Regarding our GDP and productivity we have comparative advantage in very-high end manufacturing, creative industries, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and financial professional services.
Therefore, we'd want policies and trade deals to leverage those globally as best we could, and that includes the EU.
However, in and of itself I don't think that's sufficient because a good mass of our population will never get high paying jobs in any of those sectors and we have to be able to offer them something other than low-wage, low-security, low-value work that is migrant heavy and convenient for those in the thriving sectors but drags down our GDP and income per head and our productivity measures.
Switzerland and Germany have both largely solved that issue though.
And they have done so by (a) having lots of vocational training for 16 to 21 year olds who aren't going to University, and (b) having largely contributory benefits schemes, so that young people essentially have to choose between working and training. There is no "don't work, and still recieve money" option.
It's also led to a very high effective minimum wage in Switzerland which means there's no corporate subsidisation of low wages.
Fundamentally our education system isn't fit for the 21st century. It's very good for people who can and people who will, but not very good for those who can't and especially bad for people who won't. The UK is one of very few mug countries that has universal benefits without significant contributions required to qualify and a very large and complex system of in working benefits to lower the marginal cost of labour to get the can'ts and won'ts into low productivity jobs.
So on the one hand they don't get paid enough and need to be subsidised with in working benefits and on the other side we've incentivised companies to hire these low productivity people over investing in capital by lowering the marginal cost of labour.
It's a pincer movement that has wrecked the UK economy for 20+ years.
Yep: our education (particularly vocational education) and benefits systems are massive problem.
I'd add one other: German banking is a mess in many ways, but it's a hell of a lot easier for small and medium sized companies to access bank funding than in the UK. It's next to impossible for £2m year revenue companies to get bank funding in the UK, because banks would much rather lend to Joe Schmoo for him to spend on his credit card.
In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast getting bank funding for smaller companies is - if not easy - a hell of a lot easier. This means that smaller companies find it a lot easier to invest in capital equipment than they do in the UK.
Now... remind me, have either of Sunak or Truss actually mentioned any of these issues?
This board should run for office.
Regardless of current affiliation we'd do a much better job than any of the lot on offer.
1. Sunak seems very incurious really, for someone of his intellect.
I think Truss is more of a policy wonk under the hood, albeit a batshit one.
2. If the Board ran for office, we’d quickly split into two or three camps - call them political parties, if you like.
I certainly would not want to be in the same “party” as @BartholomewRoberts.
Don't worry - we could soon remove the whip from Barty!
Manly Sea Eagles, the Sydney-based rugby league team, are facing a revolt from players who are refusing to wear a rainbow-themed Pride jersey celebrating inclusivity for their game against Sydney Roosters on Thursday.
The Daily Telegraph based in Sydney reported that seven players have said they will boycott the NRL game due to their religious beliefs about homosexuality, while Des Hasler, the coach, was said to have been supportive of their decision not to play.
Ian Roberts, the club’s former forward, who became the first rugby league player to come out as gay in 1995, described his disappointment at the episode.
Was the poll posted here earlier today that showed Truss ahead of Starmer confirmed or was it a spoof?
Wasnt here earlier but the Express had a ComRes Friday or Saturday which had Truss a point ahead of Starmer 40 to 39 from memory. Headline VI was 44 33 though
Sounds like the one.
Very odd imo but, hey, I thought it was odd that Trump got more than 5% in either POTUS election!
Regarding our GDP and productivity we have comparative advantage in very-high end manufacturing, creative industries, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and financial professional services.
Therefore, we'd want policies and trade deals to leverage those globally as best we could, and that includes the EU.
However, in and of itself I don't think that's sufficient because a good mass of our population will never get high paying jobs in any of those sectors and we have to be able to offer them something other than low-wage, low-security, low-value work that is migrant heavy and convenient for those in the thriving sectors but drags down our GDP and income per head and our productivity measures.
Switzerland and Germany have both largely solved that issue though.
And they have done so by (a) having lots of vocational training for 16 to 21 year olds who aren't going to University, and (b) having largely contributory benefits schemes, so that young people essentially have to choose between working and training. There is no "don't work, and still recieve money" option.
It's also led to a very high effective minimum wage in Switzerland which means there's no corporate subsidisation of low wages.
Fundamentally our education system isn't fit for the 21st century. It's very good for people who can and people who will, but not very good for those who can't and especially bad for people who won't. The UK is one of very few mug countries that has universal benefits without significant contributions required to qualify and a very large and complex system of in working benefits to lower the marginal cost of labour to get the can'ts and won'ts into low productivity jobs.
So on the one hand they don't get paid enough and need to be subsidised with in working benefits and on the other side we've incentivised companies to hire these low productivity people over investing in capital by lowering the marginal cost of labour.
It's a pincer movement that has wrecked the UK economy for 20+ years.
Yep: our education (particularly vocational education) and benefits systems are massive problem.
I'd add one other: German banking is a mess in many ways, but it's a hell of a lot easier for small and medium sized companies to access bank funding than in the UK. It's next to impossible for £2m year revenue companies to get bank funding in the UK, because banks would much rather lend to Joe Schmoo for him to spend on his credit card.
In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast getting bank funding for smaller companies is - if not easy - a hell of a lot easier. This means that smaller companies find it a lot easier to invest in capital equipment than they do in the UK.
Now... remind me, have either of Sunak or Truss actually mentioned any of these issues?
This board should run for office.
Regardless of current affiliation we'd do a much better job than any of the lot on offer.
Me as Prime Minister.
You know it makes sense.
There hasn’t been a PM from the Lords for a 100 years or so.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
It does have to make up for the growing electrification of the UK's vehicle fleet...
Why not just bake in the tax cut?
Because, ideally, we want to maintain roads.
So do that out of general taxation. We subsidise rails out of general taxation, why not roads?
Of course fuel duty pays for mammothly more than roads. Oh well, cover it out of some other general taxation instead.
Why should I - a non car owner - pay for car infrastructure, or indeed, car congestion?
I think there was a big argument on what fuel duty pays for on here, and the general consensus in the end was that it kind of did essentially cover the various costs of driving, INCLUDING congestion, road accidents, and pollution.
No it wasn't the general consensus.
The fact is it pays massively over the top of what roads cost.
And the "congestion" claim is utter bollocks since that is "paid" by the people in the congestion anyway and actually almost always the time in "congestions" is less than the delays for alternative transportation so it should be a negative charge if you really wanted to be serious rather than just fudge the numbers.
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
It does have to make up for the growing electrification of the UK's vehicle fleet...
Why not just bake in the tax cut?
Because, ideally, we want to maintain roads.
So do that out of general taxation. We subsidise rails out of general taxation, why not roads?
Of course fuel duty pays for mammothly more than roads. Oh well, cover it out of some other general taxation instead.
Why should I - a non car owner - pay for car infrastructure, or indeed, car congestion?
I think there was a big argument on what fuel duty pays for on here, and the general consensus in the end was that it kind of did essentially cover the various costs of driving, INCLUDING congestion, road accidents, and pollution.
No it wasn't the general consensus.
The fact is it pays massively over the top of what roads cost.
And the "congestion" claim is utter bollocks since that is "paid" by the people in the congestion anyway and actually almost always the time in "congestions" is less than the delays for alternative transportation so it should be a negative charge if you really wanted to be serious rather than just fudge the numbers.
Sorry; I don’t include you in “general consensus”, as you generally spout economically illiterate bollocks.
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
Recently the government massively boosted the number of medical school places, but it will take time for the results to filter through, of course.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
He did vote for the French to have 100% control over their own border.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
No, but it’s another cost that Leave swore would not exist because of champagne exporters.
If less than half a working days membership fee deals with this and then its done why continue to be members instead?
Just adapt to the fact we voted and get the infrastructure and staffing required.
So why are Brexiter administrations so utterly incompetent, even by your analysis?
Because to be elected, they only had to be good enough to beat Jeremy Corbyn.
Regarding our GDP and productivity we have comparative advantage in very-high end manufacturing, creative industries, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and financial professional services.
Therefore, we'd want policies and trade deals to leverage those globally as best we could, and that includes the EU.
However, in and of itself I don't think that's sufficient because a good mass of our population will never get high paying jobs in any of those sectors and we have to be able to offer them something other than low-wage, low-security, low-value work that is migrant heavy and convenient for those in the thriving sectors but drags down our GDP and income per head and our productivity measures.
Switzerland and Germany have both largely solved that issue though.
