Both Truss and Sunak visited the Queen several weeks ago, where photos were taken of them being invited to form a government. The appropriate set of photos was released on Tuesday.
Meanwhile the Queen has not been with us for a fortnight or more, but it was felt that we needed the PM transition prior to the transition of monarch.
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
The power infrastructure feeding the city of Enerhodar, home to the NPP’s operators and their families, has been destroyed by shelling of the switchyard at the city’s thermal power plant, leading to a complete power black-out in Enerhodar: no running water, no power, no sewage.
Given the increased and continued shelling, there is little likelihood of re-establishing reliable offsite power to the ZNPP, especially as the shelling continually and repeatedly damages the power infrastructure.
As a result, the IAEA understands that the operator, having no longer confidence in the restoration of offsite power, is considering shutting down the only remaining operating reactor. The entire power plant would then be fully reliant on emergency diesel generators for ensuring vital nuclear safety and security functions. And as a consequence, the operator would not be able to re-start the reactors unless offsite power was reliably re-established.
Furthermore, there are indications that, with the increasingly dire circumstances that the people of Energodar are facing, there is the significant risk of an impact on the availability of essential staff on site to continue to safely and securely operate ZNPP.
This is an unsustainable situation and is becoming increasingly precarious. Enerhodar has gone dark. The power plant has no offsite power. And we have seen that once infrastructure is repaired, it is damaged once again.
This is completely unacceptable. It cannot stand....
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
I was working on the assumption that it was around the time the TV presenters all switched to black ties - about 1.30 or so?
No - I think @wooliedyed has this correct (see his post at 4.30pm)
1953: coronation, "conquest" of Mount Everest, large jump in TV ownership 1953-54: end of rationing 1955: Tories win general election 1957-59: Harold Macmillan: "You've never had it so good" 1959: Tory landslide in general election
Let's assume it goes 2023: coronation
What else? At the moment I can't see anything that could correspond with the rise in TV ownership that was so important to the whole perception of the 1953 coronation, or with the end of rationing, or with the general feel of that epoch. Nobody can eat or warm themselves by TV memories of an archetypally "entitled" rich guy wearing a ceremonial hat near the Cosmati pavement.
...And he may have got a kiss photo, but he could easily put his foot in his mouth at any moment. He's dim.
There certainly was a general feeling of "things getting better "in the mid to late 50s; the (effective) end of the Korean War helped too.
Just as the defeat of Russia by Ukraine, will give a sense of achievement and relief across Europe when it happens. It will mark the passing of Russia as the most serious enemy, replaced by China.
It is of interest to observe the number of times that the following happens -
1) Big Name gets involved at the start of a business 2) Other people invest 3) Big name divests (largely) making handsome profit 4) Other investor stay in and are... not so lucky.
Hmm, do the chemicals for fracking come from Ineos, by any chance? (Not suggesting they necessarily do. But it's something to check if one is looking into investing. (The chaps who made most money from gold rushes tended to be the equipment sellers and saloon owners.)
I went to school with someone whose grandfather had made a fortune in 1929 - he was getting a commission for doing trades, and hadn't invested in the market as such.
Just like the chap who owns a factory on the outskirts of Moscow that makes body bags.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Though Queen Elizabeth II was revered by many in Africa, her death also reignited a different sort of conversation — one that touched on the legacy of the British Empire and the brutality the monarchy meted out to people in its former colonies.
It is of interest to observe the number of times that the following happens -
1) Big Name gets involved at the start of a business 2) Other people invest 3) Big name divests (largely) making handsome profit 4) Other investor stay in and are... not so lucky.
Hmm, do the chemicals for fracking come from Ineos, by any chance? (Not suggesting they necessarily do. But it's something to check if one is looking into investing. (The chaps who made most money from gold rushes tended to be the equipment sellers and saloon owners.)
I went to school with someone whose grandfather had made a fortune in 1929 - he was getting a commission for doing trades, and hadn't invested in the market as such.
Just like the chap who owns a factory on the outskirts of Moscow that makes body bags.
My Russian relative gets a bit weepy when she remembers the young men crippled in Afghanistan, begging in St Petersburg.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
I was working on the assumption that it was around the time the TV presenters all switched to black ties - about 1.30 or so?
That would have been in preparation of likely developmemts 'in the coming hours' i.e. They were told it was a strong possibility. If we take the Jacinda Ardern wake up and official PM informing at 4.30pm BST we know nobody outside Balmoral was informed of anything official before that. Huw Edwards doesnt get the info before the NZ PM
Ah - thank for that. I hadn't known the timing of the wake-up call. Though I still think it's 40/60 on Huw vs. Jacinda...
