Sky reporting the drought in Europe is very serious with river levels threatening shipping and the Rhine may become impassable for ships carrying coal and petrol later this week
The FT (£) says that the Drying of the Rhine will, by itself, knock 0.2% off German GDP this year
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
"Rising Star Zarah Sultana"? the one likely to be deselected having been imposed on her CLP as a Trot loon?
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
We know the ideological position she is sowing. The challenge will be what happens when the ideological rhetoric splats against reality and need.
"No handouts" and "tax cuts will deliver" work fine as slogans for ancient Tory giffers. But not in the real world. So they will have to act - the question is will it just be too little too late, or will they sneer at the people in trouble first?
I listened to a single parent with 3 children earning just £650 per month explaining her obvious distress at the cost of living crisis
I would be interested to hear from the conservative and labour parties just how they would address the serious shortfall she is facing
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
I put together a playlist of Scottish pop/rock artists for Burns Night once and I still listen to it regularly - Scotland has produced so much good music and Glasgow accounts for much of it. I have a theory that the Celts are a much more musical people than the Anglo Saxons, and so the musical map of Britain is tilted towards the west coast, with its Irish immigrant connections, as well as the celtic fringe more broadly.
The Celtic Race is a factoid apparently. The inhabitants of the Celtic Fringe just underwent a different linguistic development.
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
Dunno, it’s profile isn’t that different from Liverpool’s*. And there is the musical marching tradition of course..
*not necessarily a recommendation in your view istr 🙂
Well, no. Compare, say, Twist and Shout with, say, Twist and Shout. No contest, and the winning city also has fratellis, del Amitri, Amy, Franz Ferdinand, aztec Camera, ultravox....
And not to mention Orange Juice, Simple Minds (before U2ification), Donovan, Blue Nile, Primal Scream, Frankie Miller, Belle and Sebastian and the guvnor, Alex Harvey.
Also fwiw birthplace of Angus Young and Mark Knopfler.
Is it me, or is the quality of spoken English by international based scam callers getting worse? Job market pressures for scammers too?
The market depends on the cost of the lists of telephone numbers, I am guessing. Perhaps the lists you are on have been downgraded (for good reasons from your POV like lack of gullibility) and are affordable to people who can only afford shit call centres?
I got moved to VOIP in February and have yet to get round to plugging the handset in. Amazing how this cuts down on the calls.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
I said might but given Labour is still committed to nationalising the railways again it would not take much of a shift
*) I've never been able to see the rationale for water privatisation, and it is one that seems an obvious choice for renationalisation. *) Energy nationalisation is massively more complex (e.g. which bits are you nationalising?), but with energy prices and energy company profits both rising, it seems an 'easy' win to say you'd do it. *) I've seen little evidence that railway renationalisation would help either the public purse or the paying passenger (aside from hopes and dreams of returning to the glory days of BR). But Labour will end up doing it anyway.
I'm also slightly surprised that Royal Mail renationalisaiton is not a bigger thing. Or perhaps more people are realising the postal service may be going the way of the DoDo?
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
Dunno, it’s profile isn’t that different from Liverpool’s*. And there is the musical marching tradition of course..
*not necessarily a recommendation in your view istr 🙂
Well, no. Compare, say, Twist and Shout with, say, Twist and Shout. No contest, and the winning city also has fratellis, del Amitri, Amy, Franz Ferdinand, aztec Camera, ultravox....
And not to mention Orange Juice, Simple Minds (before U2ification), Donovan, Primal Scream, Frankie Miller, Belle and Sebastian and the guvnor, Alex Harvey.
Sadly I missed Donovan a couple of years ago at our local festival, but apparently an object lesson in not overdoing the LSD for too many decades. Belle and Sebastian for sure.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
Is it me, or is the quality of spoken English by international based scam callers getting worse? Job market pressures for scammers too?
The market depends on the cost of the lists of telephone numbers, I am guessing. Perhaps the lists you are on have been downgraded (for good reasons from your POV like lack of gullibility) and are affordable to people who can only afford shit call centres?
I got moved to VOIP in February and have yet to get round to plugging the handset in. Amazing how this cuts down on the calls.
We seem to do alright on scam texts. I get one or two a year generally, but take the phone to France, and I get several a day. english scams, not french ones. I assume this means it is the network doing the blocking.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
"Rising Star Zarah Sultana"? the one likely to be deselected having been imposed on her CLP as a Trot loon?
Perhaps there was a reality fiction TV show, Labour Rising, in which she starred?
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
In what world is Zarah Sultana a rising star?
A world full of grocers' apostrophes, judging from the original headline/tweet
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
I like the clarity of the analysis though I don't fully agree. The trend may eventually secure your red wall seat by 2030, but losing Johnson / less Brexit agitation / energy bills could threaten any incumbent in particular. (There's a bigger conversation to have on PB about how long those trends will continue.)
I think the bigger issue in the first category of seats is that Labour, for a long time, punched above their socio-economic weight, because the memory of coal-mining was so strong. As the miners and ex-miners died off, thee seats moved rightwards at a rate of knots, as did (in earlier times) seats like Forest of Dean, NE Somerset, NW Leics. etc. Look at the swings to the Conservatives in these , since 1997, and they're in the high 20s, low 30s%.
And, mainly, the ex-mining seats are nice places to live. Housing is very affordable, relative to incomes, the cost of living is low, and the countryside is beautiful.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
Conservative lite by the sounds of it
And why go for an imitation at the same price as the original
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways. The only question being whether we go through the rigmarole of pretending to try other routes or not. The only arguments against that were technical ones about the definition, and a ludicrous ideological one utterly divorced from the reality of the situation.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
I said might but given Labour is still committed to nationalising the railways again it would not take much of a shift
*) I've never been able to see the rationale for water privatisation, and it is one that seems an obvious choice for renationalisation. *) Energy nationalisation is massively more complex (e.g. which bits are you nationalising?), but with energy prices and energy company profits both rising, it seems an 'easy' win to say you'd do it. *) I've seen little evidence that railway renationalisation would help either the public purse or the paying passenger (aside from hopes and dreams of returning to the glory days of BR). But Labour will end up doing it anyway.
I'm also slightly surprised that Royal Mail renationalisaiton is not a bigger thing. Or perhaps more people are realising the postal service may be going the way of the DoDo?
Energy it’s pretty obvious to me which bits we should be nationalising. The bits of the industry like refining run by complete jokers like Gary Klesh and the Ruia brothers, because there’s limited economic incentive for serious players to continue investing in capital intensive assets with a narrowing window for payback.
We’d be sorry if we had no domestic oil refining capacity at all and yet incredibly I can foresee this happening unless the dogma of privatisation at all cost is ditched. There’s also rationale for state owned nuclear for base load, certainly far more so than having it owned by the Chinese (or even French).
Gas peaker plants don’t need nationalising but I would give state subsidies to incentivise the rapid investment in utility scale battery storage so they can be wound down, thereby improving energy resilience on still cloudy days without relying on gas imports.
Exploration & Production just needs the state to get the F out. These knobhead so called Tory chancellors like Osborne and Sunak who think it’s clever to play about with the tax structure for a few quick headlines but at the long term detriment of investment in eking out the last drops from fields that would otherwise be abandoned.
As for retail utility co’s, it doesn’t work having a price cap which compels private enterprise to sell their product at a substantial negative gross margin. It’s utterly senseless in fact. A stupid idea of Ed Miliband taken up by equally stupid Tory ministers. So you either need to nationalise them or come up with some other model of subsidy that does not discourage the companies from improving their overall position through trading activities.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
Russia just doesn't have the numbers of young people to be reckless with their soldiers' lives any more. But, their generals don't appreciate that.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways. The only question being whether we go through the rigmarole of pretending to try other routes or not. The only arguments against that were technical ones about the definition, and a ludicrous ideological one utterly divorced from the reality of the situation.
The first party to really embrace protectionism will waltz the next election imo
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
Leigh is an oddity. Leigh itself, what you'd think of as Leigh, couldn't be more stereotypical Labour if it tried. It should be Liverpool - Walton levels of safe red.