And they have done so by (a) having lots of vocational training for 16 to 21 year olds who aren't going to University, and (b) having largely contributory benefits schemes, so that young people essentially have to choose between working and training. There is no "don't work, and still recieve money" option.
It's also led to a very high effective minimum wage in Switzerland which means there's no corporate subsidisation of low wages.
Fundamentally our education system isn't fit for the 21st century. It's very good for people who can and people who will, but not very good for those who can't and especially bad for people who won't. The UK is one of very few mug countries that has universal benefits without significant contributions required to qualify and a very large and complex system of in working benefits to lower the marginal cost of labour to get the can'ts and won'ts into low productivity jobs.
So on the one hand they don't get paid enough and need to be subsidised with in working benefits and on the other side we've incentivised companies to hire these low productivity people over investing in capital by lowering the marginal cost of labour.
It's a pincer movement that has wrecked the UK economy for 20+ years.
Yep: our education (particularly vocational education) and benefits systems are massive problem.
I'd add one other: German banking is a mess in many ways, but it's a hell of a lot easier for small and medium sized companies to access bank funding than in the UK. It's next to impossible for £2m year revenue companies to get bank funding in the UK, because banks would much rather lend to Joe Schmoo for him to spend on his credit card.
In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast getting bank funding for smaller companies is - if not easy - a hell of a lot easier. This means that smaller companies find it a lot easier to invest in capital equipment than they do in the UK.
Now... remind me, have either of Sunak or Truss actually mentioned any of these issues?
This board should run for office.
Regardless of current affiliation we'd do a much better job than any of the lot on offer.
Me as Prime Minister.
You know it makes sense.
There hasn’t been a PM from the Lords for a 100 years or so.
More like 60 years. On his appointment as PM in 1963, I imagine the Earl of Home was still a peer, albeit he must have renounced it almost immediately to seek election to the Commons. I fear this might be another example of the tedious pedantry that periodically afflicts this place.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
No, but it’s another cost that Leave swore would not exist because of champagne exporters.
If less than half a working days membership fee deals with this and then its done why continue to be members instead?
Just adapt to the fact we voted and get the infrastructure and staffing required.
So why are Brexiter administrations so utterly incompetent, even by your analysis?
Because to be elected, they only had to be good enough to beat Jeremy Corbyn.
Regarding our GDP and productivity we have comparative advantage in very-high end manufacturing, creative industries, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and financial professional services.
Therefore, we'd want policies and trade deals to leverage those globally as best we could, and that includes the EU.
However, in and of itself I don't think that's sufficient because a good mass of our population will never get high paying jobs in any of those sectors and we have to be able to offer them something other than low-wage, low-security, low-value work that is migrant heavy and convenient for those in the thriving sectors but drags down our GDP and income per head and our productivity measures.
Switzerland and Germany have both largely solved that issue though.
And they have done so by (a) having lots of vocational training for 16 to 21 year olds who aren't going to University, and (b) having largely contributory benefits schemes, so that young people essentially have to choose between working and training. There is no "don't work, and still recieve money" option.
It's also led to a very high effective minimum wage in Switzerland which means there's no corporate subsidisation of low wages.
Fundamentally our education system isn't fit for the 21st century. It's very good for people who can and people who will, but not very good for those who can't and especially bad for people who won't. The UK is one of very few mug countries that has universal benefits without significant contributions required to qualify and a very large and complex system of in working benefits to lower the marginal cost of labour to get the can'ts and won'ts into low productivity jobs.
So on the one hand they don't get paid enough and need to be subsidised with in working benefits and on the other side we've incentivised companies to hire these low productivity people over investing in capital by lowering the marginal cost of labour.
It's a pincer movement that has wrecked the UK economy for 20+ years.
Yep: our education (particularly vocational education) and benefits systems are massive problem.
I'd add one other: German banking is a mess in many ways, but it's a hell of a lot easier for small and medium sized companies to access bank funding than in the UK. It's next to impossible for £2m year revenue companies to get bank funding in the UK, because banks would much rather lend to Joe Schmoo for him to spend on his credit card.
In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast getting bank funding for smaller companies is - if not easy - a hell of a lot easier. This means that smaller companies find it a lot easier to invest in capital equipment than they do in the UK.
Now... remind me, have either of Sunak or Truss actually mentioned any of these issues?
This board should run for office.
Regardless of current affiliation we'd do a much better job than any of the lot on offer.
Me as Prime Minister.
You know it makes sense.
There hasn’t been a PM from the Lords for a 100 years or so.
More like 60 years. On his appointment as PM in 1963, I imagine the Earl of Home was still a peer, albeit he must have renounced it almost immediately to seek election to the Commons. I fear this might be another example of the tedious pedantry that periodically afflicts this place.
You are right, he was PM as Lord for about five minutes.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
I suspect the price elasticity of commuting has changed a bit post-Covid.
As for the amount of tax revenue, if it replacing fuel duty, then it’s no extra burden overall, albeit there will be winners and losers.
Amazon delivery drivers, for example, would likely be losers. But rural drivers, winners.
The trouble with road pricing is that its suggested as a way of reducing congestion. The premise being you pay less if you drive at less congested times of the day. The part DfT people seemed to miss was for most people getting to work the time they drive is pretty much down to the whim of the firm they work for.
Not much use saying to Joe Bloggs well just goto work later if his job requires him to be there for 9am and won't budge. In my case the reason it cost so much is I would have been on the m25 in morning rush hour so it attracted the maximum price which from memory was around £1 a mile. Nor did I have any sensible option but to drive as a train would turn it into a 2 hour commute
I think road pricing would be about as popular as syphillis. It would offend civil libertarians and ordinary people who like the freedom to hit the roads and go where they want whenever they want without making complex variable financial calculations and being charged for the privilege.
This is something that works for a regulated asset base model, like Heathrow, or Network Rail in charging train paths to TOCs and FOCs, but not your average Joe.
It's far more likely that we'll get a tax surcharge on electricity charging points or an enhanced annual road tax based upon total mileage in the same way you read a gas meter or do a self-assessment tax return to HMRC.
Well, what do we mean by road pricing?
The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money.
France has motorways you pay for, and those you don't. Switzerland breaks down road tax between "with motorway access" (more expensive) and "without". (Which also cleverly raises revenue from tourists and foreign hauliers.)
Germany has road pricing for commercial vehicles on many Autobahn.
The UK has the Dartford Bridge and the M6 bypass (I think).
Or do we mean some kind of sophisticated GPS based every road priced in real time?
I assumed you meant the last. Indeed, it'd have to be if the premise was to replace all fuel duty like for like because that's an effective tax per mile.
Most countries do charge for their top-end motorways with a dongle, and sometimes for city centre congestion, but it's by exception not the rule.
Regarding our GDP and productivity we have comparative advantage in very-high end manufacturing, creative industries, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and financial professional services.
Therefore, we'd want policies and trade deals to leverage those globally as best we could, and that includes the EU.
However, in and of itself I don't think that's sufficient because a good mass of our population will never get high paying jobs in any of those sectors and we have to be able to offer them something other than low-wage, low-security, low-value work that is migrant heavy and convenient for those in the thriving sectors but drags down our GDP and income per head and our productivity measures.
Switzerland and Germany have both largely solved that issue though.
And they have done so by (a) having lots of vocational training for 16 to 21 year olds who aren't going to University, and (b) having largely contributory benefits schemes, so that young people essentially have to choose between working and training. There is no "don't work, and still recieve money" option.
It's also led to a very high effective minimum wage in Switzerland which means there's no corporate subsidisation of low wages.
Fundamentally our education system isn't fit for the 21st century. It's very good for people who can and people who will, but not very good for those who can't and especially bad for people who won't. The UK is one of very few mug countries that has universal benefits without significant contributions required to qualify and a very large and complex system of in working benefits to lower the marginal cost of labour to get the can'ts and won'ts into low productivity jobs.
So on the one hand they don't get paid enough and need to be subsidised with in working benefits and on the other side we've incentivised companies to hire these low productivity people over investing in capital by lowering the marginal cost of labour.
It's a pincer movement that has wrecked the UK economy for 20+ years.
It certainly is. The poverty of expectations leads to an uninterested and alienated semi-working class. The contrast with Estonia, which is consistently top of the PISA education rankings is something I find increasingly depressing. I do a certain amount of business outreach with schools here and the bright, motivated kids are a joy. The UK has great Universities and some very good high schools, but whereas no kid in Estonia is left behind at high school level, across Britain, and even in Scotland now, the average quality of high schools is just mediocre. I think too much back seat driving from politicians doesn´t help this.