1953: coronation, "conquest" of Mount Everest, large jump in TV ownership 1953-54: end of rationing 1955: Tories win general election 1957-59: Harold Macmillan: "You've never had it so good" 1959: Tory landslide in general election
Let's assume it goes 2023: coronation
What else? At the moment I can't see anything that could correspond with the rise in TV ownership that was so important to the whole perception of the 1953 coronation, or with the end of rationing, or with the general feel of that epoch. Nobody can eat or warm themselves by TV memories of an archetypally "entitled" rich guy wearing a ceremonial hat near the Cosmati pavement.
...And he may have got a kiss photo, but he could easily put his foot in his mouth at any moment. He's dim.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
I was working on the assumption that it was around the time the TV presenters all switched to black ties - about 1.30 or so?
No - I think @wooliedyed has this correct (see his post at 4.30pm)
Thanks. Im pretty much 100% certain on it, anything outside that formal process falls into constitutional issues and diplomatic protocol issues (heads of govt in commonwealth realms have to be informed their head of state has died before the world press etc). However everyone could have been on standby/expecting the news as they were for previous deaths
Priceless deadpan from the judge dismissing: ...Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here...
I love legal snark.
Read the whole judgment if you like snark. Once again lawyers foolish enough to support Trump's ridiculous lies are going to end up facing professional misconduct charges on the basis that they have made averments for which they did not have a proper basis.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Coincidentally, I was charged £0 for gas my my latest bill. I've not been running the heating, but I'm still using gas for cooking, dishwashing etc (smart meter and supplier website both show the usage too). I emailed them at the time but haven't heard anything back.
I have just seen the pictures of Charles doing the walkabout outside Buckingham Palace. There is something amazing about seeing scenes like this: like from a dream or TV drama. It feels like something we knew was coming, but was always far in the distance, intangible. Crowds shouting God Save the King. You see in these moments why people defend the British monarchy for giving continuity and comfort - there is something reassuring about it, even applied to a figure like Charles who has divided opinion for some time.
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
I was working on the assumption that it was around the time the TV presenters all switched to black ties - about 1.30 or so?
That would have been in preparation of likely developmemts 'in the coming hours' i.e. They were told it was a strong possibility. If we take the Jacinda Ardern wake up and official PM informing at 4.30pm BST we know nobody outside Balmoral was informed of anything official before that. Huw Edwards doesnt get the info before the NZ PM
Ah - thank for that. I hadn't known the timing of the wake-up call. Though I still think it's 40/60 on Huw vs. Jacinda...
Nah, its a diplomatic protocol. HMQ was NZ head of state. Jacinda not being informed before Huw/the Beeb would be a diplomatic incident
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Sunak scheme commences in October at a monthly credit of £66 for 6 months, so no
1953: coronation, "conquest" of Mount Everest, large jump in TV ownership 1953-54: end of rationing 1955: Tories win general election 1957-59: Harold Macmillan: "You've never had it so good" 1959: Tory landslide in general election
Let's assume it goes 2023: coronation
What else? At the moment I can't see anything that could correspond with the rise in TV ownership that was so important to the whole perception of the 1953 coronation, or with the end of rationing, or with the general feel of that epoch. Nobody can eat or warm themselves by TV memories of an archetypally "entitled" rich guy wearing a ceremonial hat near the Cosmati pavement.
...And he may have got a kiss photo, but he could easily put his foot in his mouth at any moment. He's dim.
There certainly was a general feeling of "things getting better "in the mid to late 50s; the (effective) end of the Korean War helped too.
Just as the defeat of Russia by Ukraine, will give a sense of achievement and relief across Europe when it happens. It will mark the passing of Russia as the most serious enemy, replaced by China.
And although the energy crisis looks bad now, after a few years of investment and technological development, we could be in a much better place in terms of energy security, cost and climate change.
Both Truss and Sunak visited the Queen several weeks ago, where photos were taken of them being invited to form a government. The appropriate set of photos was released on Tuesday.
Meanwhile the Queen has not been with us for a fortnight or more, but it was felt that we needed the PM transition prior to the transition of monarch.
Do I believe this? Er, no!
Caveat up front - I obviously don’t believe it either.
BUT
If we’re playing this game that also aligns with having just enough time to sneak out the energy announcement, because it was required for the nation.
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
All seems possible to sensibly regulate.
Eg could you not say that before you get a licence for drilling, there must be a bond set aside to clean up any environmental damage afterwards?
