to pretend that they have an iron (substitute strong metal or object of your choice) rule that they would not?
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Quite a few hills here in Scotland, lots in Wales too.
But it's not just about having 'hills': it's about having the right conditions, both in terms of height and geology. Then wait until the environmentalists complain that the upper pond's are going to destroy the environment (and I do have some sympathy with that...)
Well, clearly I don't have the information to say that's untrue, but the environment at the top of a lot of these hills is pretty bleak. Not much flora and fauna up there.
I think TSE is wrong on this - at least for some aspects of the culture war. Even on a heavily "champagne" forum like this, I'm sure many of us are aware of some quite extraordinary things that have been said to children at schools, anecdotes worth as much as a the cited focus group. When it comes to a secret ballot with the government at stake I think the results may surprise.
To borrow the Chilean saying, trans extremism is god's way of keeping the left out of power forever.
The gamble for the Tories is this: as people get cold and hungry this winter, will the supposed threat of cock-wielding trans deviants persuade them to ignore their hunger and cold and the anger that generates towards the Tories, and instead be kept warm in a Mail-induced fury about bathrooms?
But it's not really an either/or, it it? We'll be cold and hungry anyway. Gas has got much more expensive and no amount of accounting tricks will change that. Whereas we can choose whether we invite Stonewall in to our institutions to advance their gender agenda. But for the record, if government could either prevent food prices from doubling or stop schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda, I would rather they stopped schools from advancing their ultra-woke agenda. I don't watch kids growing up with a sense of shame about being straight and white.
If that was happening en masse then perhaps.
But as it isn't...
But it is, Rochdale. Or at least, in a sample size of 5 secondary schools I have visited recently, the incidence of it was 100%. If you infer the schools' orders of priorities from the visibility of display materials, they are: 1) now you're in secondary school, you need to pick a sexuality and identity from this list. This is very important and if you're not sure it's probably because you're bi, rather than, you know, 11 or 12 and not actually sexual at all yet. Why not join the Rainbow Club? =2) woohoo for BLM! Mary Seacombe and Rosa Parks. Why not join the equality club? =2) the environment: we're all doomed. 4) while you're here, if you want to indulge in a little education, or perhaps sport, that would also be fine.
Seacole. Bloody autocorrect.
I agree about autocorrect. I fail to see the problem with teaching kids about Mary Seacole.
Not at all, nor Rosa Parks. But it is astonishing how ubiquitous she is. And to be clear, I'm definitely not arguing for a return to the 1950s, or even the 1980s, when growing up gay must have been very painful. (I remember nothing in my childhood to remember race being an issue - don't remember any racist attitudes being expressed, whereas there were certainly homophobic attitudes, in both sense of the word - though the number of non- white people in my year could be counted on the fingers of one hand, so maybe it just wasn't visible.) I just think the amount of prominence that schools give to woke issues is massively disproportionate. Reflecting on the way I've expressed this, the point is I don't actually oppose 'woke'. If woke means don't be racist or homophobic and treat everyone with respect, then of course I'm all in. What I'm opposed to is the prominence given to it, as if your race and gender identity and sexuality are the only important things about you, and the 'if you're not with us your against us' attitude: that if you're not prominently displaying your woke credentials at every opportunity you're a horrible old gammon.
Good morning everyone. One of the surprising things about the Conservative election for me is the fact that Kemi Badenoch managed to get past the Conservative committee in Saffron Walden! That area isn’t known as the most liberal, but I wouldn’t be happy to be told I was wrong!
On Mr C”s point I have several great nieces and great nephews going through secondary education at the moment and while there are problems with some of them I have never heard their grandparents raise any complaints about the sort of issues he discussed and, believe me, they would have!
I also have two teacher grandchildren, one of whom teaches sociology and I’ve never heard any comments. A third granddaughter is an educational psychologist and I’ve never heard of any such problems being raised.
Pleased to hear that OKC. I'd note that from what I know of Kemi and of Saffron Walden her views are pretty well aligned to that of her constituents.
Lol yeah blame the civil servants and not the politicians making the decisions. If they’re too stupid to understand what the civil servants are doing then maybe they shouldn’t have gone into politics.