But the areas around Leigh have long had some nice homes that the well off could go to. A fair number of former professional footballers etc around there, not exactly slumming. But the volume of new homes in the area around Leigh now being thrown up fast wouldn't be amiss in any other pleasant town that's safe Tory.
Its not wall to wall terraced houses anymore, if the Tories can keep a hold of the Barratt Homes style vote then a lot of voters in Leigh are now Barratt Homes style and not run down terraces, even though the terraces are still there. . The demographics are evolving even in Leigh. It might be a marginal of the future.
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
Dunno, it’s profile isn’t that different from Liverpool’s*. And there is the musical marching tradition of course..
*not necessarily a recommendation in your view istr 🙂
Well, no. Compare, say, Twist and Shout with, say, Twist and Shout. No contest, and the winning city also has fratellis, del Amitri, Amy, Franz Ferdinand, aztec Camera, ultravox....
And not to mention Orange Juice, Simple Minds (before U2ification), Donovan, Blue Nile, Primal Scream, Frankie Miller, Belle and Sebastian and the guvnor, Alex Harvey.
Also fwiw birthplace of Angus Young and Mark Knopfler.
And just a few miles along the river was David Byrne's birthplace too.
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
In what world is Zarah Sultana a rising star?
Take this with however many of pinches of salt you want but....
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
I like the clarity of the analysis though I don't fully agree. The trend may eventually secure your red wall seat by 2030, but losing Johnson / less Brexit agitation / energy bills could threaten any incumbent in particular. (There's a bigger conversation to have on PB about how long those trends will continue.)
I think the bigger issue in the first category of seats is that Labour, for a long time, punched above their socio-economic weight, because the memory of coal-mining was so strong. As the miners and ex-miners died off, thee seats moved rightwards at a rate of knots, as did (in earlier times) seats like Forest of Dean, NE Somerset, NW Leics. etc. Look at the swings to the Conservatives in these , since 1997, and they're in the high 20s, low 30s%.
And, mainly, the ex-mining seats are nice places to live. Housing is very affordable, relative to incomes, the cost of living is low, and the countryside is beautiful.
Countryside. The very nature of mine workings makes large areas of land unsuitable for building or farming. Plus you've got hills (slag heaps) and flashes where the workings have caved under rainfall to make lakes, on what was previously often a dull, flat landscape. Add 30 years to grow wild, and you've got some of the finest native habitats in England now.
[Europe is] heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand. Typically you have a market, and prices go to a certain level, and that’s how the markets allocate supply. But if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
Russia just doesn't have the numbers of young people to be reckless with their soldiers' lives any more. But, their generals don't appreciate that.
Meanwhile the prospect of genocide if they lose means Ukraine would not have much trouble mobilising a million people if they had to. This war’s only going one way. The real question is what happens next in Russia. Quite destabilising for the global security order if their armed forces more or less collapse. Much of their effective fighting units have already been expended, another 6 months of this and it might get desperate for their whole military.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
I've seen it suggested that there are well over 1m Ukrainians now under arms. But the number that will count is those sufficiently trained to be useful in an offensive operation (a much more difficult affair than throwing together a defence), which will be a great deal less than the 1m.
I don't think there are any good figures out there - which is unsurprising, since it's a highly important piece of information. I'd guess that they might well outnumber the Russians in terms of trained and effective forces available on the front. And the numbers are likely to improve for them faster than the Russians, since they have access to training help form NATO members.
[Europe is] heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand. Typically you have a market, and prices go to a certain level, and that’s how the markets allocate supply. But if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
I said might but given Labour is still committed to nationalising the railways again it would not take much of a shift
*) I've never been able to see the rationale for water privatisation, and it is one that seems an obvious choice for renationalisation. *) Energy nationalisation is massively more complex (e.g. which bits are you nationalising?), but with energy prices and energy company profits both rising, it seems an 'easy' win to say you'd do it. *) I've seen little evidence that railway renationalisation would help either the public purse or the paying passenger (aside from hopes and dreams of returning to the glory days of BR). But Labour will end up doing it anyway.
I'm also slightly surprised that Royal Mail renationalisaiton is not a bigger thing. Or perhaps more people are realising the postal service may be going the way of the DoDo?
There's always going to be an argument for a good basic postal service for the public.
The model for renationalizing would be something along the lines of La Poste. Keep the core stuff basic but own a whole bunch of money-making private concerns.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
I said might but given Labour is still committed to nationalising the railways again it would not take much of a shift
*) I've never been able to see the rationale for water privatisation, and it is one that seems an obvious choice for renationalisation. *) Energy nationalisation is massively more complex (e.g. which bits are you nationalising?), but with energy prices and energy company profits both rising, it seems an 'easy' win to say you'd do it. *) I've seen little evidence that railway renationalisation would help either the public purse or the paying passenger (aside from hopes and dreams of returning to the glory days of BR). But Labour will end up doing it anyway.
I'm also slightly surprised that Royal Mail renationalisaiton is not a bigger thing. Or perhaps more people are realising the postal service may be going the way of the DoDo?
Royal Mail still delivers plenty of parcels and is the only postal service that performs the universal service and delivers to rural or urban areas at the same price.
It does not need to be renationalised but there may be a case for government subsidising the universal service in terms of delivery to rural areas which is less cost effective
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
That is the cost of nationalisation, assuming the TUC Calculations are correct, however that is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be the cost of subsidising the gas and electricity too.
I would like to know how nationalisation will improve things. People, especially on twitter, just think nationalise these companies and we suddenly all get cheaper energy because, you know, evil corporations.
But the trajectory of the gas price over the last 18 months is the main driver for this and it is up again in the last month by 65%.
You cannot nationalise that. It is a global market.
[Europe is] heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand. Typically you have a market, and prices go to a certain level, and that’s how the markets allocate supply. But if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
In what world is Zarah Sultana a rising star?
Take this with however many of pinches of salt you want but....
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
£2.8bn to pay the shareholders off
How much to supply energy at an affordable price this winter - because that £2.8bn spent on Bulb was just what was required to supply fuel to Bulb customers last winter given the market price and the price their customers were paying (and a lot of that was cap vs spot price)
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
What’s the reason pb isn’t just one long perma thread? All this chopping and changing, comments lost upon a new thread (like this one in a minute) seems silly.
How would we keep on the topic of the thread header if it was all one thread?
Mike could just have posted a header in 2004 about how wonderful Jim Wallace’s and Jack McConnell’s Lib-Lab coalition government was, and we could just have merrily chatted away for 18 years.
The Fresh Talent initiative, public smoking ban, bid for Euro 2008 and the Gaelic Language (Scotland) bill. Never any need for Off Topic comments…
TBF they did get rid of feudal law.
Absolutely! They weren’t too bad in some respects. Largely due to having the SLDs in there.
The tragedy is the decline in radical liberalism since then. They are just pale copies of their red and blue Unionist colleagues.
Hard to remember that it was Michael Forsyth and the SLabbers that drove through pro-Gaelic legislation. The BritNats are nowadays vociferously anti-Gaelic.
FPT - Indeed. It's pleasant not to have to worry about bribing the laird annually not to call you out for military service with horse and armour, or glaive and boiled leather waistcoat as appropriate.
Some Unionists do take the support for Gaelic as a personal insult, though not all, presumably on the same principle that anything with Scotland on it must be SNP on it and bad.* Nobody on PB moaned about Sunil's discovery of railway station names in the Gaelic, which I think a pleasant cultural enrichment of a train ride, and he does too I think!
The Slab-LD alliance is also to be credited with the 2003 open access legislation - preserving access to land in a climate where the landowners wanted to use the lack of specific right of way law as an excuse to close down all access.
*Yet Labour, for instance, had the policy of supporting Gaelic language teaching for young children from islands communities years back, too. One of the most interesting revelations on PB, for me at any rate, is how many people from down south are convinced that the progressive administrative devolution of c. 1890-1995 is (a) all modern and (b) all the SNP's credit/fault whern they come up here and see e.g. "Transport Scotland" or "Scottish Natural Heritage" etc. Yet much of it long predates even Holyrood and the Dewar administrations, never mind the SNP in 2010.