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Sunak scheme commences in October at a monthly credit of £66 for 6 months, so no
So either BG have decided to give me (and this is the figure) £600 for no apparent reason, or somebody has pressed the wrong button.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realns were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
I agree. I read it as her being told it was now likely that day, having already been told it was coming. The Opposition leads probably needed to step out and process the news a but more, as it might have been a bit more new for them. I also suspect someone needed to walk Starmer through his duties.
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
With the TUC Congress and probably the Lib Dem conference being halted, can we but hope that this signals the END of party conferences. They are not needed, a waste of time and a media circus.
Priceless deadpan from the judge dismissing: ...Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here...
I love legal snark.
Read the whole judgment if you like snark. Once again lawyers foolish enough to support Trump's ridiculous lies are going to end up facing professional misconduct charges on the basis that they have made averments for which they did not have a proper basis.
"What the amended complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances"
Are we sure Trump didn't write it himself?
Sadly the length thing occasionally seems to work - look at how big my legal complaint is, you must back down!
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Sunak scheme commences in October at a monthly credit of £66 for 6 months, so no
So either BG have decided to give me (and this is the figure) £600 for no apparent reason, or somebody has pressed the wrong button.
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Sunak scheme commences in October at a monthly credit of £66 for 6 months, so no
So either BG have decided to give me (and this is the figure) £600 for no apparent reason, or somebody has pressed the wrong button.
Hopefully a nice surprise
Well, if they have I'm not complaining, but it seems a bit odd.
With the TUC Congress and probably the Lib Dem conference being halted, can we but hope that this signals the END of party conferences. They are not needed, a waste of time and a media circus.
Never met a party member who cared for them, though I guess they need some chance of yelling at their senior figures to believe they wield power.
With the TUC Congress and probably the Lib Dem conference being halted, can we but hope that this signals the END of party conferences. They are not needed, a waste of time and a media circus.
Never met a party member who cared for them, though I guess they need some chance of yelling at their senior figures to believe they wield power.
Some of the young, single, members seem to enjoy them. Only place they can hunt for a partner and it’s ok to be a political geek.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realns were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
I agree. I read it as her being told it was now likely that day, having already been told it was coming. The Opposition leads probably needed to step out and process the news a but more, as it might have been a bit more new for them. I also suspect someone needed to walk Starmer through his duties.
Yes i think so, SKS needed to know constitutionally what it meant for the LOTO, when/if to call a halt to party politicking etc
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realns were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
I agree. I read it as her being told it was now likely that day, having already been told it was coming. The Opposition leads probably needed to step out and process the news a but more, as it might have been a bit more new for them. I also suspect someone needed to walk Starmer through his duties.
From a protocol point of view, London Bridge falling two days into a new government is terrible timing. Ministers would have rehearsed their roles regularly, but there were dozens of ministerial movements just beforehand, so many of them are going to have spent yesterday frantically bringing themselves up to speed on their role for the next 10 days.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
Yes, i think she was told basically HMQ gravely ill, London Bridge imminent
Hello again. After my earlier paddy I think it's only fair to point out that my daughter's football tomorrow is back on again: the FA has said that training is ok. So that's something. And as the RFU haven't gone mad I may take the oppprtunity to finally, after 13 years in Sale, get down to Heywood Road tomorrow to watch Sale FC play Leeds Tykes. Which feels like exactly the kind of communal event we should be doing at a time like this. Still pissed off about the uncertainty over the eleven plus. But I'd struggle to put it in any box other than freakishly unlucky.
Priceless deadpan from the judge dismissing: ...Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here...
I love legal snark.
Read the whole judgment if you like snark. Once again lawyers foolish enough to support Trump's ridiculous lies are going to end up facing professional misconduct charges on the basis that they have made averments for which they did not have a proper basis.
"What the amended complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances"
Are we sure Trump didn't write it himself?
Sadly the length thing occasionally seems to work - look at how big my legal complaint is, you must back down!
Sometimes and it can certainly keep a case alive which should have been disposed of earlier. But it very rarely wins in the long run in my experience. If you have a real point you can make it sharply and distinctly and you don't want it lost amongst the details, you want it out front.