I can offer some partial light on the process here, as I was involved as PPS to Malcolm Wicks in the energy review in something like 2008. Malcolm used me to discuss ideas (some PPS jobs really are just bag-carrying) and we went over the data carefully. At that stage, the figures for tidal lagoons supplied by the civil service researchers were an order of magnitude worse (in terms of return on investment) than any other way of producing more energy - I forget the exact figures but they were off the scale. I'm used to analysing data in detail, though not an expert in engineering, and I couldn't see any reason to doubt the calculations. What was obviously best at that point was lots of wind, preferably on-shore if the Nimby opposition could be overcome (because installation and maintenance is far cheaper), though I think we did underestimate the need for nuclear baseload.
I don't think we were really in a position to demolish the civil service calculations, or any particular reason why they should have been biased. It's possible that they were simply wrong, or that subsequent events have changed the balance, but Occam's Razor is that the civil servants do their best to present the options and the politicians try to make sensible decisions based on them which won't be too unpopular. We don't need to demonise the people involved, but perhaps there's scope for more independent challenging of the data before decisions are made.
What is economically sensible is determined by the anticipated price of the alternatives. When a strike price was agreed for Hinckly Point at £92.50 per megawat hour I was appalled and wrote several posts pointing out that this was likely to make large scale manufacturing in this country uncompetitive. It may still prove to be but the current price is £70.59 and rising fairly fast. If the risk of hydrocarbons massively increasing in price was not in your calculations then they would have been wrong.
That £92.50 has an inflation kicker though....
I know, it is still worrying me but I am less confident that it is absolutely outrageous than I was. The other thing that has happened since it was agreed is that the cost per megawatt hour for offshore wind and solar has collapsed.
We still have to see how long those offshore developments last. Seawater is going to expose every possible weakness in their build. If many last 30 years I will be seriously surprised. Then they need rebuilding from the seabed up.
Contrast with tidal lagoons that have a 120 year minimum life expectancy - but in reality, they will likely last centuries with a bit of tlc. Sure, the turbines will need changing out. They recently did that at La Rance - they should last another 60 years.
La Rance is the cheapest power production in France.
It depends upon the strike price for those 120 years though surely?
120 years at rip off strike prices is a problem. 120 years at a low price is great.
If tidal lagoons can be built, privately, with the same strike price commitments as granted to offshore wind etc then the state should get out of the way and ensure planning consent is granted. If it can't, then it might not be economic.
Let's say it is £50-£55. For 120 years. That needs a new set of turbines at 60 years. That will deliver guaranteed power at predictable rates (how much on February 18th 2089 - check the tide charts). Clean, waste-free power. Putin-interference free. Zero carbon once running, some carbon for the concrete and steel that can be offset/utilise new low carbon cement techniques. Virtually no abandonment costs, in however many centuries hence that might be.
In that scenario, you have to ask - why has there been such determined effort to build nuclear instead of tidal? Keep asking yourself that....
Considering £50-£55 is above the strike price for most alternative investments, and you want to lock that in for even longer, that seems like a poor investment to my uneducated eyes - if it can even be achieved for that, every independent report I've seen on Swansea showed massively higher strike prices into three figures.
Nuclear may be higher, but it provides a baseload and we aren't locking ourselves in to that for centuries.
PS predictability isn't a pro, given that it needs to supplement the far cheaper and unpredictable wind, being on-demand is more valuable than being predictable.
Pay attention. Forget the bloody Swansea prices! Look at Cardiff.
And what is the strike price in 30 years for wind, when the kit has lasted less time than promised and more regular replacement has to be factored in? £50 - £55 might be their norm too. And for that, you get a whole lot of seaside statues in a high pressure system sat over the UK in February - contributing nothing to the National Grid as it tries to stop the country freezing in minus Celsius numbers.
I have never said we shouldn't have wind power. I have never said we shouldn't have solar. But look at the down sides - solar power has inbuilt 50% obsolescence, just because there's no sun for half the year. Wind is an erratic source of supply. Tidal is as steady as she goes. And with none of the downsides of nuclear. I have never said we shouldn't have nuclear. It's just that build the first tidal lagoon power station, and you will never build another nuclear plant in this country. The cases put side by side will be so overwhelming in favour of one.
A bigger issue than a short heatwave is the longer-term lack of rainfall there has been in many parts of the country. That's going to be a very real problem if it continues. We need a very wet winter.
Getting rid of so many reservoirs can't have helped.