Yep, one of the casualties of the last few years is the patriotic Scottish Unionist, eg John Buchan. Pride in anything Scottish is now seen as giving in to the Nats.
Arch-Unionist and Thatcher-loyalist Michael Forsyth bringing the Stone of Destiny home in pomp and ceremony would nowadays be unthinkable. They have so completely flipped into blatant anti-Scottish sentiment. They go mental at the merest suggestion that Scotland is not identical with England in every respect.
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
In what world is Zarah Sultana a rising star?
Take this with however many of pinches of salt you want but....
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
[Europe is] heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand. Typically you have a market, and prices go to a certain level, and that’s how the markets allocate supply. But if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
My prediction of yellow vest level civil unrest in 2 or more EU countries by Spring 23 looks pretty likely. If that is half accurate, most EU countries. Plus the UK.
With the skyrocketing leccy price is there a possibility charging an EV will become more expensive than a moderately economical ICE ?
I mean at the moment electric vehicles are basically using gas.
It's already the case, apart from the differential taxation, if you chose a sensible diesel ICE. Electric cars aren't cheap to run because they are particularly fuel efficient - it's purely a tax arbitrage - in terms of actual energy use a Tesla gets the equivalent of about 50mpg.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
If you have a life essential where affordable supply, come what may, is far more important than choice, I think the case for some form of public ownership is strong.
Indeed. And Truss is exactly the wrong kind of politician for this kind of ditch-your-ideology, emergency scenario - unless she ditches the ERG, which won't be allowed, in the same problem May had. Sunak did at least do reasonably well with the pandemic with this kind of scenario.
What’s the reason pb isn’t just one long perma thread? All this chopping and changing, comments lost upon a new thread (like this one in a minute) seems silly.
How would we keep on the topic of the thread header if it was all one thread?
Mike could just have posted a header in 2004 about how wonderful Jim Wallace’s and Jack McConnell’s Lib-Lab coalition government was, and we could just have merrily chatted away for 18 years.
The Fresh Talent initiative, public smoking ban, bid for Euro 2008 and the Gaelic Language (Scotland) bill. Never any need for Off Topic comments…
TBF they did get rid of feudal law.
Absolutely! They weren’t too bad in some respects. Largely due to having the SLDs in there.
The tragedy is the decline in radical liberalism since then. They are just pale copies of their red and blue Unionist colleagues.
Hard to remember that it was Michael Forsyth and the SLabbers that drove through pro-Gaelic legislation. The BritNats are nowadays vociferously anti-Gaelic.
FPT - Indeed. It's pleasant not to have to worry about bribing the laird annually not to call you out for military service with horse and armour, or glaive and boiled leather waistcoat as appropriate.
Some Unionists do take the support for Gaelic as a personal insult, though not all, presumably on the same principle that anything with Scotland on it must be SNP on it and bad.* Nobody on PB moaned about Sunil's discovery of railway station names in the Gaelic, which I think a pleasant cultural enrichment of a train ride, and he does too I think!
The Slab-LD alliance is also to be credited with the 2003 open access legislation - preserving access to land in a climate where the landowners wanted to use the lack of specific right of way law as an excuse to close down all access.
*Yet Labour, for instance, had the policy of supporting Gaelic language teaching for young children from islands communities years back, too. One of the most interesting revelations on PB, for me at any rate, is how many people from down south are convinced that the progressive administrative devolution of c. 1890-1995 is (a) all modern and (b) all the SNP's credit/fault whern they come up here and see e.g. "Transport Scotland" or "Scottish Natural Heritage" etc. Yet much of it long predates even Holyrood and the Dewar administrations, never mind the SNP in 2010.
Yep, one of the casualties of the last few years is the patriotic Scottish Unionist, eg John Buchan. Pride in anything Scottish is now seen as giving in to the Nats.
Arch-Unionist and Thatcher-loyalist Michael Forsyth bringing the Stone of Destiny home in pomp and ceremony would nowadays be unthinkable. They have so completely flipped into blatant anti-Scottish sentiment. They go mental at the merest suggestion that Scotland is not identical with England in every respect.
Look at Ms Truss - promising absolutely uniform Conservative government policy all over the UK and without qualifying the devolved elements of administration. Meaningless statement. But it's pandering to the Tory Party members.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
The £2.8 billion just takes them into public ownership. What is that really going to save us in terms of our energy. It is not like all of the increase is down to excess profiteering.
They will still need to subsidise the energy for at least 9 months based on the forecasts for the cap in October, January and April.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
Let the companies fail and then nationalise at £0 compensation? Like the trains, in part, and Northern Rock.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
That is the cost of nationalisation, assuming the TUC Calculations are correct, however that is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be the cost of subsidising the gas and electricity too.
I would like to know how nationalisation will improve things. People, especially on twitter, just think nationalise these companies and we suddenly all get cheaper energy because, you know, evil corporations.
But the trajectory of the gas price over the last 18 months is the main driver for this and it is up again in the last month by 65%.
You cannot nationalise that. It is a global market.
And that is why "just nationalise them" is not the answer. Which is why Starmer isn't talking about it.
Here and now ownership is not the problem - the wholesale price of energy is. Its right that companies should be stopped making undue profits from this, and right that the price cap is smashed down to a level that people can afford.
Its a regulated market, no need for a change of ownership. Just regulate the fuckers.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
If you have a life essential where affordable supply, come what may, is far more important than choice, I think the case for some form of public ownership is strong.
Indeed. And Truss is exactly the wrong kind of politician for this kind of ditch-your-ideology, emergency scenario - unless she ditches the ERG, which won't be allowed. Sunak did at least do reasonably well with the pandemic with this kind of scenario.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
£2.8bn might be the cost of nationalisation but it is certainly not the cost of nationalisation plus mass subsidy.
Well. No it isn't at all. But that's talking conventional nationalisation. When the government dictates who gets supplied and when, and what the price is, a moratorium on being cut off, and a stop on dividends, which is where we are going to end up, then what is the difference anyway?
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
If you have a life essential where affordable supply, come what may, is far more important than choice, I think the case for some form of public ownership is strong.
Indeed. And Truss is exactly the wrong kind of politician for this kind of ditch-your-ideology, emergency scenario - unless she ditches the ERG, which won't be allowed. Sunak did at least do reasonably well with the pandemic with this kind of scenario.
She's offering hope, not handouts.
And cutting the NI burden of the wealthiest.
How is she offering hope to the millions facing unpayable energy bills? Specifically.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
That is the cost of nationalisation, assuming the TUC Calculations are correct, however that is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be the cost of subsidising the gas and electricity too.
I would like to know how nationalisation will improve things. People, especially on twitter, just think nationalise these companies and we suddenly all get cheaper energy because, you know, evil corporations.
But the trajectory of the gas price over the last 18 months is the main driver for this and it is up again in the last month by 65%.
You cannot nationalise that. It is a global market.
And that is why "just nationalise them" is not the answer. Which is why Starmer isn't talking about it.
Here and now ownership is not the problem - the wholesale price of energy is. Its right that companies should be stopped making undue profits from this, and right that the price cap is smashed down to a level that people can afford.
Its a regulated market, no need for a change of ownership. Just regulate the fuckers.
Exactly. I totally agree with you on this.
Sue Perkins on twitter had a point when she said Ofgem were acting as enablers not regulators.
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
I put together a playlist of Scottish pop/rock artists for Burns Night once and I still listen to it regularly - Scotland has produced so much good music and Glasgow accounts for much of it. I have a theory that the Celts are a much more musical people than the Anglo Saxons, and so the musical map of Britain is tilted towards the west coast, with its Irish immigrant connections, as well as the celtic fringe more broadly.
And we took it with us to North America where it laid the foundation for early country and western.
Less obviously and less well known is the contribution Gaelic psalm singing made to the Gospel tradition.
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
In what world is Zarah Sultana a rising star?
Take this with however many of pinches of salt you want but....
"Though she is the second-youngest MP (after Whittome), Sultana is already spoken of by her admirers as a future Labour leader."
Rising star of the labour left.
Corbynite, supported Ding Dong Daily and Burgon in 2020, anti NATO, Stop The Warite. She's not leading Labour in this reality.