Russian war correspondent Evegeny Poddubny says that Ukraine has damaged the bridge in Kupyansk, potentially limiting the ability of Russian reinforcements to arrive in the city or for its forces to retreat. https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1568267855870758917
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Ahem. I think you’ll that in the formal line of notification the Queen’s Most Loyal Intruder, Michael Fagan Esq, is informed 3rd, after the Queen’s Private Secretary, and the Honourable Imbiber of Heroin With The Queen’s Loyal Intruder (Dragontail Pursuivant) is 7th
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
Yes, i think she was told basically HMQ gravely ill, London Bridge imminent
Perhaps she didn't leave because Zahawi's note botched it and said 'London has fallen', and she was like 'Well, I like Gerard Butler movies as much as the next person, but this debate is pretty important'.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
It was reported that they sent Charles’s helicopter up to Scotland first thing in the morning. Most likely something happened overnight. Beyond a very few staff, family members and medical professionals, HM became Schrödinger’s cat made real. It’s clear that the formal process awaited the arrival of all the Queen’s children but that what was communicated in Parliament was sufficiently clear that it was just the formalities outstanding.
The real puzzle was what happened with the Sussexes. If Charles’s household knew at 8.30am and we on pb knew at 12.30pm, why did it take the silly bugger until after 8pm(?) to make it over?
Priceless deadpan from the judge dismissing: ...Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here...
I love legal snark.
Read the whole judgment if you like snark. Once again lawyers foolish enough to support Trump's ridiculous lies are going to end up facing professional misconduct charges on the basis that they have made averments for which they did not have a proper basis.
"What the amended complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances"
Are we sure Trump didn't write it himself?
Sadly the length thing occasionally seems to work - look at how big my legal complaint is, you must back down!
Sometimes and it can certainly keep a case alive which should have been disposed of earlier. But it very rarely wins in the long run in my experience. If you have a real point you can make it sharply and distinctly and you don't want it lost amongst the details, you want it out front.
I was always told that you don't make a weak case stronger by including even weaker arguments to boost the numbers. Stick with your best reasons and don't pad it out.
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
Crowds' perceptions can change fast.
Those who booed Meghan may be booing you next, King Summerisle, if next year's crop fails...
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
I was working on the assumption that it was around the time the TV presenters all switched to black ties - about 1.30 or so?
That would have been in preparation of likely developmemts 'in the coming hours' i.e. They were told it was a strong possibility. If we take the Jacinda Ardern wake up and official PM informing at 4.30pm BST we know nobody outside Balmoral was informed of anything official before that. Huw Edwards doesnt get the info before the NZ PM
Ah - thank for that. I hadn't known the timing of the wake-up call. Though I still think it's 40/60 on Huw vs. Jacinda...
Nah, its a diplomatic protocol. HMQ was NZ head of state. Jacinda not being informed before Huw/the Beeb would be a diplomatic incident
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
It was reported that they sent Charles’s helicopter up to Scotland first thing in the morning. Most likely something happened overnight. Beyond a very few staff, family members and medical professionals, HM became Schrödinger’s cat made real. It’s clear that the formal process awaited the arrival of all the Queen’s children but that what was communicated in Parliament was sufficiently clear that it was just the formalities outstanding.
The real puzzle was what happened with the Sussexes. If Charles’s household knew at 8.30am and we on pb knew at 12.30pm, why did it take the silly bugger until after 8pm(?) to make it over?
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Ahem. I think you’ll that in the formal line of notification the Queen’s Most Loyal Intruder, Michael Fagan Esq, is informed 3rd, after the Queen’s Private Secretary, and the Honourable Imbiber of Heroin With The Queen’s Loyal Intruder (Dragontail Pursuivant) is 7th
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
The delay between Liz, Jacinda and co and the rest of us knowing is Trudeau can only be informed if hes in his totally right on blackface. #protocoloddities
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
This is like when some people complained Andrew Marr's Golden Jubilee special was hagiographic. It was prepared as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary, of course it was. Of course people paying tribute, er, pay tribute.
What would you expect them to say? 'Not a fan myself, she was a bit dull'?
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
It was reported that they sent Charles’s helicopter up to Scotland first thing in the morning. Most likely something happened overnight. Beyond a very few staff, family members and medical professionals, HM became Schrödinger’s cat made real. It’s clear that the formal process awaited the arrival of all the Queen’s children but that what was communicated in Parliament was sufficiently clear that it was just the formalities outstanding.
The real puzzle was what happened with the Sussexes. If Charles’s household knew at 8.30am and we on pb knew at 12.30pm, why did it take the silly bugger until after 8pm(?) to make it over?
Because he's a prick.
It can’t have taken all day to organise the private jet surely. Just very bizarre. One can only conclude he was supposed to be on the plane from Northolt but for reasons we might read about in his book serialisation, he was not on board when it left.
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
This is like when some people complained Andrew Marr's Golden Jubilee special was hagiographic. It was prepared as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary, of course it was. Of course people paying tribute, er, pay tribute.
What would you expect them to say? 'Not a fan myself, she was a bit dull'?
Priceless deadpan from the judge dismissing: ...Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here...