Oh, hadn't heard of that?
There’s been an odd “war on reservoirs” in Green circles - the mantra goes that water companies waste too much water in leaks. No new reservoirs should be allowed and water must be rationed as a scarce commodity.
One bizarre example was where a Victorian gravel pit was going to be converted into a reservoir - it was actually hard to stop It flooding. No ground contamination on the site, excellent geology. Just turn it into a nice lake full of fish with some nice wetlands next to it. Huge efforts have been made to date to stop it.
And others have been filled in and covered with houses. It is a bizarre pincer movement.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Quite a few hills here in Scotland, lots in Wales too.
But it's not just about having 'hills': it's about having the right conditions, both in terms of height and geology. Then wait until the environmentalists complain that the upper pond's are going to destroy the environment (and I do have some sympathy with that...)
Well, clearly I don't have the information to say that's untrue, but the environment at the top of a lot of these hills is pretty bleak. Not much flora and fauna up there.
Different biota, which is a crucial issue. Alpine flora, for instance, as on Ben Lawers. Though less so in the valley.
Someone here last time this was discussed said quite sensibly that you can just use excess wind power to push water up a hill, then let it roll down and generate power when the wind stops. That sounded fairly sensible. Not sure how much excess there is at present.
Isn't the problem with that that we don't actually have very many suitable sites to do that in this country? We do it at Dinorwig and maybe one or two other places, but you need quite a bit of height difference and the ability to have a reservoir of water at top and bottom.
Quite a few hills here in Scotland, lots in Wales too.
The problem is that people like those hills as they are.
Chopping the top of mountains will be strongly resisted.
Doesn't stop people building the damn ugly windmills all over them in the first place. I'd imagine such a scheme would be less transformative to the lansdscape than that.
Comments
I always had my suspicions
What are the odds, hey? I have always been fascinated by the counterintuitive effects of purely random selection.
On Mr C”s point I have several great nieces and great nephews going through secondary education at the moment and while there are problems with some of them I have never heard their grandparents raise any complaints about the sort of issues he discussed and, believe me, they would have!
I also have two teacher grandchildren, one of whom teaches sociology and I’ve never heard any comments. A third granddaughter is an educational psychologist and I’ve never heard of any such problems being raised.
They also have this great filter question.
As for Penny, she is still my second choice after Tom.
The unisex changing room figures, which also included harassment and voyeurism, totalled 120. Obviously not all of the CSEW assaults were reported, but it's pretty clear that we're talking about a very small number in comparison.
There's also no indication of how many of these involved trans individuals as clearly a unisex changing room is open to men too. Unisex changing facilities have also been around for a lot longer than the recent debates around trans rights and self-identification.
I'm not unsympathetic to your views on Self-ID, and certainly wouldn't diminish individual incidents, but unless you provide the context, comments such as "the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases occurred in unisex changing rooms not single sex ones", are very misleading scare-mongering. Given the number of visits to leisure centres is certainly well into the tens of millions, and likely into hundreds of millions a year, then it's divisive to present them as anything other than extremely safe spaces.
And then there's all of that plus the godawful masks to contend with on top of that. You wonder what proportion of the heatwave casualties will end up expiring in hospitals.
To take the toilet position as an example, the rational "pro-trans" position is to get away with toilets of differing sexes and to make them unisex. However, if Cyclefree's data is right that women are greater at risk from unisex changing rooms than single-sex ones, then that is a problem.
Similarly with sport, its self-evident that allowing transwomen to compete in professional sport is unfair so should be as prohibited as doping, which shouldn't mean that transwomen can't be treated as women in other respects normally.
There needs to be some sensible compromises on this topic without the heat and fire. Personally I would want to be as supporting as possible towards transmen and transwomen so long as doing so doesn't put in jeopardy or unfairly penalise actual women.
Its interesting to note that almost none of this conversation is about transmen.
you aren't morally thinking here, you are just pattern matching between possible responses and your own perception of your inherent right on-ness. The fact that this leads you to dismiss the experience of an actual, non fictional woman, being raped and then called a liar about it for a year, as a statistical outlier, is remarkable.
If she becomes Tory Prime Minister then will you object to attacks against her at the next election?
So that is RIP Red Wall then and they will instead attempt to win a Cameron-style Blue Wall majority?