Once Education was a county level responsibility, now it is controlled from Whitehall or Holyrood and this centralisation has become another source of sclerosis. There is some good work being done by some think-tanks, but few politicians seem interested, let alone committed to building a consensus for positive change. Largely irrelevent old battles on school ratings or even 11+ selection are still being fought on both right and left while the real questions: teacher autonomy, breadth of curriculum, starting languages at infant or junior level, early stage STEM and all the rest of it are simply put in the "too difficult" box.
How does Estonia handle the so-called 'woke' issues in schools?
Well quite a lot of the woke is to do with the structure of gender in language. Estonian does not have he/she/it, it is all one word "Ta" so much of the gender fights on pronouns have no meaning in Estonian. Toilets can be either segregated or not, and no one seems to care. I suspect the number of trans people here anyway is probably either zero or single figures. So schools focus on actual education rather than the incredible amount of pastoral and safeguarding that seems to afflict educators in the UK. There is a real commitment to excellence by both kids and staff, and I think many of the battles in the Anglosphere are regarded with general disbelief.
Given that most of the issue with trans recognition seems to be among the youngest cohorts, I would propose that for all young people between the ages of 13 and 21, we no longer use he/she/etc, but instead simply use "it".
This would remove all confusion, and (frankly) be more appropriate.
Demand for passport control is highly variable. During certain time of the year there is enormous demand for it - because there are tens of thousands of people going on (or coming back from) holidays. There are lots of cars, and each car has many occupants.
At other times, there are just a few tens of lorries (each with just a driver) requiring minimal time and effort.
And this is a much greater issue at Dover than at Heathrow or Luton. People travelling by car to the Continent are much more likely to have kids with them, than those flying.
Governments don't deal well with highly variable things. It would be expensive to have 50 passport control officers there 365 days a year... but getting trained staff there during just the busiest times is far from easy. (Especially as those busiest times are the times when passport officers probably want to go on holiday with their own families.)
HM Government should propose a plan like Nexus/Sentri in the US, which handles land crossings to Mexico and Canada. Basically, you pay a fee, do a background check and register your vehicle. When you are due to cross the border, you tell them who will be in your vehicle, and then you pretty much drive straight through.
Of course, they have a man looking into the vehicle as you go through, and they pull out vehicles where they think there might be a mismatch between who is registered and who is actually travelling. And - of course - there's jail time for all involved if it turned out you lied.
In general, this works very well. People with families do the work ahead of time, and cross quickly. Those who have criminal records or have not, will sit in queues for a couple of hours.
Good idea - except that you’d be relying on the co-operation of the French.
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
We should remember that the NHS, and most Western countries, have always relied on immigration to top up healthcare staff. The problem is perhaps more acute now, but it’s not a new phenomenon.
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
I suspect the price elasticity of commuting has changed a bit post-Covid.
As for the amount of tax revenue, if it replacing fuel duty, then it’s no extra burden overall, albeit there will be winners and losers.
Amazon delivery drivers, for example, would likely be losers. But rural drivers, winners.
The trouble with road pricing is that its suggested as a way of reducing congestion. The premise being you pay less if you drive at less congested times of the day. The part DfT people seemed to miss was for most people getting to work the time they drive is pretty much down to the whim of the firm they work for.
Not much use saying to Joe Bloggs well just goto work later if his job requires him to be there for 9am and won't budge. In my case the reason it cost so much is I would have been on the m25 in morning rush hour so it attracted the maximum price which from memory was around £1 a mile. Nor did I have any sensible option but to drive as a train would turn it into a 2 hour commute
I think road pricing would be about as popular as syphillis. It would offend civil libertarians and ordinary people who like the freedom to hit the roads and go where they want whenever they want without making complex variable financial calculations and being charged for the privilege.
This is something that works for a regulated asset base model, like Heathrow, or Network Rail in charging train paths to TOCs and FOCs, but not your average Joe.
It's far more likely that we'll get a tax surcharge on electricity charging points or an enhanced annual road tax based upon total mileage in the same way you read a gas meter or do a self-assessment tax return to HMRC.
Don’t exaggerate - Road pricing would be no where near as unpopular as syphilis. It would probably poll about 10 percentage points below genital warts, though.
The reason for this is lack of trust? - focus groups on the subject have revealed that nearly everyone has an unshakeable belief that the Government would take the opportunity to massively increase taxes.
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
Recently the government massively boosted the number of medical school places, but it will take time for the results to filter through, of course.
Has it - it reduced the numbers for 2022 compared to 2021 by refusing to let those who deferred from 2021 to be allowed an extra place. Which severely impacts this year's A level leavers.
2021 students 9296 2022 places 8300
As for the 5 recently added medical schools they all predate Bozo and added a total of 470 places which is what 6%?
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
I suspect the price elasticity of commuting has changed a bit post-Covid.
As for the amount of tax revenue, if it replacing fuel duty, then it’s no extra burden overall, albeit there will be winners and losers.
Amazon delivery drivers, for example, would likely be losers. But rural drivers, winners.
The trouble with road pricing is that its suggested as a way of reducing congestion. The premise being you pay less if you drive at less congested times of the day. The part DfT people seemed to miss was for most people getting to work the time they drive is pretty much down to the whim of the firm they work for.
Not much use saying to Joe Bloggs well just goto work later if his job requires him to be there for 9am and won't budge. In my case the reason it cost so much is I would have been on the m25 in morning rush hour so it attracted the maximum price which from memory was around £1 a mile. Nor did I have any sensible option but to drive as a train would turn it into a 2 hour commute
I think road pricing would be about as popular as syphillis. It would offend civil libertarians and ordinary people who like the freedom to hit the roads and go where they want whenever they want without making complex variable financial calculations and being charged for the privilege.
This is something that works for a regulated asset base model, like Heathrow, or Network Rail in charging train paths to TOCs and FOCs, but not your average Joe.
It's far more likely that we'll get a tax surcharge on electricity charging points or an enhanced annual road tax based upon total mileage in the same way you read a gas meter or do a self-assessment tax return to HMRC.
Don’t exaggerate - Road pricing would be no where near as unpopular as syphilis. It would probably poll about 10 percentage points below genital warts, though.
The reason for this is lack of trust? - focus groups on the subject have revealed that nearly everyone has an unshakeable belief that the Government would take the opportunity to massively increase taxes.
It would need to come with promises to maintain the level and invest in a major road-upgrade programme.
Day one of the summer holidays: Have resorted to creating origin stories for everything on his dinner plate:
"I was just a lowly wife, and my one sin was to look back to see if I'd left the iron on because my useless 'usband couldn't be 'rsed to check 'imself. So 'im up there, that B------, that UTTER B------, turned me to SALT. And there I lie for a millennia, carefully minding me own business, then some machine grabs me up and puts me in a 'opper. I get taken to a place I've never been before, and put in a plastic container. AND SOLD!! I then gets put into a clay container and sprinkled over some CUCUMBER! I mean, I was a good wife, and 'ere I am, sprinkled on some cucumber. And then, to add insult to all that injury, I get eaten by an eight year old! All because I thought I left the iron on!"
(Repeat similar origin stories for pasta, cucumber, peperoni, lettuce and water. But you really don't want to experience the water's story. For the eighth time...)
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
Recently the government massively boosted the number of medical school places, but it will take time for the results to filter through, of course.
Rookies have never been a problem, but retention of fully trained people has become a major issue.
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
The major reason that we don't get many EU applicants now is because their Specialist qualifications are no longer recognised automatically, nor their primary qualification. Instead of getting a GMC number in 2 weeks it now takes 6 months (the same as India etc, with multiple hoops). It is the same for nurses and their PIN numbers.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
Recently the government massively boosted the number of medical school places, but it will take time for the results to filter through, of course.
Rookies have never been a problem, but retention of fully trained people has become a major issue.
The NHS could still employ EU doctors and nurses as they’re likely to meet the new visa rules, however the appeal of the UK to EU nationals to move here now isn’t what it was pre Brexit.
So it looks like the UK will have to appeal to countries like India and the Philippines to help plug the gap .
The NHS staffing crisis is very worrying given how much of a backlog has built up . No 10 would like to dupe people into thinking this was just due to covid but this isn’t the case . There were big problems before that and covid has just been the final straw.
The major reason that we don't get many EU applicants now is because their Specialist qualifications are no longer recognised automatically, nor their primary qualification. Instead of getting a GMC number in 2 weeks it now takes 6 months (the same as India etc, with multiple hoops). It is the same for nurses and their PIN numbers.