I love legal snark.
Read the whole judgment if you like snark. Once again lawyers foolish enough to support Trump's ridiculous lies are going to end up facing professional misconduct charges on the basis that they have made averments for which they did not have a proper basis.
"What the amended complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances"
Are we sure Trump didn't write it himself?
Sadly the length thing occasionally seems to work - look at how big my legal complaint is, you must back down!
Trump has got some of America's dumbest lawyers working for him. And that's truly saying something!
Rudy Giuliani being the pick of the litter. A litter of rabid, mange-ridden mongrels.
Speaking of lawyers AND the Royal Family, did PBers notice that Ghislaine Maxwell's crack legal team is now suing . . . wait for it . . . her brother.
Who allegedly promised to cover her reportedly immense legal bills but since her conviction has allegedly failed to pay up.
Any lawyer who is asked to represent Trump & Co & Etc. certainly must & will factor into their thinking, a calculation of likelihood that 45 will actually pay HIS bills.
On that note, note this:
Fortune.com - Trump’s Truth Social reportedly owes over $1 million in backdated payments
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
Crowds' perceptions can change fast.
How are the territorial maps in Kharkiv Oblast looking buster? I haven’t followed it much in the last 48 hours.
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
All seems possible to sensibly regulate.
Eg could you not say that before you get a licence for drilling, there must be a bond set aside to clean up any environmental damage afterwards?
Anything is doable at a price but it depends on whether the Government and the company can come to an agreement on how much that should be. Given the potential costs of dealing with, for example, a polluted aquifer - if indeed it is possible to deal with it - then I am not sue the company would be willing to pay a realistic cost of such a bond.
A number of North Sea companies have been driven to having to surrender fields in the North Sea and abandon UK operations entirely in recent years because they could no longer show they had the necessary monetary reserves to pay for future end of life field abandonments as required by UK law. It strikes me from everything I am looking at that the business plan for fracking in the UK is only viable if they are not expected to pick up the failure costs and that the UK Government - when they were still allowing fracking operations - were going along with this.
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
Why should we taxpayers pay the cost for dodgy companies which are so dodgy they can't even get their own insurance?
(Not getting at you. I do know about Flood Re but that at least has some sort of general public interest in it - towns are where they were before.)
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Sunak scheme commences in October at a monthly credit of £66 for 6 months, so no
So either BG have decided to give me (and this is the figure) £600 for no apparent reason, or somebody has pressed the wrong button.
Hopefully a nice surprise
Well, if they have I'm not complaining, but it seems a bit odd.
It is quite normal. Recently Conservative Governments either directly or indirectly give out free money. I got some during COVID.
I have never had free money from any other colour of Government. Free money Conservatives are awesome.
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
Crowds' perceptions can change fast.
Those who booed Meghan may be booing you next, King Summerisle, if next year's crop fails...
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
Crowds' perceptions can change fast.
Those who booed Meghan may be booing you next, King Summerisle, if next year's crop fails...
"Well, don't you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you're going to have to have another blood sacrifice? And next year, no one less than the king of Summerisle himself will do."
"One of the greatest leaders the world has ever known" (says Liz Truss), "Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson), "a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
Crowds' perceptions can change fast.
Those who booed Meghan may be booing you next, King Summerisle, if next year's crop fails...
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Ahem. I think you’ll that in the formal line of notification the Queen’s Most Loyal Intruder, Michael Fagan Esq, is informed 3rd, after the Queen’s Private Secretary, and the Honourable Imbiber of Heroin With The Queen’s Loyal Intruder (Dragontail Pursuivant) is 7th
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
How many people do you supppse the queen has met - however you define 'met' - in her life? It's quite possible it's more than any other human, ever.
He argues that his duties as President interfered with his ability to timely file the instant lawsuit. But, for the reasons discussed below, Plaintiff’s claims are not meritorious, and most are completely lacking any evidentiary support as required by the Federal Rules. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 11. Moreover, Plaintiff’s presidency evidently did not deter him from filing other lawsuits in his personal capacity during the duration of his term in elected office....But even if Plaintiff’s RICO claims were timely, they still fail on the merits at every step of the analysis
Ilove this sort of thing particularly
Plaintiff cites United States v. Grubb, 11 F.3d 426 (4th Cir. 1993), as supporting the contrary position: that an FBI investigation is sufficient to support an obstruction of justice charge. But that case doesn’t say so, and it actually hurts Plaintiff’s position
It is not simply that I find the Amended Complaint “inadequate in any respect”; it is inadequate in nearly every respect. Defendants presented substantively identical arguments in support of dismissal in the earlier round of briefing on Plaintiff’s original Complaint. But despite this briefing, Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint failed to cure any of the deficiencies. Instead, Plaintiff added eighty new pages of largely irrelevant allegations that did nothing to salvage the legal sufficiency of his claims
With the TUC Congress and probably the Lib Dem conference being halted, can we but hope that this signals the END of party conferences. They are not needed, a waste of time and a media circus.