Not anytime soon, I would agree.
But who knows what happens in ten years time or so.
This campaign will help elevate her profile. What she does with that remains to be seen.
The idea of her as the UK's AOC. I am not sure that's an endorsement.
No, AOC is a joke. She's another of these plat du jour politicians that end up nothing. Sultana might lead a post Labour socialist party. But not Labour. They wont go back down Rue de Corbyn
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
£2.8bn might be the cost of nationalisation but it is certainly not the cost of nationalisation plus mass subsidy.
Nationalisation doesn’t come cheaper than when the entity in question can’t meet its obligations. The money to bail out is needed regardless of ownership.
Companies like bulb don’t really need to exist. They buy their energy on the wholesale market and sell it to consumers. If they’ve fecked up their risk management then cheerio. The question then is to what extent consumers should be shielded from their poor decision in choosing a fixed tariff from a cowboy operator because Martin Lewis’s website told them it was a pound a month cheaper when they signed up.
Really if you’re not going to let these utility retailers fail when they deserve to and you’re going to spend billions insulating the consumer from it all too then you may as well just nationalise that segment of the energy industry. I would rather have a better regulated private sector that still allows firms to die and consumers to realise their penny pinching has consequences. But I appreciate that might be a minority view in the UK.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
Let the companies fail and then nationalise at £0 compensation? Like the trains, in part, and Northern Rock.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
It is not a free market We cannot allow Thames Water to go bust and just disappear. They perform an essential public service. So even if they do go pop, the service will have to continue to be provided.
So yes, let them fail. Thats what the free marketeers would want. Its just that StateCo has to run services when they fail.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
That is the cost of nationalisation, assuming the TUC Calculations are correct, however that is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be the cost of subsidising the gas and electricity too.
I would like to know how nationalisation will improve things. People, especially on twitter, just think nationalise these companies and we suddenly all get cheaper energy because, you know, evil corporations.
But the trajectory of the gas price over the last 18 months is the main driver for this and it is up again in the last month by 65%.
You cannot nationalise that. It is a global market.
And that is why "just nationalise them" is not the answer. Which is why Starmer isn't talking about it.
Here and now ownership is not the problem - the wholesale price of energy is. Its right that companies should be stopped making undue profits from this, and right that the price cap is smashed down to a level that people can afford.
Its a regulated market, no need for a change of ownership. Just regulate the fuckers.
Exactly. I totally agree with you on this.
Sue Perkins on twitter had a point when she said Ofgem were acting as enablers not regulators.
The simple reality is that if we regulated these businesses to provide the essential strategic service they are custodians of, many would exit the market. Which makes picking up their assets cheaply very achievable.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
Let the companies fail and then nationalise at £0 compensation? Like the trains, in part, and Northern Rock.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
It is not a free market We cannot allow Thames Water to go bust and just disappear. They perform an essential public service. So even if they do go pop, the service will have to continue to be provided.
So yes, let them fail. Thats what the free marketeers would want. Its just that StateCo has to run services when they fail.
Quite; but then a water company (for instance, and hypothetically) could be taken over at no compensation to shareholders. That's what happened in the railway industry, e.g. with the track infrastucture provider.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
Russia just doesn't have the numbers of young people to be reckless with their soldiers' lives any more. But, their generals don't appreciate that.
Meanwhile the prospect of genocide if they lose means Ukraine would not have much trouble mobilising a million people if they had to. This war’s only going one way. The real question is what happens next in Russia. Quite destabilising for the global security order if their armed forces more or less collapse. Much of their effective fighting units have already been expended, another 6 months of this and it might get desperate for their whole military.
De facto (especially if civil aviation becomes impossible to maintain in Russia) I'd expect Eastern Siberia to gradually become a province of China. I expect that Russia will only keep in being as a whole as a vassal state of China.
"Dry weather has left hydropower reservoirs in Norway, a key electricity exporter to the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, with historically low water levels. The government said it would curb electricity exports to Europe, just when the continent needs it most."
and 3% of germany's domestic is hydro, too. NL not so much, presumably.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
If you have a life essential where affordable supply, come what may, is far more important than choice, I think the case for some form of public ownership is strong.
Indeed. And Truss is exactly the wrong kind of politician for this kind of ditch-your-ideology, emergency scenario - unless she ditches the ERG, which won't be allowed. Sunak did at least do reasonably well with the pandemic with this kind of scenario.
She's offering hope, not handouts.
And cutting the NI burden of the wealthiest.
How is she offering hope to the millions facing unpayable energy bills? Specifically.
They can hope to become rich enough to benefit from the tax cuts.
Nobody said anything about the hope offered being realistic.
What’s the reason pb isn’t just one long perma thread? All this chopping and changing, comments lost upon a new thread (like this one in a minute) seems silly.
How would we keep on the topic of the thread header if it was all one thread?
Mike could just have posted a header in 2004 about how wonderful Jim Wallace’s and Jack McConnell’s Lib-Lab coalition government was, and we could just have merrily chatted away for 18 years.
The Fresh Talent initiative, public smoking ban, bid for Euro 2008 and the Gaelic Language (Scotland) bill. Never any need for Off Topic comments…
TBF they did get rid of feudal law.
Absolutely! They weren’t too bad in some respects. Largely due to having the SLDs in there.
The tragedy is the decline in radical liberalism since then. They are just pale copies of their red and blue Unionist colleagues.
Hard to remember that it was Michael Forsyth and the SLabbers that drove through pro-Gaelic legislation. The BritNats are nowadays vociferously anti-Gaelic.
FPT - Indeed. It's pleasant not to have to worry about bribing the laird annually not to call you out for military service with horse and armour, or glaive and boiled leather waistcoat as appropriate.
Some Unionists do take the support for Gaelic as a personal insult, though not all, presumably on the same principle that anything with Scotland on it must be SNP on it and bad.* Nobody on PB moaned about Sunil's discovery of railway station names in the Gaelic, which I think a pleasant cultural enrichment of a train ride, and he does too I think!
The Slab-LD alliance is also to be credited with the 2003 open access legislation - preserving access to land in a climate where the landowners wanted to use the lack of specific right of way law as an excuse to close down all access.
*Yet Labour, for instance, had the policy of supporting Gaelic language teaching for young children from islands communities years back, too. One of the most interesting revelations on PB, for me at any rate, is how many people from down south are convinced that the progressive administrative devolution of c. 1890-1995 is (a) all modern and (b) all the SNP's credit/fault whern they come up here and see e.g. "Transport Scotland" or "Scottish Natural Heritage" etc. Yet much of it long predates even Holyrood and the Dewar administrations, never mind the SNP in 2010.
Yep, one of the casualties of the last few years is the patriotic Scottish Unionist, eg John Buchan. Pride in anything Scottish is now seen as giving in to the Nats.
Whereas pride in anything British is seen as giving in to the Yoons. Well done you
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
I put together a playlist of Scottish pop/rock artists for Burns Night once and I still listen to it regularly - Scotland has produced so much good music and Glasgow accounts for much of it. I have a theory that the Celts are a much more musical people than the Anglo Saxons, and so the musical map of Britain is tilted towards the west coast, with its Irish immigrant connections, as well as the celtic fringe more broadly.
The Celtic Race is a factoid apparently. The inhabitants of the Celtic Fringe just underwent a different linguistic development.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
If you have a life essential where affordable supply, come what may, is far more important than choice, I think the case for some form of public ownership is strong.
Indeed. And Truss is exactly the wrong kind of politician for this kind of ditch-your-ideology, emergency scenario - unless she ditches the ERG, which won't be allowed. Sunak did at least do reasonably well with the pandemic with this kind of scenario.
She's offering hope, not handouts.
And cutting the NI burden of the wealthiest.
How is she offering hope to the millions facing unpayable energy bills? Specifically.
Exactly. She isn't. It is just a bland platitude she and her campaign have been throwing out to justify her dogmatic adherence to tax cuts and reversing the NI change. She had Jake Berry on Sky on Saturday morning trotting this crap out and saying reversing the NI changes would help the least well off. When pressed by the interviewer he had no answers.