Thanks for explaining that . It’s a real shame that when the UK EU deal was done there wasn’t an automatic exemption for certain key areas.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Hmmmm with Starmer going for a 'growth' strategy and no nationalisations, im thinking we are looking at labour running something similar to the 2005 election campaign without the iraq issue. Basically back to the drawing board of their last succeessful GE. The first PEB of Labours 05 csmpaign featured Blair and Brown agreeing 'growth' was the key thing. Hand of Campbell in evidence?
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
It does have to make up for the growing electrification of the UK's vehicle fleet...
Why not just bake in the tax cut?
Because, ideally, we want to maintain roads.
So do that out of general taxation. We subsidise rails out of general taxation, why not roads?
Of course fuel duty pays for mammothly more than roads. Oh well, cover it out of some other general taxation instead.
Why should I - a non car owner - pay for car infrastructure, or indeed, car congestion?
I think there was a big argument on what fuel duty pays for on here, and the general consensus in the end was that it kind of did essentially cover the various costs of driving, INCLUDING congestion, road accidents, and pollution.
No it wasn't the general consensus.
The fact is it pays massively over the top of what roads cost.
And the "congestion" claim is utter bollocks since that is "paid" by the people in the congestion anyway and actually almost always the time in "congestions" is less than the delays for alternative transportation so it should be a negative charge if you really wanted to be serious rather than just fudge the numbers.
As I have said before (not originally) I wish I was as sure about anything, as you are about everything.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
Day one of the summer holidays: Have resorted to creating origin stories for everything on his dinner plate:
"I was just a lowly wife, and my one sin was to look back to see if I'd left the iron on because my useless 'usband couldn't be 'rsed to check 'imself. So 'im up there, that B------, that UTTER B------, turned me to SALT. And there I lie for a millennia, carefully minding me own business, then some machine grabs me up and puts me in a 'opper. I get taken to a place I've never been before, and put in a plastic container. AND SOLD!! I then gets put into a clay container and sprinkled over some CUCUMBER! I mean, I was a good wife, and 'ere I am, sprinkled on some cucumber. And then, to add insult to all that injury, I get eaten by an eight year old! All because I thought I left the iron on!"
(Repeat similar origin stories for pasta, cucumber, peperoni, lettuce and water. But you really don't want to experience the water's story. For the eighth time...)
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
I suspect the price elasticity of commuting has changed a bit post-Covid.
As for the amount of tax revenue, if it replacing fuel duty, then it’s no extra burden overall, albeit there will be winners and losers.
Amazon delivery drivers, for example, would likely be losers. But rural drivers, winners.
The trouble with road pricing is that its suggested as a way of reducing congestion. The premise being you pay less if you drive at less congested times of the day. The part DfT people seemed to miss was for most people getting to work the time they drive is pretty much down to the whim of the firm they work for.
Not much use saying to Joe Bloggs well just goto work later if his job requires him to be there for 9am and won't budge. In my case the reason it cost so much is I would have been on the m25 in morning rush hour so it attracted the maximum price which from memory was around £1 a mile. Nor did I have any sensible option but to drive as a train would turn it into a 2 hour commute
I think road pricing would be about as popular as syphillis. It would offend civil libertarians and ordinary people who like the freedom to hit the roads and go where they want whenever they want without making complex variable financial calculations and being charged for the privilege.
This is something that works for a regulated asset base model, like Heathrow, or Network Rail in charging train paths to TOCs and FOCs, but not your average Joe.
It's far more likely that we'll get a tax surcharge on electricity charging points or an enhanced annual road tax based upon total mileage in the same way you read a gas meter or do a self-assessment tax return to HMRC.
Well, what do we mean by road pricing?
The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money.
France has motorways you pay for, and those you don't. Switzerland breaks down road tax between "with motorway access" (more expensive) and "without". (Which also cleverly raises revenue from tourists and foreign hauliers.)
Germany has road pricing for commercial vehicles on many Autobahn.
The UK has the Dartford Bridge and the M6 bypass (I think).
Or do we mean some kind of sophisticated GPS based every road priced in real time?
I assumed you meant the last. Indeed, it'd have to be if the premise was to replace all fuel duty like for like because that's an effective tax per mile.
Most countries do charge for their top-end motorways with a dongle, and sometimes for city centre congestion, but it's by exception not the rule.
Personally, I'd keep it simple and gradual.
I'd encourage more private tollways, and I'd introduce FastTrak lanes on some busy motorways. If you don't want to pay, you can avoid it. But you'll be spending more time in traffic. We'll raise revenues to compensate for the inevitable drop in fuel duty, without completely supplanting it.
OT damn. Forgot that today is the day of the Racing Post's free 80-page football betting pullout for the new season. One of its many tips is Leicester to finish in the top half, some weeks after it was put up on here, presumably by Foxy.
Leicester on SkyBet for top 10 is 4/5, which doesn't seem good value to me.
We are yet to make a signing, and Rogers seems to be falling out with the That's. We do have good players though, so not impossible, but I think Rogers will be sacked by the World Cup break. 8/1 on SkyBet.
The fans are a bit restive, and there is a palpable lack of enthusiasm for the new season.
Unilateral European Nuclear Disarmament is a bold direction.
It's good to see retards across the political spectrum are keen to give Putin "a win".
As an aside, Mr Pinker has disabled replies.
Jeez, he’s supposed to be one of the intelligent ones. Americans in general completely fail to understand this conflict.
The only explanation is that people like Pinker and Chomsky are being paid by a cabal of experts who want to discredit non-specialists from commenting on anything.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
Starlink exists today, and is actually pretty good. As they continue to add satellites to the constellation it will get better and better.
I worry OneWeb will be the underfunded and perpetually just behind offering. It's also at 3x the orbital distance of Starlink (1,200km vs 400km), so there is the risk that while one is fine for video conferencing/gaming/etc., the other is basically useless.
I may be too cynical, but it is my impression that many people in this area (Seattle and suburbs) are willing to pay signficant amounts of taxes to get other people off the highways. That the other people are making the same calculation does not seem to have occurred to many people here.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
It may happen - the problem is persistent non-delivery. It is hard to think that the slow pace at Blue Origin may be matched by the satellites for Kuiper taking ages.
Remember when Surrey Satellites saved Galileo’s bacon? Just…
Starlink V2 is about getting an unassailable lead - even if Bezos is buying all the non Starship launch capacity on the planet, he can’t compete. Can’t solve that problem with money - he’d need throw weight. Which won’t be available for any price. Unless he launches on Starship
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit...
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home
It *is* possible for government policy to grow the economy, despite naysayers on left and right.
True, but it's also highly non-obvious how to go about it. Otherwise every government would do it...
The UK is now some way off the frontier of the productivity / GDP, so there are actually lots of things we could do.
They all involve confronting various vested interests, though.
French style, permanent tax breaks on investment in plant and machinery. At say, 100% tax relief.
Yes. Full relief. For starters.
UK is actually at the bottom end of tax competitiveness for business, despite common belief, and has essentially disincentivised capex until very recently.
We have focused on the low rate of CT rather than the effective rate. Rather than cancel the increase in the base rate we should increase the allowances. I don't see why 100% relief should be the cap either on capital spending or on training. We need incentives to invest in this country and the actual rate of CT is not particularly relevant to that.
After thinking about this for a week, and digging into a bit, we should probably do all of the above AND keep corporation tax lowish.
I would make high quality investment in machinery and high quality training very very tax advantageous.
The average Brit spends 115 hours in traffic each year. Swapping Fuel Duty for Road Pricing would boost GDP for 2 reasons.
1. You can't work if you're stuck in traffic. 2. Your effective labour market is smaller reducing the benefits of agglomeration.
How does reducing your effective labour market solve anything?
or
This study suggest constraints on housing supply have a 13.5% GDP cost in the US. And there are good reasons to believe supply is even more constrained in the UK
Firstly does he know that NIMBYISM is worth a lot of votes. Secondly has he seen how hard it is to do anything in San Francisco (yes I know it's an extreme example but there are plenty of others)..
I don’t think it’s codswallop. It might be politically unrealistic, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain’s productivity is significantly impaired by housing/planning/transport issues.
But look at his solution to a problem - he wishes to price people off commuting to increase the effective labour market size.
How does that work because all you do with road pricing is move the tax from being paid at the pump to being paid per mile on the road - you haven't changed anything beyond when and how it's collected. You haven't done anything to make the commute time shorter.
Actually, he does not.
He suggests that road pricing will smooth traffic flow as people respond to paying full cost of congestion during peak hours.