Never met a party member who cared for them, though I guess they need some chance of yelling at their senior figures to believe they wield power.
Some of the young, single, members seem to enjoy them. Only place they can hunt for a partner and it’s ok to be a political geek.
I went to the Conservative one, in a work capacity, about ten years ago. Plenty of posh Tory totty. Some outstanding milfs.
All the young lads in three piece suits and big quiffs, all the young women in nice dresses, heels and pearls. All dreaming of being PM one day.
Lots of free booze too. Fearsome hangovers. I remember standing about 10 foot away from Phillip Hammond as he valiantly tried to give a speech to a raucous, shitfaced crowd, me included, who were paying him no attention whatsoever. About 11 at night. God knows what he was saying.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
Yes, i think she was told basically HMQ gravely ill, London Bridge imminent
How can you tell? What piece of circumstantial evidence exists for the "gravely ill" hypothesis and rules out the "dead" hypothesis?
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Theres a difference between it being generally known the monarch is at deaths door and the process for communicating the death. Heads of government in states she was Head of State have to know first. We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
Yes. But that removes all responsibility from the company which kind of takes us right back to where we were at the start of these discussions.
If you remove all financial liability and regulatory control from an operation pretty much anything is possible. But is tat the route you want to take, particularly when there is no certainty of success anyway.
Priceless deadpan from the judge dismissing: ...Plaintiff’s theory of this case, set forth over 527 paragraphs in the first 118 pages of the Amended Complaint, is difficult to summarize in a concise and cohesive manner. It was certainly not presented that way. Nevertheless, I will attempt to distill it here...
I love legal snark.
Read the whole judgment if you like snark. Once again lawyers foolish enough to support Trump's ridiculous lies are going to end up facing professional misconduct charges on the basis that they have made averments for which they did not have a proper basis.
"What the amended complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances"
Are we sure Trump didn't write it himself?
Sadly the length thing occasionally seems to work - look at how big my legal complaint is, you must back down!
Sometimes and it can certainly keep a case alive which should have been disposed of earlier. But it very rarely wins in the long run in my experience. If you have a real point you can make it sharply and distinctly and you don't want it lost amongst the details, you want it out front.
I was always told that you don't make a weak case stronger by including even weaker arguments to boost the numbers. Stick with your best reasons and don't pad it out.
I once followed a case in the US of an AirBnB type operator who had gone bust holding onto my deposit (which I got back from my credit card).
The judge in his summing up remarked that “when the facts are against you, you pound the law, when the law is against you, you pound the facts, when both are against you, you pound the table….”
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
Why should we taxpayers pay the cost for dodgy companies which are so dodgy they can't even get their own insurance?
(Not getting at you. I do know about Flood Re but that at least has some sort of general public interest in it - towns are where they were before.)
I know you aren't but it seems a possibility though I doubt any fracking will happen
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Theres a difference between it being generally known the monarch is at deaths door and the process for communicating the death. Heads of government in states she was Head of State have to know first. We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
That is what we quibbling logicians call a terminus ante quem, or in English, the latest time at which she can have died. It does not rule out that she was dead when she woke up at 8 a.m.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Indeed sometimes keeping calm and carrying on is what is required.
From memory on 9/11 didn't President Bush get informed of the attacks and finish reading to school children before he left?
Truss would have to keep calm until she was off view of the camera at least.
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Sunak scheme commences in October at a monthly credit of £66 for 6 months, so no
So either BG have decided to give me (and this is the figure) £600 for no apparent reason, or somebody has pressed the wrong button.
Hopefully a nice surprise
Well, if they have I'm not complaining, but it seems a bit odd.
It is quite normal. Recently Conservative Governments either directly or indirectly give out free money. I got some during COVID.
I have never had free money from any other colour of Government. Free money Conservatives are awesome.
And £66 per month for 6 months from next month that Starmer would have cancelled
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
Yes. But that removes all responsibility from the company which kind of takes us right back to where we were at the start of these discussions.
If you remove all financial liability and regulatory control from an operation pretty much anything is possible. But is tat the route you want to take, particularly when there is no certainty of success anyway.