Sunak gets the immediacy of the problem. She doesn't appear to. She will have a rude awakening on September 6th.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
Let the companies fail and then nationalise at £0 compensation? Like the trains, in part, and Northern Rock.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
It is not a free market We cannot allow Thames Water to go bust and just disappear. They perform an essential public service. So even if they do go pop, the service will have to continue to be provided.
So yes, let them fail. Thats what the free marketeers would want. Its just that StateCo has to run services when they fail.
Except free marketeers tend also to be shareholders.
Mr. Z, that's why redundancy is so important. Solar energy is great now in the UK, hydroelectric less so. Similarly, we should have more reserves of gas and the capacity to increase supply at will (whether that's gas or nuclear).
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
That is the cost of nationalisation, assuming the TUC Calculations are correct, however that is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be the cost of subsidising the gas and electricity too.
I would like to know how nationalisation will improve things. People, especially on twitter, just think nationalise these companies and we suddenly all get cheaper energy because, you know, evil corporations.
But the trajectory of the gas price over the last 18 months is the main driver for this and it is up again in the last month by 65%.
You cannot nationalise that. It is a global market.
The problem, the absence of government subsidy, can end up being much more costly in the long-term, for both economy and society, and in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
Look again at the huge difference with what French consumers and businesses are paying, and the predicted economic results of this, rather than the more short-term forecast of French government indebtednss.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
Let the companies fail and then nationalise at £0 compensation? Like the trains, in part, and Northern Rock.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
It is not a free market We cannot allow Thames Water to go bust and just disappear. They perform an essential public service. So even if they do go pop, the service will have to continue to be provided.
So yes, let them fail. Thats what the free marketeers would want. Its just that StateCo has to run services when they fail.
Allowing them to go pop simply wipes out the value of their private equity owners, as well as giving a bit of pain to bond holders. There’s no reason at all why the service would stop, the administrator would have an interest in keeping the service going on that people kept paying their rates.
What irks me is the model of privatisation for water. It should be an essential component of their license to ensure pumping stations have back uk power and there are appropriate reservoirs for droughts and pipe replacement programmes. It’s possible to have the private sector perform these tasks no problem at all, let the best bid win. But what’s not acceptable is a model where essential activities don’t happen with customer revenues instead escalated to PE owners as dividends. I have this secret hope that people like John Redwood realise this and come into cabinet as the only people to break the stultifying group think in the uk on private vs public sector.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
£2.8bn might be the cost of nationalisation but it is certainly not the cost of nationalisation plus mass subsidy.
Nationalisation doesn’t come cheaper than when the entity in question can’t meet its obligations. The money to bail out is needed regardless of ownership.
Companies like bulb don’t really need to exist. They buy their energy on the wholesale market and sell it to consumers. If they’ve fecked up their risk management then cheerio. The question then is to what extent consumers should be shielded from their poor decision in choosing a fixed tariff from a cowboy operator because Martin Lewis’s website told them it was a pound a month cheaper when they signed up.
Really if you’re not going to let these utility retailers fail when they deserve to and you’re going to spend billions insulating the consumer from it all too then you may as well just nationalise that segment of the energy industry. I would rather have a better regulated private sector that still allows firms to die and consumers to realise their penny pinching has consequences. But I appreciate that might be a minority view in the UK.
I am not at all against nationalisation in principle for energy firms, but don't think it is a particularly good fit for the UK or necessary now. We would only vote in Tories who would reverse it and privatise them again, so better deal with a short term problem with short term solutions and leave a bit of stability longer term.
We should not allow a one man in his flat type operation to run energy firms again though, they need to be properly capitalised to be able to deal with price volatility against them.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Nationalising the companies wouldn't by itself do anything to keep even a single consumer alive though.
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
Let the companies fail and then nationalise at £0 compensation? Like the trains, in part, and Northern Rock.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
As a last resort it's a far better solution than bailing out failed businesses or paying to nationalise businesses that haven't failed.
Even better, you can then privatise the businesses again in the future to get money back. Like RBS.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
£2.8bn might be the cost of nationalisation but it is certainly not the cost of nationalisation plus mass subsidy.
Nationalisation doesn’t come cheaper than when the entity in question can’t meet its obligations. The money to bail out is needed regardless of ownership.
Companies like bulb don’t really need to exist. They buy their energy on the wholesale market and sell it to consumers. If they’ve fecked up their risk management then cheerio. The question then is to what extent consumers should be shielded from their poor decision in choosing a fixed tariff from a cowboy operator because Martin Lewis’s website told them it was a pound a month cheaper when they signed up.
Really if you’re not going to let these utility retailers fail when they deserve to and you’re going to spend billions insulating the consumer from it all too then you may as well just nationalise that segment of the energy industry. I would rather have a better regulated private sector that still allows firms to die and consumers to realise their penny pinching has consequences. But I appreciate that might be a minority view in the UK.
I don't understand why we baled out Bulb and spent 2 billion quid to let their customers keep their fixed rates, but let the customers of all the other suppliers which went broke go straight to the cap - it seems a particularly unfair way of wasting public money.
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
I'm confused as to how Darlington can be a marginal yet Bishop Auckland / Sedgefield are trending Tory?
Over the past 100 years, Darlington has been held for 57 years by Labour, 43 by the Conservatives. It has a Labour lean, but regularly shifts back and forth.
Over the same period, Labour has held Bishop Auckland for 93 years, National Liberal 4, Conservative 3. There was always a fair sized Conservative vote in the West, around Barnard Castle, but it was safe Labour. Since 1997, the Labour vote share has dropped by 27%, and the Conservative vote share has risen by 35%. That's an example of permanently shifting allegiances, as coal mining drops out of peoples' memories.
Yes, I don't see any reason why such seats shouldn't behave differently to rural/semi-rural seats in Eastern or southern England.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
If you have a life essential where affordable supply, come what may, is far more important than choice, I think the case for some form of public ownership is strong.
Indeed. And Truss is exactly the wrong kind of politician for this kind of ditch-your-ideology, emergency scenario - unless she ditches the ERG, which won't be allowed. Sunak did at least do reasonably well with the pandemic with this kind of scenario.
She's offering hope, not handouts.
And cutting the NI burden of the wealthiest.
How is she offering hope to the millions facing unpayable energy bills? Specifically.
Exactly. She isn't. It is just a bland platitude she and her campaign have been throwing out to justify her dogmatic adherence to tax cuts and reversing the NI change. She had Jake Berry on Sky on Saturday morning trotting this crap out and saying reversing the NI changes would help the least well off. When pressed by the interviewer he had no answers.
Sunak gets the immediacy of the problem. She doesn't appear to. She will have a rude awakening on September 6th.
I am not sure either of them have understood how serious this is. It is not the people on benefits who will be up in arms, thay are used to being in a mess. But those on modest incomes will really kick off -those with above average bills - If they are retired and home all day or in a slightly bigger than average or less well insulated house bills are going to be unaffordable.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
£2.8bn might be the cost of nationalisation but it is certainly not the cost of nationalisation plus mass subsidy.
Nationalisation doesn’t come cheaper than when the entity in question can’t meet its obligations. The money to bail out is needed regardless of ownership.
Companies like bulb don’t really need to exist. They buy their energy on the wholesale market and sell it to consumers. If they’ve fecked up their risk management then cheerio. The question then is to what extent consumers should be shielded from their poor decision in choosing a fixed tariff from a cowboy operator because Martin Lewis’s website told them it was a pound a month cheaper when they signed up.
Really if you’re not going to let these utility retailers fail when they deserve to and you’re going to spend billions insulating the consumer from it all too then you may as well just nationalise that segment of the energy industry. I would rather have a better regulated private sector that still allows firms to die and consumers to realise their penny pinching has consequences. But I appreciate that might be a minority view in the UK.
I don't understand why we baled out Bulb and spend 2 billion quid to let their customers keep their fixed rates, but let the customers of all the other suppliers which went broke go straight to the cap - it seems a particularly unfair way of wasting public money.
I had not absorbed that detail. Hate to say it but you’ll probably find a personal interest somewhere if the decision is as plain as you say.
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
Mr. Z, that's why redundancy is so important. Solar energy is great now in the UK, hydroelectric less so. Similarly, we should have more reserves of gas and the capacity to increase supply at will (whether that's gas or nuclear).