I'd rather people didn't go for politicians like the Mail does, I'd like to talk about policy differences.
My point was very simple - this is a highly unusual case which should not be magnified as if it is normal and thus drive a moral panic.
I didn't express a view on the stupidity of the judges because their ruling is still self-evidently stupid that it will get overruled.
Obviously there will have been scope to massage the calculations so only a minority got "you will pay more". But I appreciated the effort to treat me like an adult.
@johnestevens
Liz Truss has not done a single broadcast interview during the Tory leadership campaign (unlike all the other candidates)
https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1548575456063934464
Paul Waugh
@paulwaugh
·
28m
Bigger problem among Tory MPs may be this.
Mordaunt then says she will ditch Sunak's second fiscal rule: she would allow borrowing to fund day to day spending.
NB That puts her to the LEFT of
@johnmcdonnellMP 's 2019 manifesto pledge let alone @RachelReevesMP
now.
And the difference in scale between the Swansea and Cardiff schemes is one of my points. Scale matters: but just because something is bigger, it is not necessarily cheaper per unit of power generated.
What do you base your confidence on the viability of the schemes on, e.g. the construction costs?
England have yet to perform with the bat in this series. Today would be a good day to start.
She's clearly just making it up on the spot.
2.62 Rishi Sunak 38%
2.72 Penny Mordaunt 37%
6.6 Liz Truss 15%
10 Kemi Badenoch 10%
90 Tom Tugendhat
130 Dominic Raab
To make the final two
1.07 Rishi Sunak 93%
1.55 Penny Mordaunt 65%
3.35 Liz Truss 30%
5.7 Kemi Badenoch 18%
55 Tom Tugendhat
Not much change in the win odds but in the final two betting, Kemi has shortened.
https://gwlad.org/en/english-turning-back-the-tide/
#Raworth - We did have a veto over Turkey joining the EU... do you now accept what you said in 2016 was misleading?
Penny Mordaunt - No
#Raworth - We did have a vito... as it's spelt out in article 49 of the treaty on the EU... what you said was misleading?
#Ridge
Goodness me, she's going down in my estimation every time she talks.
Do the members care about economic positions? Or will it all be decided on who looks the part the most and who can say the right things on woke matters?
It's that simple.
We already use pumped storage hydro, but we don't have suitable geographical features for much more.
The problem is locations capable of storing more than a tiny fraction of the capacity of the grid.
The big problem tidal ponds face is the concentrated NIMBY/Green nexus, which will fight them with the enthusiasm normally used for new nuclear power station sites.
By contrast, the government quietly changed the rules so that small scale power storage sites (up to 20MWH IIRC) don’t require planning permission as power stations. This means that it is essentially impossible to stop small scale storage being twinned with the supercharging sites that are being set up electric cars. Storage there has a number of uses - time shifting cheaper electricity, demand smoothing etc.
Several of the companies building such sites are looking at over provisioning their storage so that they can make money selling power back to the grid.
What that could mean, if the right incentives are put in place, is that within a decade or so, you’d have enough storage to run the entire country for an extended period of time. Distributed as well - no single points of failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sihwa_Lake_Tidal_Power_Station
"... e fact the nuclear industry and their stooges at energy and climate change were so desperate"
I've seen this said several times. I'm not saying it's wrong, but what's the evidence for it, and the evidence that it had any effect on the decision?
PB4TT
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10810795/Paroled-sex-offender-arrested-rape-woman-elevator-NYC-apartment-building.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/man-who-tried-sexually-assault-22883045
https://japantoday.com/category/crime/man-arrested-over-sexual-assault-in-elevator
Does that mean we ignore it? No. Does that mean we hype a moral panic where this case sets moral policy in political debate? No.
As for my first para, it isn't dumb. There is a damaging macho bullshit culture amongst certain groups of men. It needs to be called out by men and eradicated by men. We have managed to make wolf-whistling and catcalling unacceptable, we've made today's tits are on page 3 newspapers unacceptable. Because the majority of men have said the behaviour of the minority is unacceptable.
We have to go further. "Incel" - where some men think they have the right to get sex. WFT is the mentality there? We know that rape is predominantly about power, so when you get cases like the met cop branded "rapey" by colleagues before he becomes a rapist - that is something that men can stop.