Man y thanks - some very interesting posts from you today, as well as recently. Much appreciated.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
Yes, i think she was told basically HMQ gravely ill, London Bridge imminent
How can you tell? What piece of circumstantial evidence exists for the "gravely ill" hypothesis and rules out the "dead" hypothesis?
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Theres a difference between it being generally known the monarch is at deaths door and the process for communicating the death. Heads of government in states she was Head of State have to know first. We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
That is what we quibbling logicians call a terminus ante quem, or in English, the latest time at which she can have died. It does not rule out that she was dead when she woke up at 8 a.m.
I think we can rule out she was dead if she woke up at 8am.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Theres a difference between it being generally known the monarch is at deaths door and the process for communicating the death. Heads of government in states she was Head of State have to know first. We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
That is what we quibbling logicians call a terminus ante quem, or in English, the latest time at which she can have died. It does not rule out that she was dead when she woke up at 8 a.m.
A quibbling biologist wants to differ in re the logical possibility of your last sentence.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
Yes, i think she was told basically HMQ gravely ill, London Bridge imminent
How can you tell? What piece of circumstantial evidence exists for the "gravely ill" hypothesis and rules out the "dead" hypothesis?
It is of interest to observe the number of times that the following happens -
1) Big Name gets involved at the start of a business 2) Other people invest 3) Big name divests (largely) making handsome profit 4) Other investor stay in and are... not so lucky.
Hmm, do the chemicals for fracking come from Ineos, by any chance? (Not suggesting they necessarily do. But it's something to check if one is looking into investing. (The chaps who made most money from gold rushes tended to be the equipment sellers and saloon owners.)
I went to school with someone whose grandfather had made a fortune in 1929 - he was getting a commission for doing trades, and hadn't invested in the market as such.
It seems completely perverse not to try fracking because it might cause a few rich people to become less rich. Its not as if fracking is being pyramid sold to the public. Fracking company shares are not being peddled around the doorsteps of Britain by shiny salespeople.
There's no South Sea fracking bubble, as far as I can see.
Indeed. If some rich people lose some money going for fracking and it fails, then that's on them. Their money. No loss for us.
If they go for it and it succeeds, then it would add to our national energy security and the tax revenues on that would go towards paying down our deficit/the NHS/tax cuts/take your pick.
Heads we win, tails they lose. There's no downside.
What if, and I realise this is unheard of, the rich people try it, knacker the local environment then leave the poor people to deal with the fall-out?
The sane methodology, which has worked historically, is to
1) Set standards. 2) Enforce the standards
Oh and
3) Make sure that constructive bankruptcy doesn't get people out of doing the cleanup.
It's possible you are more optimistic about all three than I am perhaps.
It just takes effort from regulators.
That ship has already sailed, for reasons I have already explained.
Extending the regulation would simply be some law passing, wouldn't it?
Haven't we got a building full of politicians in Central London, who are supposed to specialise in that?
I agree. But you have to ask why the exception was made in the first place. If the necessary regulation is so onerous the whole operation is no longer financially viable then you are kind of screwed from the start.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Indeed sometimes keeping calm and carrying on is what is required.
From memory on 9/11 didn't President Bush get informed of the attacks and finish reading to school children before he left?
Truss would have to keep calm until she was off view of the camera at least.
Yes which bizarrely I seem to recall some people tried to criticise him for, as if leaping up in shock, screaming out that the country was under attack and running from the room would have been the more appropriate option.
Public Announcement - I wish to apologize immediately, totally and unconditionally for my indefensible, cruel and unforgivable aspersions upon mongrels, by connecting them in ANY way with the likes of Rudy Giuliani.
What I meant to say, is that RG and etc., are a litter of JUNKYARD dogs, as illustrated below:
I wish to apologize immediately, totally and unconditionally for my indefensible, cruel and unforgivable aspersions upon junkyard dogs, or any other breed, kind or type of canine, by connecting them in ANY way with the likes of Rudy Giuliani.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Theres a difference between it being generally known the monarch is at deaths door and the process for communicating the death. Heads of government in states she was Head of State have to know first. We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
That is what we quibbling logicians call a terminus ante quem, or in English, the latest time at which she can have died. It does not rule out that she was dead when she woke up at 8 a.m.
A quibbling biologist wants to differ in re the logical possibility of your last sentence.
God I love this site. At a time like this, there is no better pick-me-up than really top class pedantry.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Ahem. I think you’ll that in the formal line of notification the Queen’s Most Loyal Intruder, Michael Fagan Esq, is informed 3rd, after the Queen’s Private Secretary, and the Honourable Imbiber of Heroin With The Queen’s Loyal Intruder (Dragontail Pursuivant) is 7th
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
How many people do you supppse the queen has met - however you define 'met' - in her life? It's quite possible it's more than any other human, ever.