And that goes back to a conversation from earlier today. For decades now, the attitude has been "Redundancy is wasteful and waste is bad." So we have got rid of reserves and whatnot, and had more stuff for less money as a result.
That approach, in business, government and elsewhere, has worked brilliantly until it goes wrong.
(It might be that, overall, the occaisonal disasters are worth the benefits in the good times. I'm not qualified to judge. But the extent to which we have been gambling by not bothering to pay the insurance premium may have been miscalculated, if it was calculated at all.)
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
Leigh is an oddity. Leigh itself, what you'd think of as Leigh, couldn't be more stereotypical Labour if it tried. It should be Liverpool - Walton levels of safe red.
But the areas around Leigh have long had some nice homes that the well off could go to. A fair number of former professional footballers etc around there, not exactly slumming. But the volume of new homes in the area around Leigh now being thrown up fast wouldn't be amiss in any other pleasant town that's safe Tory.
Its not wall to wall terraced houses anymore, if the Tories can keep a hold of the Barratt Homes style vote then a lot of voters in Leigh are now Barratt Homes style and not run down terraces, even though the terraces are still there. . The demographics are evolving even in Leigh. It might be a marginal of the future.
I'm astonished at Leigh, which is well within Greater Manchester.
I'd never have produced any analysis which would have shown it going blue - just look at how it voted landslide Labour in 1997.
A campaign called "Enough is Enough", fronted by Unions and MP's including labour Rising Star Zarah Sultana, has been formed to tackle the cost of living crisis.
"Ms Sultana adds there are billionaires are pocketing record profits whilst households “suffer”, saying: “It’s all about one political choice – your need or their greed. It’s time to channel anger into action.”
Enough is Enough say they plan to hold rallies across Britain, form community groups, organise picket line solidarity and take action against the firms and individuals it claims are profiting from the cost of living crisis.
It has put forward five demands including giving households a real pay rise, with a hike to minimum wage, as well as slashing energy bills by cancelling the October price hike and reinstating the significantly lower pre-April price cap of £1,277 per year."
"Celebrities such as Caitlin Moran also vocalised their support on Twitter with the writer adding that she had signed up to the campaign."
Be interesting to see how this pans out even with the support of witless celebs tweeting for likes and retweets.
In what world is Zarah Sultana a rising star?
A raisin star?
She's certainly in the news, based on current events.
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
Dunno, it’s profile isn’t that different from Liverpool’s*. And there is the musical marching tradition of course..
*not necessarily a recommendation in your view istr 🙂
Well, no. Compare, say, Twist and Shout with, say, Twist and Shout. No contest, and the winning city also has fratellis, del Amitri, Amy, Franz Ferdinand, aztec Camera, ultravox....
And not to mention Orange Juice, Simple Minds (before U2ification), Donovan, Blue Nile, Primal Scream, Frankie Miller, Belle and Sebastian and the guvnor, Alex Harvey.
Also fwiw birthplace of Angus Young and Mark Knopfler.
Clare Grogan on Radio 2 has chosen Mmm-bop as one of the tracks of her years.
Where PB leads...
Odd how much good music is from Glasgow.
I put together a playlist of Scottish pop/rock artists for Burns Night once and I still listen to it regularly - Scotland has produced so much good music and Glasgow accounts for much of it. I have a theory that the Celts are a much more musical people than the Anglo Saxons, and so the musical map of Britain is tilted towards the west coast, with its Irish immigrant connections, as well as the celtic fringe more broadly.
The Celtic Race is a factoid apparently. The inhabitants of the Celtic Fringe just underwent a different linguistic development.
Ho ho.
Now we’re not even to be allowed to be Celts.
Jackboot Britain continues apace.
Speaking as half a Celt, from Cornwall, it is actually quite difficult to prove that Celts exist, genetically, or at least to winnow them out from other Britons. Which is awkward for blood-and-soil quasi-Nazi Scot Nats like you
"A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK.
According to the data, those of Celtic ancestry in Scotland and Cornwall are more similar to the English than they are to other Celtic groups."
However I concur there is, or was, definitely a Celtic culture. That dreamy lyrical weaving quality, consonant with the mists of Penwith, Harlech, Connemara, the Cuillins. That's a THING
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
I like the clarity of the analysis though I don't fully agree. The trend may eventually secure your red wall seat by 2030, but losing Johnson / less Brexit agitation / energy bills could threaten any incumbent in particular. (There's a bigger conversation to have on PB about how long those trends will continue.)
I think the bigger issue in the first category of seats is that Labour, for a long time, punched above their socio-economic weight, because the memory of coal-mining was so strong. As the miners and ex-miners died off, thee seats moved rightwards at a rate of knots, as did (in earlier times) seats like Forest of Dean, NE Somerset, NW Leics. etc. Look at the swings to the Conservatives in these , since 1997, and they're in the high 20s, low 30s%.
And, mainly, the ex-mining seats are nice places to live. Housing is very affordable, relative to incomes, the cost of living is low, and the countryside is beautiful.
Countryside. The very nature of mine workings makes large areas of land unsuitable for building or farming. Plus you've got hills (slag heaps) and flashes where the workings have caved under rainfall to make lakes, on what was previously often a dull, flat landscape. Add 30 years to grow wild, and you've got some of the finest native habitats in England now.
I must admit I get tempted to move up to County Durham at times.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
Easily. There’s about 15 million Ukranian men aged 18-50, and the majority of them will sign up to defend their home. Less than one million in the Russian army, plus whatever reserves and mercenaries they can muster up.
Look at the scale of the training that’s going on, not just in Ukraine, but in most European countries. Plus all the specialist training, on the new equipment that they’re getting. In the case of the MRLS, that training was in the UK and US.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
It's utterly mystifying. We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways.
Labours Steve Reed rules out taking the energy companies into public ownership: "nationalising companies costs an awful lot of money"
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
Theyd rather the consumer spend an awful lot of money staying alive. An odd position to take.
Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers? Looks cheap in the circumstances.
£2.8bn might be the cost of nationalisation but it is certainly not the cost of nationalisation plus mass subsidy.
Nationalisation doesn’t come cheaper than when the entity in question can’t meet its obligations. The money to bail out is needed regardless of ownership.
Companies like bulb don’t really need to exist. They buy their energy on the wholesale market and sell it to consumers. If they’ve fecked up their risk management then cheerio. The question then is to what extent consumers should be shielded from their poor decision in choosing a fixed tariff from a cowboy operator because Martin Lewis’s website told them it was a pound a month cheaper when they signed up.
Really if you’re not going to let these utility retailers fail when they deserve to and you’re going to spend billions insulating the consumer from it all too then you may as well just nationalise that segment of the energy industry. I would rather have a better regulated private sector that still allows firms to die and consumers to realise their penny pinching has consequences. But I appreciate that might be a minority view in the UK.
I don't understand why we baled out Bulb and spent 2 billion quid to let their customers keep their fixed rates, but let the customers of all the other suppliers which went broke go straight to the cap - it seems a particularly unfair way of wasting public money.
I'm with bulb, and I don't think it ever had fixed rates. From memory, it was single variable tarrif. I think the bulb issue was that they didn't bother with hedging much, so they banged their metaphorical head on the energy cap quickly and brutally.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
Russia just doesn't have the numbers of young people to be reckless with their soldiers' lives any more. But, their generals don't appreciate that.
Meanwhile the prospect of genocide if they lose means Ukraine would not have much trouble mobilising a million people if they had to. This war’s only going one way. The real question is what happens next in Russia. Quite destabilising for the global security order if their armed forces more or less collapse. Much of their effective fighting units have already been expended, another 6 months of this and it might get desperate for their whole military.
De facto (especially if civil aviation becomes impossible to maintain in Russia) I'd expect Eastern Siberia to gradually become a province of China. I expect that Russia will only keep in being as a whole as a vassal state of China.
Which is a way out for Russian nationalists to topple Putin.
What do they want isolationist, effective dismemberment and vassal status under China? Or, integrity of their existing borders, independence and healthy trade with the West whilst doing their own thing?