How often to we get responses to these cases where women are told to stay at home? Fuck that, it's men who should stay at home because we can't be trusted outside. As a culture we can make so much of this unacceptable, and the trans dogwhistle stops that happening.
The case can be made. It always was made - see the Hendry Review. A "no regrets decision" he termed it.
And any claims I make you find amusing - just pm me to set you straight.
Wtf, Tory MPs need to axe her. Borrowing to fund current spending is a terrible idea.
One bizarre example was where a Victorian gravel pit was going to be converted into a reservoir - it was actually hard to stop
It flooding. No ground contamination on the site, excellent geology. Just turn it into a nice lake full of fish with some nice wetlands next to it. Huge efforts have been made to date to stop it.
“Our problem was we thought Twitter was Britain. Their problem is they think the Spectator magazine is Britain.”
“Their obsession with things like trans and university campus platforms is a million miles from where the public are. People on the doorstep are saying they can’t afford Christmas because of the energy bill rises coming this autumn.”
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1548607272489783299
They are also massive structures: 12 million tonnes of stone had to be dug out to create the Dinorwig power station, along with 9.9 miles of tunnels. Yet it paid for itself in a couple of years (source: wiki)
Instead, he has promoted nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. He isn't going to do anything now to change tack.
Though I can see the sense in putting pressure on companies to sort the leaks.
The nation in microcosm. Grenfell was one of several similar buildings in Kensington.
And on inflation, my pay is up 5%, my Dad's pensions are up by the rate of inflation. It's the working people who are losing out from inflation and will lose out from more inflation.
Tory Party has lost its soul.
If she gets ahead of Truss by Tues, she could edge out Mordaunt. Here's how:
https://twitter.com/harrytlambert/status/1548432561579253761
The research revealed one in four adults in the UK feel they are financially stretched, but are still reluctant to let worrying about the rising cost of living impact their spending habits.
These "squeezed spenders" recognise the need to cut back some of their spending but generally prefer to borrow, dip into savings or use buy-now-pay-later schemes, rather than allow money worries to get in the way of purchases.
Any discretionary income is typically spent on non-essential items, with a lack of willpower cited as the main barrier to saving more regularly.
"This group of squeezed spenders is interesting, precisely because it's counterintuitive," Richard Lim, head of Retail Economics, told the BBC.
"These people realise their personal finances are under pressure, but at the same time, they really don't want to cut back and so they carry on spending, including on things that aren't essential."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62148525
Personally, I think that this is rubbish. We are running a huge trade deficit. We have virtually full employment. We already have a large fiscal deficit. We have a serious problem with inflation. Rishi made the last point very forcefully in the Friday debate: more borrowing and spending is not an answer to inflation.
To get more growth we need to improve productivity. That is the key. It reduces inflation, increases wages, makes domestic production more competitive, reduces the pressure on the supply of labour. What do the candidates have to say about that?
I'd add that I'd consider you a shining exception to this Nick in that you do try to accept that there are costs and benefits to decisions Nick - though perhaps it helps that I have come across you in forums where a more thoughtful debate is more possible (though that doesn't necessarily encourage everyone to take such an approach).
Increasing spending is easier and enjoyable.
Chopping the top of mountains will be strongly resisted.
https://www.withouthotair.com/
That is an excellent read - click "download pdf" (or just browse the chapters in the website)
It really is judgment time for Keir Starmer, if he can emulate Wilson he will win and win big. But otherwise he will lose.
I'd note that from what I know of Kemi and of Saffron Walden her views are pretty well aligned to that of her constituents.
And what is the strike price in 30 years for wind, when the kit has lasted less time than promised and more regular replacement has to be factored in? £50 - £55 might be their norm too. And for that, you get a whole lot of seaside statues in a high pressure system sat over the UK in February - contributing nothing to the National Grid as it tries to stop the country freezing in minus Celsius numbers.
I have never said we shouldn't have wind power. I have never said we shouldn't have solar. But look at the down sides - solar power has inbuilt 50% obsolescence, just because there's no sun for half the year. Wind is an erratic source of supply. Tidal is as steady as she goes. And with none of the downsides of nuclear. I have never said we shouldn't have nuclear. It's just that build the first tidal lagoon power station, and you will never build another nuclear plant in this country. The cases put side by side will be so overwhelming in favour of one.
As nuclear fears.