He references Singapore where, as he notes, average urban traffic speeds have *sped up* in recent years as congestion as decreased.
is he? - he references road pricing rather than dynamic road pricing - if he had referenced dynamic or time based road pricing I would just ask the simple question - where and how are you going to build the infrastructure to do it? Followed by have you seen the cost of doing it for even a small fixed point like the Dartford or Tyne Tunnels...
Now Dynamic Road pricing is possible in a small rich country when you limit it to particular routes - it's a lot harder to do in somewhere like the UK....
Easy enough if you GPS track all cars...
I'm sure the Home Office would never suggest such a thing.
You can't GPS all cars - because the car isn't under the Government's control so the GPS can be removed or disabled.
Isn't GPS going to be required for speed controls? I thought they were going to be mandatory. If it is done on visual sign recognition then there will be plenty fun to be had.
Of course, anything can be disabled, just like you can drive around without insurance.
Presumably you could check each car "exists" when it passes an existing camera.
As an aside I worked at WS Atkins in Blairs first term and got a sight of a DfT discussion document on road pricing which included some proposed figures per mile. Most in our document calculated how much our costs would be to commute and I was second closest to the office at 22 miles.....my costs would have been £150 a week to goto work. Petrol at the time for the commute was costing me £30 a week to compare. Most of us were of the view if it ever came in then we would have to quit and find a job closer to home.
Suspect the data could do with a “re-run” after 25 years.
The issue comes down to the lack of price elasticity for commuting AND the sheer amount of tax revenue the Government would want.
Put it this way Road pricing won't be designed to be cheaper than petrol duty...
I suspect the price elasticity of commuting has changed a bit post-Covid.
As for the amount of tax revenue, if it replacing fuel duty, then it’s no extra burden overall, albeit there will be winners and losers.
Amazon delivery drivers, for example, would likely be losers. But rural drivers, winners.
The trouble with road pricing is that its suggested as a way of reducing congestion. The premise being you pay less if you drive at less congested times of the day. The part DfT people seemed to miss was for most people getting to work the time they drive is pretty much down to the whim of the firm they work for.
Not much use saying to Joe Bloggs well just goto work later if his job requires him to be there for 9am and won't budge. In my case the reason it cost so much is I would have been on the m25 in morning rush hour so it attracted the maximum price which from memory was around £1 a mile. Nor did I have any sensible option but to drive as a train would turn it into a 2 hour commute
I think road pricing would be about as popular as syphillis. It would offend civil libertarians and ordinary people who like the freedom to hit the roads and go where they want whenever they want without making complex variable financial calculations and being charged for the privilege.
This is something that works for a regulated asset base model, like Heathrow, or Network Rail in charging train paths to TOCs and FOCs, but not your average Joe.
It's far more likely that we'll get a tax surcharge on electricity charging points or an enhanced annual road tax based upon total mileage in the same way you read a gas meter or do a self-assessment tax return to HMRC.
Don’t exaggerate - Road pricing would be no where near as unpopular as syphilis. It would probably poll about 10 percentage points below genital warts, though.
The reason for this is lack of trust? - focus groups on the subject have revealed that nearly everyone has an unshakeable belief that the Government would take the opportunity to massively increase taxes.
Not just massively increase taxes either, but create a massive database of movements which would be handed to the police without any questions, including automation of speeding tickets.
Unless you keep the charges to main roads with gantries, using ANPR or RFID technology, you’re going to be putting a Tracker in every car, and sending the live stream of data straight to the police.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
Starlink exists today, and is actually pretty good. As they continue to add satellites to the constellation it will get better and better.
I worry OneWeb will be the underfunded and perpetually just behind offering. It's also at 3x the orbital distance of Starlink (1,200km vs 400km), so there is the risk that while one is fine for video conferencing/gaming/etc., the other is basically useless.
The target market for OneWeb is back haul, IIRC. A few more ms on the latency would be fine for backhauling mobile comms. Think 5G phone mast with satellite connection to the network.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
Eutelsat's shares are down 17% today, so it's entirely possible that it will be derailed by the markets.
Perhaps, but we seem to have gone from saving OneWeb is money down the drain to Eutelsat needs OneWeb to stay in the game. It's quite a change of sentiment.
OT damn. Forgot that today is the day of the Racing Post's free 80-page football betting pullout for the new season. One of its many tips is Leicester to finish in the top half, some weeks after it was put up on here, presumably by Foxy.
Leicester on SkyBet for top 10 is 4/5, which doesn't seem good value to me.
We are yet to make a signing, and Rogers seems to be falling out with the That's. We do have good players though, so not impossible, but I think Rogers will be sacked by the World Cup break. 8/1 on SkyBet.
The fans are a bit restive, and there is a palpable lack of enthusiasm for the new season.
That's just cuz Forest are back to show them up.....
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
It may happen - the problem is persistent non-delivery. It is hard to think that the slow pace at Blue Origin may be matched by the satellites for Kuiper taking ages.
Remember when Surrey Satellites saved Galileo’s bacon? Just…
Starlink V2 is about getting an unassailable lead - even if Bezos is buying all the non Starship launch capacity on the planet, he can’t compete. Can’t solve that problem with money - he’d need throw weight. Which won’t be available for any price. Unless he launches on Starship
As ever, you are a little too pro-Musk and a little too anti- his rivals. If you had not noticed, SS has not launched, let alone reached orbit. They're nearly as late as NG. And Raptor 2 isn't looking that good.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
Starlink exists today, and is actually pretty good. As they continue to add satellites to the constellation it will get better and better.
I worry OneWeb will be the underfunded and perpetually just behind offering. It's also at 3x the orbital distance of Starlink (1,200km vs 400km), so there is the risk that while one is fine for video conferencing/gaming/etc., the other is basically useless.
That is a concern for OneWeb. But there are vast terrabytes of data that are *not* latency-beneficial. And OneWeb and Kuiper also not reliant on the pathetic rantings of a manchild.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
Starlink exists today, and is actually pretty good. As they continue to add satellites to the constellation it will get better and better.
I worry OneWeb will be the underfunded and perpetually just behind offering. It's also at 3x the orbital distance of Starlink (1,200km vs 400km), so there is the risk that while one is fine for video conferencing/gaming/etc., the other is basically useless.
The target market for OneWeb is back haul, IIRC. A few more ms on the latency would be fine for backhauling mobile comms. Think 5G phone mast with satellite connection to the network.
Two albatrosses tying themselves together doesn't make an eagle. And Eutelsat is an albatross.
I hope OneWeb can make it (ditto Kuiper), because I want there to be competition in the space. But - rightly or wrongly - I think that the lower you are, the better the performance. And the sheer density of the Starlink constellation (especially in the coming years) also makes it much likely that any terminal will have multiple connection options. That makes it very resilient.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
Wasn’t that the whole point of the M6 toll road - I don’t think it’s worked
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
It may happen - the problem is persistent non-delivery. It is hard to think that the slow pace at Blue Origin may be matched by the satellites for Kuiper taking ages.
Remember when Surrey Satellites saved Galileo’s bacon? Just…
Starlink V2 is about getting an unassailable lead - even if Bezos is buying all the non Starship launch capacity on the planet, he can’t compete. Can’t solve that problem with money - he’d need throw weight. Which won’t be available for any price. Unless he launches on Starship
As ever, you are a little too pro-Musk and a little too anti- his rivals. If you had not noticed, SS has not launched, let alone reached orbit. They're nearly as late as NG. And Raptor 2 isn't looking that good.
Starlink is in operation now. Thousands of satellites. Hundreds of thousands of actual users etc. approval to operate in many countries. Uplink stations in many countries. More satellites being launched every week. Literally.
OneWeb is now beginning to come into service. Satellites in orbit, ground stations up and running, approval granted by various countries.
Kuiper - no satellites. No ground stations. No users. No approvals.
Currently just OneWeb and Starlink are in the game.
Not sure what you means about Raptor 2 - plenty of videos from the fence at McGregor of multi hundred second runs, thrust vectoring and everything…
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h With Nord Stream 1 flowing at just 20% of capacity from July 27, Germany will NOT have enough natural gas to make it throughout the whole winter **unless big demand reductions are implemented**. Berlin will need to activate stage 3 of its gas emergency program #ONGT #EnergyCrisis
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
$20 a day, call it $4,000 a year, in extra commuting costs. You may not think that’s a lot of money… Corbyn might call it the Zil Lane.
And you know that in the UK, it would be one of three or four *existing* lanes used for the fast track, rather than any expansion of capacity for the scheme. Remember Clarkson and his tirade against Prescott’s M4 bus lane two decades ago?