If I was a redwaller I would be pretty bitter about those who brought Boris down. For all his multitude of faults I would recognise that he could reach parts of the electorate who won't give the likes of Truss the time of day and there just might have been a chance with him as leader at the next election. Truss, in fairness, recognises that concern and has very much played the loyalty card. Sunak, otoh, might, if I was a redwaller, look weak, self indulgent and unlikely to be much help.
So, going forward, that loyalty will give Truss the benefit of the doubt and initial support but it will be sanguine and realistic about what I can hope that she can do. My one hope would be that SKS is so boring and uninspirational that it is possible that a lot of my 2019 supporters might be reluctant to go back to a Labour party not offering much. And, like @NickPalmer, I would build up options on the side.
FPT. We're going to finish up with the energy providers de facto nationalised, aren't we? Just a question of how long it takes for all other options to be tried. May as well get on with it.
Though until the Ukraine and Russia war is over and sanctions ended that won't make much difference to inflation. It would also likely require a Labour government to implement
You really don't think that's where the new PM will end up (barring a swift end to the war of course)? All other options look implausible and risk mass collapse of providers. Of course, it won't be called nationalisation. But it won't differ much in all but name.
Given Truss is set to have arch free marketeer Kwarteng as her Chancellor and bring arch free marketeers like John Redwood into her Cabinet as I said it won't happen in a government led by her.
It might happen in a government led by Starmer after the next general election however
Labour said this morning they are not looking at nationalising energy
How shit is Starmers Labour?! A genuine crisis and possibly essential need for a plank of Labour's historic position, nationalisation, and 'we arent looking at it'. They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
Conservative lite by the sounds of it
But they wouldn't have the stomach for eating babies....
If you're in a seat that's been trending Conservative for several elections like Don Valley/Rother Valley/ Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland, the Stoke seats, you probably don't have much to worry about. These are all heading into the safe Conservative camp.
If you're in a seat that was just a fluke win, like Burnley, Leigh, you should be looking for another job.
If you're in a classic marginal, like Darlington, or High Peak, everything turns on the national state of play.
I like the clarity of the analysis though I don't fully agree. The trend may eventually secure your red wall seat by 2030, but losing Johnson / less Brexit agitation / energy bills could threaten any incumbent in particular. (There's a bigger conversation to have on PB about how long those trends will continue.)
I think the bigger issue in the first category of seats is that Labour, for a long time, punched above their socio-economic weight, because the memory of coal-mining was so strong. As the miners and ex-miners died off, thee seats moved rightwards at a rate of knots, as did (in earlier times) seats like Forest of Dean, NE Somerset, NW Leics. etc. Look at the swings to the Conservatives in these , since 1997, and they're in the high 20s, low 30s%.
And, mainly, the ex-mining seats are nice places to live. Housing is very affordable, relative to incomes, the cost of living is low, and the countryside is beautiful.
Countryside. The very nature of mine workings makes large areas of land unsuitable for building or farming. Plus you've got hills (slag heaps) and flashes where the workings have caved under rainfall to make lakes, on what was previously often a dull, flat landscape. Add 30 years to grow wild, and you've got some of the finest native habitats in England now.
I must admit I get tempted to move up to County Durham at times.
Housing cheap. And mine workings mean reasonably smallish developments with plenty of open space between.
Mr. Z, that's why redundancy is so important. Solar energy is great now in the UK, hydroelectric less so. Similarly, we should have more reserves of gas and the capacity to increase supply at will (whether that's gas or nuclear).
The absolute opposite of the UK's shareholder , short-term private model for 40 years. Thatcher's legacy on public utilities has failed in just about every conceivable social and economic way, except for shareholder dividends, and also profits exported back abroad to countries like France , who haven't been wholly captured by this kind of dogmatic thinking.
… snip … Soldiers will have been in theatre for months with no respite, and will be tired and demoralised. 40,000 of them won’t be going home. Give it another month and the weather will start to change, with more mud everywhere and winter fast approaching.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, but let’s hope my optimism pays off. Keep the weapons coming, Western governments.
Incredible. Not yet 6 months of special military operations and Russian k.i.a. approx two thirds the American losses in Vietnam over more than a dozen years.
Yes, it’s totally insane. Land wars are often horrific in terms of casualties, and this war has seen a lot of close-quarters fighting between the sides.
Not to mention the thousands of casualties among the defenders and Ukranian civilians.
Ukranian numbers for Russian casualties are:
Killed ~43.000 Wounded ~129.000 Prisoner of war ~1.000
That’s around 173,000 in total, nearly 20% of the entire Russian army. Now, some of the wounded might be okay and return at some point, but many of them will have suffered life-changing injuries. There’s plenty of evidence, that replacements from the Russian reserve forces are not well trained or equipped, and that battalions are having to merge together as their numbers dwindle.
Ukraine is thought to be losing 100 men per day on average, so close to 20,000 Ukranian soldiers so far.
I saw a suggestion (can't remember where) that due to the conscription/volunteers to defend their homeland across Ukraine that the Ukrainian army now has more people than the Russian one does. Most of them not military a few months ago, but they're gaining experience fast one imagines.
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
Russia just doesn't have the numbers of young people to be reckless with their soldiers' lives any more. But, their generals don't appreciate that.
This piece is interesting on manpower issues (the author is strongly pro-Ukraine, but interested in detail):
Comments
I would be interested to hear from the conservative and labour parties just how they would address the serious shortfall she is facing
Another £20 per week on UC is not going to do it
Also fwiw birthplace of Angus Young and Mark Knopfler.
I got moved to VOIP in February and have yet to get round to plugging the handset in. Amazing how this cuts down on the calls.
*) I've never been able to see the rationale for water privatisation, and it is one that seems an obvious choice for renationalisation.
*) Energy nationalisation is massively more complex (e.g. which bits are you nationalising?), but with energy prices and energy company profits both rising, it seems an 'easy' win to say you'd do it.
*) I've seen little evidence that railway renationalisation would help either the public purse or the paying passenger (aside from hopes and dreams of returning to the glory days of BR). But Labour will end up doing it anyway.
I'm also slightly surprised that Royal Mail renationalisaiton is not a bigger thing. Or perhaps more people are realising the postal service may be going the way of the DoDo?
Oasis were famously signed after doing a gig to 1 man and his dog in Glasgow (at King Tuts). The one man being Alan McGee.
They dont support strikes, they dont nationalise. What is the point of them?!
Is there any truth to that suggestion do you think? Russia is not adverse to throwing men at the meatgrinder and normally they outnumber any opponent, but if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their freedom then could numbers ultimately be a Ukrainian advantage unless Russia opts for full scale mobilisation and conscription?
And, mainly, the ex-mining seats are nice places to live. Housing is very affordable, relative to incomes, the cost of living is low, and the countryside is beautiful.
We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways. The only question being whether we go through the rigmarole of pretending to try other routes or not.
The only arguments against that were technical ones about the definition, and a ludicrous ideological one utterly divorced from the reality of the situation.
We’d be sorry if we had no domestic oil refining capacity at all and yet incredibly I can foresee this happening unless the dogma of privatisation at all cost is ditched. There’s also rationale for state owned nuclear for base load, certainly far more so than having it owned by the Chinese (or even French).
Gas peaker plants don’t need nationalising but I would give state subsidies to incentivise the rapid investment in utility scale battery storage so they can be wound down, thereby improving energy resilience on still cloudy days without relying on gas imports.
Exploration & Production just needs the state to get the F out. These knobhead so called Tory chancellors like Osborne and Sunak who think it’s clever to play about with the tax structure for a few quick headlines but at the long term detriment of investment in eking out the last drops from fields that would otherwise be abandoned.
As for retail utility co’s, it doesn’t work having a price cap which compels private enterprise to sell their product at a substantial negative gross margin. It’s utterly senseless in fact. A stupid idea of Ed Miliband taken up by equally stupid Tory ministers. So you either need to nationalise them or come up with some other model of subsidy that does not discourage the companies from improving their overall position through trading activities.
The TUC have said nationalising the big 5 energy retailers would cost £2.8bn, which is how much the govt spent on bailing out just one (Bulb)
The Party is irrelevant to working people
But the areas around Leigh have long had some nice homes that the well off could go to. A fair number of former professional footballers etc around there, not exactly slumming. But the volume of new homes in the area around Leigh now being thrown up fast wouldn't be amiss in any other pleasant town that's safe Tory.
Its not wall to wall terraced houses anymore, if the Tories can keep a hold of the Barratt Homes style vote then a lot of voters in Leigh are now Barratt Homes style and not run down terraces, even though the terraces are still there.
.
The demographics are evolving even in Leigh. It might be a marginal of the future.
An odd position to take.
https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2022/05/can-zarah-sultana-save-the-labour-left
"Though she is the second-youngest MP (after Whittome), Sultana is already spoken of by her admirers as a future Labour leader."
Rising star of the labour left.
The very nature of mine workings makes large areas of land unsuitable for building or farming. Plus you've got hills (slag heaps) and flashes where the workings have caved under rainfall to make lakes, on what was previously often a dull, flat landscape.
Add 30 years to grow wild, and you've got some of the finest native habitats in England now.
[Europe is] heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand. Typically you have a market, and prices go to a certain level, and that’s how the markets allocate supply. But if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/opinion/europe-energy-crisis-ukraine.html
But the number that will count is those sufficiently trained to be useful in an offensive operation (a much more difficult affair than throwing together a defence), which will be a great deal less than the 1m.
I don't think there are any good figures out there - which is unsurprising, since it's a highly important piece of information.
I'd guess that they might well outnumber the Russians in terms of trained and effective forces available on the front. And the numbers are likely to improve for them faster than the Russians, since they have access to training help form NATO members.
The model for renationalizing would be something along the lines of La Poste. Keep the core stuff basic but own a whole bunch of money-making private concerns.
It does not need to be renationalised but there may be a case for government subsidising the universal service in terms of delivery to rural areas which is less cost effective
I would like to know how nationalisation will improve things. People, especially on twitter, just think nationalise these companies and we suddenly all get cheaper energy because, you know, evil corporations.
But the trajectory of the gas price over the last 18 months is the main driver for this and it is up again in the last month by 65%.
You cannot nationalise that. It is a global market.
She's not leading Labour in this reality.
https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1557691500418551811?s=20&t=3yHZ5nlES2jWSAGTpatbpQ
How much to supply energy at an affordable price this winter - because that £2.8bn spent on Bulb was just what was required to supply fuel to Bulb customers last winter given the market price and the price their customers were paying (and a lot of that was cap vs spot price)
If the industry were nationalised, how much would need to be spent to bail out the now nationalised firms? It isn't an either/or solution unless you'd be prepared to see the nationalised firms fail.
We've both said this morning that this is where we will end up anyways. Does anyone think we'll end up bunging less than another £2.8 bn at consumers?
Looks cheap in the circumstances.
But who knows what happens in ten years time or so.
This campaign will help elevate her profile. What she does with that remains to be seen.
The idea of her as the UK's AOC. I am not sure that's an endorsement.
Electric cars aren't cheap to run because they are particularly fuel efficient - it's purely a tax arbitrage - in terms of actual energy use a Tesla gets the equivalent of about 50mpg.
They will still need to subsidise the energy for at least 9 months based on the forecasts for the cap in October, January and April.
https://twitter.com/isitreallymoira/status/1557311730547662849?s=20&t=cJMEJqMLxBHv6cPrUpz6mg
Ah, I further read it's a comedy sketch but the authenticity glows from it.
Edit: not saying it's the best solution, but it does exist.
Here and now ownership is not the problem - the wholesale price of energy is. Its right that companies should be stopped making undue profits from this, and right that the price cap is smashed down to a level that people can afford.
Its a regulated market, no need for a change of ownership. Just regulate the fuckers.
And cutting the NI burden of the wealthiest.
But that's talking conventional nationalisation.
When the government dictates who gets supplied and when, and what the price is, a moratorium on being cut off, and a stop on dividends, which is where we are going to end up, then what is the difference anyway?
Sue Perkins on twitter had a point when she said Ofgem were acting as enablers not regulators.
Less obviously and less well known is the contribution Gaelic psalm singing made to the Gospel tradition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lining_out
https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/presenting-new-line-connecting-gaelic-and-gospel-2453148
Sultana might lead a post Labour socialist party. But not Labour. They wont go back down Rue de Corbyn
Companies like bulb don’t really need to exist. They buy their energy on the wholesale market and sell it to consumers. If they’ve fecked up their risk management then cheerio. The question then is to what extent consumers should be shielded from their poor decision in choosing a fixed tariff from a cowboy operator because Martin Lewis’s website told them it was a pound a month cheaper when they signed up.
Really if you’re not going to let these utility retailers fail when they deserve to and you’re going to spend billions insulating the consumer from it all too then you may as well just nationalise that segment of the energy industry. I would rather have a better regulated private sector that still allows firms to die and consumers to realise their penny pinching has consequences. But I appreciate that might be a minority view in the UK.
So yes, let them fail. Thats what the free marketeers would want. Its just that StateCo has to run services when they fail.
1.11 Liz Truss 90%
9.6 Rishi Sunak 10%
Next Conservative leader
1.11 Liz Truss 90%
9.6 Rishi Sunak 10%
"Dry weather has left hydropower reservoirs in Norway, a key electricity exporter to the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, with historically low water levels. The government said it would curb electricity exports to Europe, just when the continent needs it most."
and 3% of germany's domestic is hydro, too. NL not so much, presumably.
Nobody said anything about the hope offered being realistic.
Now we’re not even to be allowed to be Celts.
Jackboot Britain continues apace.
Sunak gets the immediacy of the problem. She doesn't appear to. She will have a rude awakening on September 6th.
Look again at the huge difference with what French consumers and businesses are paying, and the predicted economic results of this, rather than the more short-term forecast of French government indebtednss.
What irks me is the model of privatisation for water. It should be an essential component of their license to ensure pumping stations have back uk power and there are appropriate reservoirs for droughts and pipe replacement programmes. It’s possible to have the private sector perform these tasks no problem at all, let the best bid win. But what’s not acceptable is a model where essential activities don’t happen with customer revenues instead escalated to PE owners as dividends. I have this secret hope that people like John Redwood realise this and come into cabinet as the only people to break the stultifying group think in the uk on private vs public sector.
We should not allow a one man in his flat type operation to run energy firms again though, they need to be properly capitalised to be able to deal with price volatility against them.
Even better, you can then privatise the businesses again in the future to get money back. Like RBS.
NOM 1.8
Con Maj 3.75 (was 3.95 at weekend)
Lab Maj 4.5
LD Maj 251
Grn Maj 501
That approach, in business, government and elsewhere, has worked brilliantly until it goes wrong.
(It might be that, overall, the occaisonal disasters are worth the benefits in the good times. I'm not qualified to judge. But the extent to which we have been gambling by not bothering to pay the insurance premium may have been miscalculated, if it was calculated at all.)
I'd never have produced any analysis which would have shown it going blue - just look at how it voted landslide Labour in 1997.
"A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK.
According to the data, those of Celtic ancestry in Scotland and Cornwall are more similar to the English than they are to other Celtic groups."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31905764
However I concur there is, or was, definitely a Celtic culture. That dreamy lyrical weaving quality, consonant with the mists of Penwith, Harlech, Connemara, the Cuillins. That's a THING
And of course Celtic languages: yes
Look at the scale of the training that’s going on, not just in Ukraine, but in most European countries. Plus all the specialist training, on the new equipment that they’re getting. In the case of the MRLS, that training was in the UK and US.
What do they want isolationist, effective dismemberment and vassal status under China? Or, integrity of their existing borders, independence and healthy trade with the West whilst doing their own thing?
So, going forward, that loyalty will give Truss the benefit of the doubt and initial support but it will be sanguine and realistic about what I can hope that she can do. My one hope would be that SKS is so boring and uninspirational that it is possible that a lot of my 2019 supporters might be reluctant to go back to a Labour party not offering much. And, like @NickPalmer, I would build up options on the side.
https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/ukraine-war-early-august-2022-part-2-63aad98130c4