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
Wasn’t that the whole point of the M6 toll road - I don’t think it’s worked
The the price is wrong.
Cut the price, and you'll see usage increase.
There are lots of toll roads in the world, and some have been enormous successes, and some have been dismal failures. It's all about getting the pricing right.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Except of course it isn't. As has been shown today. You are deluded.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
Wasn’t that the whole point of the M6 toll road - I don’t think it’s worked
The the price is wrong.
Cut the price, and you'll see usage increase.
There are lots of toll roads in the world, and some have been enormous successes, and some have been dismal failures. It's all about getting the pricing right.
Yes, it should be £3 for cars, and £30 for trucks. And a 90mph speed limit.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
Unilateral European Nuclear Disarmament is a bold direction.
It's good to see retards across the political spectrum are keen to give Putin "a win".
As an aside, Mr Pinker has disabled replies.
He's done that on all his tweets. As a defender of free speech he doesn't like people gainsaying him.
Or more probably he's tired of people posting photos of him and Epstein all the time in his replies. He runs a bot that blocks anyone that mentions him and Epstein in the same tweet (by name, not twitter handler)
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
Hoping against hope that Truss makes a mess of the debate tonight.
If Liz Truss does make a mess of this debate, she might drift out to a backable price with plenty of time to recover. Likewise Rishi. It is hard to know what to wish for so I shall save myself the psychic energy.
There's a debate today and another tomorrow, then a few days off to enjoy Glorious Goodwood while the opinion pollsters do their thing.
Unilateral European Nuclear Disarmament is a bold direction.
It's good to see retards across the political spectrum are keen to give Putin "a win".
As an aside, Mr Pinker has disabled replies.
Jeez, he’s supposed to be one of the intelligent ones. Americans in general completely fail to understand this conflict.
The only explanation is that people like Pinker and Chomsky are being paid by a cabal of experts who want to discredit non-specialists from commenting on anything.
The guy wrote a brilliant book on rational thinking, but can’t understand that the only way you defeat Putin is to actually defeat him militarily.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
I doubt this will be a factor. There probably aren't very many families who plan their holidays at three days' notice to give themselves the flexibility to react to customs delays.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
"@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation."
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
There’s probably a lot of truth in people heading for Dover to avoid the airports, on what’s usually one of the busiest weekends of the year.
It won’t take long for word to get around, that any particular country or destination was easy on the bureaucracy this year, for them to find themselves exceptionally busy next year. Macron is shooting his own country’s tourist industry in the foot, if they can’t be bothered to try and get the queues down.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
$20 a day, call it $4,000 a year, in extra commuting costs. You may not think that’s a lot of money… Corbyn might call it the Zil Lane.
And you know that in the UK, it would be one of three or four *existing* lanes used for the fast track, rather than any expansion of capacity for the scheme. Remember Clarkson and his tirade against Prescott’s M4 bus lane two decades ago?
It's not a lot of money if it unlocks, say, $20k extra salary relative to working locally. (Maybe comparable to childcare costs.)
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
There’s probably a lot of truth in people heading for Dover to avoid the airports, on what’s usually one of the busiest weekends of the year.
It won’t take long for word to get around, that any particular country or destination was easy on the bureaucracy this year, for them to find themselves exceptionally busy next year. Macron is shooting his own country’s tourist industry in the foot, if they can’t be bothered to try and get the queues down.
Mallorca was an absolute doddle a couple of weeks ago.
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
And that is why we back Dominic Raab as interim PM, ladies and gentlemen.
Yep, although what I've done is lay both Sunak and Truss to confect a 300/1 punt on just generally some summer nonsense from Johnson leading to 'somebody' having to step in for a short period.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
I doubt this will be a factor. There probably aren't very many families who plan their holidays at three days' notice to give themselves the flexibility to react to customs delays.
Indeed not. But they will see the queues on the telly (or experience them directly) and decide to do something else next year.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
$20 a day, call it $4,000 a year, in extra commuting costs. You may not think that’s a lot of money… Corbyn might call it the Zil Lane.
And you know that in the UK, it would be one of three or four *existing* lanes used for the fast track, rather than any expansion of capacity for the scheme. Remember Clarkson and his tirade against Prescott’s M4 bus lane two decades ago?
It's not a lot of money if it unlocks, say, $20k extra salary relative to working locally. (Maybe comparable to childcare costs.)
It may do in the US - I seriously doubt it would in the UK.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
There’s probably a lot of truth in people heading for Dover to avoid the airports, on what’s usually one of the busiest weekends of the year.
It won’t take long for word to get around, that any particular country or destination was easy on the bureaucracy this year, for them to find themselves exceptionally busy next year. Macron is shooting his own country’s tourist industry in the foot, if they can’t be bothered to try and get the queues down.
Mallorca was an absolute doddle a couple of weeks ago.
Mrs Eek landed in Manchester 2 hours ago - still waiting for her bag to arrive and will miss the train I booked her on.
"@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation."
Regarding our GDP and productivity we have comparative advantage in very-high end manufacturing, creative industries, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and financial professional services.
Therefore, we'd want policies and trade deals to leverage those globally as best we could, and that includes the EU.
However, in and of itself I don't think that's sufficient because a good mass of our population will never get high paying jobs in any of those sectors and we have to be able to offer them something other than low-wage, low-security, low-value work that is migrant heavy and convenient for those in the thriving sectors but drags down our GDP and income per head and our productivity measures.
Switzerland and Germany have both largely solved that issue though.
And they have done so by (a) having lots of vocational training for 16 to 21 year olds who aren't going to University, and (b) having largely contributory benefits schemes, so that young people essentially have to choose between working and training. There is no "don't work, and still recieve money" option.
It's also led to a very high effective minimum wage in Switzerland which means there's no corporate subsidisation of low wages.
Fundamentally our education system isn't fit for the 21st century. It's very good for people who can and people who will, but not very good for those who can't and especially bad for people who won't. The UK is one of very few mug countries that has universal benefits without significant contributions required to qualify and a very large and complex system of in working benefits to lower the marginal cost of labour to get the can'ts and won'ts into low productivity jobs.
So on the one hand they don't get paid enough and need to be subsidised with in working benefits and on the other side we've incentivised companies to hire these low productivity people over investing in capital by lowering the marginal cost of labour.
It's a pincer movement that has wrecked the UK economy for 20+ years.
Yep: our education (particularly vocational education) and benefits systems are massive problem.
I'd add one other: German banking is a mess in many ways, but it's a hell of a lot easier for small and medium sized companies to access bank funding than in the UK. It's next to impossible for £2m year revenue companies to get bank funding in the UK, because banks would much rather lend to Joe Schmoo for him to spend on his credit card.
In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast getting bank funding for smaller companies is - if not easy - a hell of a lot easier. This means that smaller companies find it a lot easier to invest in capital equipment than they do in the UK.
Now... remind me, have either of Sunak or Truss actually mentioned any of these issues?
This board should run for office.
Regardless of current affiliation we'd do a much better job than any of the lot on offer.
Me as Prime Minister.
You know it makes sense.
There hasn’t been a PM from the Lords for a 100 years or so.
More like 60 years. On his appointment as PM in 1963, I imagine the Earl of Home was still a peer, albeit he must have renounced it almost immediately to seek election to the Commons. I fear this might be another example of the tedious pedantry that periodically afflicts this place.
You are right, he was PM as Lord for about five minutes.
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
It does rather look like the LEO constellation data provision market will be
1) Starlink 2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan. 3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Kuiper will happen. Even *If* New Glenn never gets to orbit, Kuiper will launch, as Kuiper is not dependent on NG. It's Kuiper and Oneweb's USP...
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
It may happen - the problem is persistent non-delivery. It is hard to think that the slow pace at Blue Origin may be matched by the satellites for Kuiper taking ages.
Remember when Surrey Satellites saved Galileo’s bacon? Just…
Starlink V2 is about getting an unassailable lead - even if Bezos is buying all the non Starship launch capacity on the planet, he can’t compete. Can’t solve that problem with money - he’d need throw weight. Which won’t be available for any price. Unless he launches on Starship
As ever, you are a little too pro-Musk and a little too anti- his rivals. If you had not noticed, SS has not launched, let alone reached orbit. They're nearly as late as NG. And Raptor 2 isn't looking that good.
Starlink is in operation now. Thousands of satellites. Hundreds of thousands of actual users etc. approval to operate in many countries. Uplink stations in many countries. More satellites being launched every week. Literally.
OneWeb is now beginning to come into service. Satellites in orbit, ground stations up and running, approval granted by various countries.
Kuiper - no satellites. No ground stations. No users. No approvals.
Currently just OneWeb and Starlink are in the game.
Not sure what you means about Raptor 2 - plenty of videos from the fence at McGregor of multi hundred second runs, thrust vectoring and everything…
There are plenty of videos of BE-4 as well, with the same criteria. And note they are on Raptor *2* because Raptor *1* did not cut the mustard. And they have blown three Raptor 2's in the last few months.
Now, this might mean they're pushing the limits. Or it could be a sign the program is in trouble. But bear in mind NG has seven BE-4 engines on its first stage. Super Heavy has 33 (*). As the N1 shows, even with protection, the failure of one engine can doom the rocket.
SpaceX has a great record in such things. But they are really pushing the limits of the technology, and they may be in for a world of pain. And tech is filled with companies that were leaders who vanished. I doubt that will happen with SpaceX, but don't swallow the Musk Kool-Aid.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
There’s probably a lot of truth in people heading for Dover to avoid the airports, on what’s usually one of the busiest weekends of the year.
It won’t take long for word to get around, that any particular country or destination was easy on the bureaucracy this year, for them to find themselves exceptionally busy next year. Macron is shooting his own country’s tourist industry in the foot, if they can’t be bothered to try and get the queues down.
Mallorca was an absolute doddle a couple of weeks ago.
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
$20 a day, call it $4,000 a year, in extra commuting costs. You may not think that’s a lot of money… Corbyn might call it the Zil Lane.
And you know that in the UK, it would be one of three or four *existing* lanes used for the fast track, rather than any expansion of capacity for the scheme. Remember Clarkson and his tirade against Prescott’s M4 bus lane two decades ago?
It's not a lot of money if it unlocks, say, $20k extra salary relative to working locally. (Maybe comparable to childcare costs.)
It may do in the US - I seriously doubt it would in the UK.
One of a number of reasons why economic growth is more feasible in the US than in Europe (broadly).
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
I doubt this will be a factor. There probably aren't very many families who plan their holidays at three days' notice to give themselves the flexibility to react to customs delays.
Not necessarily true this year. Lots of families have had flights cancelled at short notice, and accommodation booked separately that will be lost if not used. I’d probably jump in the car and head for Dover in that situation.
I've just received my new (blue) passport - The Brexit dividend is complete!
Congratulations. You are hereby now entitled to join a long, long queue to get across the Channel (once it's been stamped by a surly French customs agent). Brexit - the joy!
And potential deportation if you get an incompetent border agent who forgets to stamp your passport correctly on the way out.
I have read several times on this very forum that it still only takes seconds to stamp a passport.
This is simply not true. Said surly and incompetent border guard has to leaf through your passport to find the most recent entry and exit stamps to ensure you are compliant with the visa-free 90/180 rule. That takes longer than a few seconds.
But checks were always required, so nothing is new.
If checks take twice as long then if you have twice as many staff on, then nothing has changed. Just staff appropriately based upon today's circumstances.
Sorry, you keep repeating this, but the checks are new. Even if they were required previously, they weren't done. Those of us who hopped across the Channel can testify that most of the time you were just waved through, with the occasional random check.
Indeed - that was my experience too. Normally the only checks outbound were done by the UK Border force, the French normally just checked you were waving the same number of passports at them as there were passengers in the car. They might stop Eastern European vehicles occasionally.
Also @BartholomewRoberts doesn't consider that Dover and Folkestone both have major constraints on capacity due to geography. Given the extra time taken to process, it may be that it isn't possible simply to keep increasing the number of border posts - there needs to be somewhere to put them, and the waiting cars. A more realistic option may be to limit the number of vehicle crossings.
Incidentally I notice that my shiny new blue passport has, in 4 months, already received the same number of stamps (5) as my previous one had in its lifetime.
In the event it takes 24 booths instead of 12 then would the responsible thing to do be:
A: Get 24 booths. Use compulsory purchase orders if necessary.
B: Stick with 12. Blame voters for a choice they may six years ago.
They've had six years to prepare for this. It isn't voters responsibility to deal with this, it's government's responsibility to accept voters choices and adapt.
Have you actually been to Dover? Have you seen where the port actually is? Folkestone isn't much better. Are you planning to requisition the Castle, or the White Cliffs?
Yes I have and yes there's space for 12 extra booths if they're needed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
As @RochdalePioneers has repeatedly said the Port of Dover requested ~£30 million to build new facilities. Oddly enough they didn't seem bothered that they'd need to requisition the White Cliffs to do so.
Considering that EU membership cost us £350mn a week gross, less net, and considering that this is supposedly your big problem with Brexit - spending half of one working day's gross EU membership fees to construct 12 extra booths and eliminate the problem seems like a bit of a bargain does it not?
Extending Article 50 and then the transition period cost us about €20 billion, so €20,000,000,000, so if £30,000,000 is the cost of fixing this and then we're out of the EU and the problem is dealt with, then voting Brexit seems eminently logical does it not?
If after six years this problem is real and hasn't been fixed, that's a failure of one or more of the respective government's not a failure of voting for Brexit.
Once again you miss the fact Dover asked the UK Government for £30m to resolve the issues the UK Government created.
And the UK Government offered them £30,000 or 0.1% of what was needed.
And yes £30m is a lot of money - but adding space to a port by concreting over the open sea doesn't come cheap.
I didn't miss that, I addressed it.
£30m is less than half of one working day's gross EU membership fee. Its peanuts, but the existing booths weren't staffed.
For an hour or so then they were manned. The delays didn't stop but they did manage to move the queues out of Dover Port to the M20 thanks to Brock.
Reports on that seem disputed, many seem to be saying that the booths weren't manned.
But either way it's moot. EU membership was costing us £350mn a week, gross, per week. About a billion per month net.
Extending article 50 came with about a €9 billion fee attached. Transition game with about a €11 billion fee attached.
If Brexit means investing £30mn as a one off to expand capacity and that's it, then just do it already, if it's actually needed. What a bargain compared to membership and transition fees.
And if it's not been done that isn't the fault of Brexit voters.
Personally I would blame you, not the French. You voted for people to be subjected to 11 hour delays at the border; they didn't. But it doesn't matter either way. I have no agency over your vote nor how the French manage their border. Until something changes the delays will stay.
The basic facts show that you are talking utter bollocks. Hardly surprising from someone who is so unreconciled with Brexit.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Au contraire, if I'm allowed to use a French expression. Unlike you I am reconciled to the 11 hour delays at the Channel, at least to the extent of realising this is the new normal.
Its only normal if the French don't staff their border. There's no divine reason they can't.
In any case, surely people will plan different sorts of holidays. So they won't drive to France, particularly not on the first weekend of the school holidays. That will cut the queues. And French tourist revenue.
There’s probably a lot of truth in people heading for Dover to avoid the airports, on what’s usually one of the busiest weekends of the year.
It won’t take long for word to get around, that any particular country or destination was easy on the bureaucracy this year, for them to find themselves exceptionally busy next year. Macron is shooting his own country’s tourist industry in the foot, if they can’t be bothered to try and get the queues down.
Mallorca was an absolute doddle a couple of weeks ago.
I went to Spain in October, even with some Covid restrictions in place I walked straight through. Albania likewise (I realise that isn't everyone's cup of tea for their holidays but they have some nice beaches). Didn't even bother to stamp my passport. Gdańsk in June, likewise, no covid restrictions, even with a bit of a queue for the border I was through in 15 minutes. I have certainly been picking destinations based on ease of travel.
Hoping against hope that Truss makes a mess of the debate tonight.
If Liz Truss does make a mess of this debate, she might drift out to a backable price with plenty of time to recover. Likewise Rishi. It is hard to know what to wish for so I shall save myself the psychic energy.
There's a debate today and another tomorrow, then a few days off to enjoy Glorious Goodwood while the opinion pollsters do their thing.
I suppose it is expecting too much for Rishi to be head and shoulders above Truss tonight?
@christopherhope ** EXCLUSIVE ** Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
The man's a bloody disgrace. It isn't the confidence of the members that decides who is PM, and teasing people that it should be that way doesn't help anyone, including him.
He really cannot think more than 5 minutes ahead and so just throws temper tantrums, doesn't he?
rcs1000 said: "The US has a great many toll roads. It also has "FastTrak" lanes on many freeways which you can pay to access. Basically, you have the choice between paying $5 for FastTrak and getting home 20 minutes earlier, or just lumping it and saving the money."
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them, photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
To be fair, it should pretty much always be empty during off peak times!
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
Wasn’t that the whole point of the M6 toll road - I don’t think it’s worked
The M6 toll is fairly busy these days. It took a long time though.
Comments
The link if you want to read it
Redfield has Starmer 5 ahead so i mean its all ballpark and MoE i guess
The fact is it pays massively over the top of what roads cost.
And the "congestion" claim is utter bollocks since that is "paid" by the people in the congestion anyway and actually almost always the time in "congestions" is less than the delays for alternative transportation so it should be a negative charge if you really wanted to be serious rather than just fudge the numbers.
Soz.
The French could have put sufficient staff on to prevent the delays. They chose not to - whether for political or some other reason is immaterial. It was their choice and their responsibility.
When they did then decide to put sufficient staff on - with no other changes nor need for additional resources beyond what is normal - the delays massively reduced as did the backlogs. And yet Brexit still exists today just as it did yesterday.
Most countries do charge for their top-end motorways with a dongle, and sometimes for city centre congestion, but it's by exception not the rule.
This would remove all confusion, and (frankly) be more appropriate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-62291116
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/25/france-eutelsat-uk-satellite-firm-oneweb-elon-musk-starlink
Oh and the British government will have all sorts of handy vetos over the merged company.
Rishi has quite possibly played an absolute blinder.
The reason for this is lack of trust? - focus groups on the subject have revealed that nearly everyone has an unshakeable belief that the Government would take the opportunity to massively increase taxes.
2021 students 9296
2022 places 8300
As for the 5 recently added medical schools they all predate Bozo and added a total of 470 places which is what 6%?
Have resorted to creating origin stories for everything on his dinner plate:
"I was just a lowly wife, and my one sin was to look back to see if I'd left the iron on because my useless 'usband couldn't be 'rsed to check 'imself. So 'im up there, that B------, that UTTER B------, turned me to SALT. And there I lie for a millennia, carefully minding me own business, then some machine grabs me up and puts me in a 'opper. I get taken to a place I've never been before, and put in a plastic container. AND SOLD!! I then gets put into a clay container and sprinkled over some CUCUMBER! I mean, I was a good wife, and 'ere I am, sprinkled on some cucumber. And then, to add insult to all that injury, I get eaten by an eight year old! All because I thought I left the iron on!"
(Repeat similar origin stories for pasta, cucumber, peperoni, lettuce and water. But you really don't want to experience the water's story. For the eighth time...)
1) Starlink
2) OneWeb - being actually operational and everything. Being the alternative to Starlink, in OneWebs chosen markets is probably quite a good business plan.
3) Kuiper - if Jeff can ever get his rockets up.
Hand of Campbell in evidence?
There is one just a few blocks east from where I live, and I sometimes walk up to the overpass to observe the traffic. There are five lanes in each direction, two of the five having variable congestion pricing. (With large signs telling drivers the current price.) Charges are assessed with electronic tags and, for those who don't have them,
photos of license plates.
When I have watched it, always in non-peak times so far, the fast track lanes are always almost empty, though the cars and the trucks in them do move faster. They can be expensive, more than a dollar a mile.
I haven't decided whether those lanes are a good idea, net -- but then I haven't even looked for studies on the question. The complexity does bother me.
(Many details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_405_(Washington) )
Also note sex-pest Musk's post that Starlink depends on the unlaunched Starship... (*)
(*) I don't believe that for one minute. he was just sh*tting on the employees he could not sh*g.
I'd encourage more private tollways, and I'd introduce FastTrak lanes on some busy motorways. If you don't want to pay, you can avoid it. But you'll be spending more time in traffic. We'll raise revenues to compensate for the inevitable drop in fuel duty, without completely supplanting it.
And there are next to no civil liberties issues.
We are yet to make a signing, and Rogers seems to be falling out with the That's. We do have good players though, so not impossible, but I think Rogers will be sacked by the World Cup break. 8/1 on SkyBet.
The fans are a bit restive, and there is a palpable lack of enthusiasm for the new season.
How Can I Miss You When Won't Go Away? - Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcvmgGoxJNA
I worry OneWeb will be the underfunded and perpetually just behind offering. It's also at 3x the orbital distance of Starlink (1,200km vs 400km), so there is the risk that while one is fine for video conferencing/gaming/etc., the other is basically useless.
Remember when Surrey Satellites saved Galileo’s bacon? Just…
Starlink V2 is about getting an unassailable lead - even if Bezos is buying all the non Starship launch capacity on the planet, he can’t compete. Can’t solve that problem with money - he’d need throw weight. Which won’t be available for any price. Unless he launches on Starship
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Unless you keep the charges to main roads with gantries, using ANPR or RFID technology, you’re going to be putting a Tracker in every car, and sending the live stream of data straight to the police.
Now... it is worth noting that highway throughput drops when demand is highest. By having two lanes less crowded and flowing at 60mph, you might well actually increase total throughput of the road, while raising revenue, and allowing people to self select whether they want to pay and get their quicker or not.
$1/mile for 10 miles that saves you 20 minutes is going to be worth it for a substantial minority of people. If it doesn't add significant delays to other road users, then it's win-win: more money raised and people who want get their quicker can do so.
I get up at 5am. Not staying up until 10pm to watch all the shite and analysis.
** EXCLUSIVE **
Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him
The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation.
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1551628844137820162
I hope OneWeb can make it (ditto Kuiper), because I want there to be competition in the space. But - rightly or wrongly - I think that the lower you are, the better the performance. And the sheer density of the Starlink constellation (especially in the coming years) also makes it much likely that any terminal will have multiple connection options. That makes it very resilient.
OneWeb is now beginning to come into service. Satellites in orbit, ground stations up and running, approval granted by various countries.
Kuiper - no satellites. No ground stations. No users. No approvals.
Currently just OneWeb and Starlink are in the game.
Not sure what you means about Raptor 2 - plenty of videos from the fence at McGregor of multi hundred second runs, thrust vectoring and everything…
@JavierBlas
·
3h
With Nord Stream 1 flowing at just 20% of capacity from July 27, Germany will NOT have enough natural gas to make it throughout the whole winter **unless big demand reductions are implemented**. Berlin will need to activate stage 3 of its gas emergency program #ONGT #EnergyCrisis
And you know that in the UK, it would be one of three or four *existing* lanes used for the fast track, rather than any expansion of capacity for the scheme. Remember Clarkson and his tirade against Prescott’s M4 bus lane two decades ago?
Cut the price, and you'll see usage increase.
There are lots of toll roads in the world, and some have been enormous successes, and some have been dismal failures. It's all about getting the pricing right.
Or more probably he's tired of people posting photos of him and Epstein all the time in his replies. He runs a bot that blocks anyone that mentions him and Epstein in the same tweet (by name, not twitter handler)
Imagine being called Cruddas and passing up the chance of changing that on ennoblement. What a minge monkey.
There's a debate today and another tomorrow, then a few days off to enjoy Glorious Goodwood while the opinion pollsters do their thing.
To be honest in the long run it would have been better if Johnson had just gone down to defeat in the GE.
Now the party will be saddled with years of 'stab in the back', 'king over the water' type stuff from a vocal minority of cultists.
Conference is going to be a nightmare each year unless they can engineer a way of not letting him speak.
LOL.
Pass the popcorn, Jeeves.
** EXCLUSIVE **
Boris Johnson has said he does not want to resign and will stay on if the membership backs him
The PM told former treasurer @peteratcmc over lunch at Chequers on Friday he wishes he could "wipe away" his resignation."
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1551628844137820162
It won’t take long for word to get around, that any particular country or destination was easy on the bureaucracy this year, for them to find themselves exceptionally busy next year. Macron is shooting his own country’s tourist industry in the foot, if they can’t be bothered to try and get the queues down.
Whilst i bet Boris wishes had could wipe away his resignation I bet he didn't actually say he backs the membership write in campaign.
Now, this might mean they're pushing the limits. Or it could be a sign the program is in trouble. But bear in mind NG has seven BE-4 engines on its first stage. Super Heavy has 33 (*). As the N1 shows, even with protection, the failure of one engine can doom the rocket.
SpaceX has a great record in such things. But they are really pushing the limits of the technology, and they may be in for a world of pain. And tech is filled with companies that were leaders who vanished. I doubt that will happen with SpaceX, but don't swallow the Musk Kool-Aid.
(*) According to Wiki; it regularly changes.
He really cannot think more than 5 minutes ahead and so just throws temper tantrums, doesn't he?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-62299285