My Dad almost shook her hand at some army-related bash a few years ago, my step-cousin’s a soldier. My Dad’s somewhere to the left of Trotsky but was disappointed when she was two people away from him and heading towards him when she was suddenly steered away. He wanted to shake the hand that had shook the hand of all those countless famous, and infamous, people.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Indeed sometimes keeping calm and carrying on is what is required.
From memory on 9/11 didn't President Bush get informed of the attacks and finish reading to school children before he left?
Truss would have to keep calm until she was off view of the camera at least.
Yes which bizarrely I seem to recall some people tried to criticise him for, as if leaping up in shock, screaming out that the country was under attack and running from the room would have been the more appropriate option.
ISTR he did look momentarily as if someone had given him an unexpectyed prostate examination per anum, but that's hardly surprising.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Indeed sometimes keeping calm and carrying on is what is required.
From memory on 9/11 didn't President Bush get informed of the attacks and finish reading to school children before he left?
Truss would have to keep calm until she was off view of the camera at least.
Yes which bizarrely I seem to recall some people tried to criticise him for, as if leaping up in shock, screaming out that the country was under attack and running from the room would have been the more appropriate option.
Yep for all his other faults later, he showed great character at that point. In fact from later revelations about how he treated resident Obama and his wife I get the impression GW was pretty poorly characterised by the world much of the time. That is not to excuse the many things he did get wrong but he does strike me as being a decent man who was probably unsuited for the office and the events he ended up facing.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
It was reported that they sent Charles’s helicopter up to Scotland first thing in the morning. Most likely something happened overnight. Beyond a very few staff, family members and medical professionals, HM became Schrödinger’s cat made real. It’s clear that the formal process awaited the arrival of all the Queen’s children but that what was communicated in Parliament was sufficiently clear that it was just the formalities outstanding.
The real puzzle was what happened with the Sussexes. If Charles’s household knew at 8.30am and we on pb knew at 12.30pm, why did it take the silly bugger until after 8pm(?) to make it over?
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Ahem. I think you’ll that in the formal line of notification the Queen’s Most Loyal Intruder, Michael Fagan Esq, is informed 3rd, after the Queen’s Private Secretary, and the Honourable Imbiber of Heroin With The Queen’s Loyal Intruder (Dragontail Pursuivant) is 7th
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
How many people do you supppse the queen has met - however you define 'met' - in her life? It's quite possible it's more than any other human, ever.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Why would it be very rigid, when it's for a one off event, and as it is all secret how would we know if it was or not? Given the state of things over the course of the summer including (we can assume) the obvious decline in HM's health, and the looming change in PM and the fact she was going to die in Scotland not Norfolk, you would think they would have revised the plan from top to toe at the beginning of August. If your source is that Guardian article it is out of date ("London bridge" will not have been the code used for starters) and not particularly verifiable. and you are wrong about "leaving the chamber;" she has to "just carry on" because if she sprints out of her first PM statement to the House in mid sentence that's equivalent to telling the world HM has carked it.
Theres a difference between it being generally known the monarch is at deaths door and the process for communicating the death. Heads of government in states she was Head of State have to know first. We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
That is what we quibbling logicians call a terminus ante quem, or in English, the latest time at which she can have died. It does not rule out that she was dead when she woke up at 8 a.m.
A quibbling biologist wants to differ in re the logical possibility of your last sentence.
Constitutional purists here - is it “Queen Camilla” or is she “the Queen Consort”?
There seem to be a lot of announcers using the latter today, but from newsreel I’ve seen we didn’t use to call Mary or the Queen Mum “the Queen Consort.” It was just Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth or The Queen.
Is this something to do with the fact that they need to try and stop giving the impression that the “Queendom” has descended to Camilla rather than the crown passing to Charles?
Public Announcement - I wish to apologize immediately, totally and unconditionally for my indefensible, cruel and unforgivable aspersions upon mongrels, by connecting them in ANY way with the likes of Rudy Giuliani.
What I meant to say, is that RG and etc., are a litter of JUNKYARD dogs, as illustrated below:
I wish to apologize immediately, totally and unconditionally for my indefensible, cruel and unforgivable aspersions upon junkyard dogs, or any other breed, kind or type of canine, by connecting them in ANY way with the likes of Rudy Giuliani.
Where does he go from there? Does he now compare them to New York realtors?
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
Yes. But that removes all responsibility from the company which kind of takes us right back to where we were at the start of these discussions.
If you remove all financial liability and regulatory control from an operation pretty much anything is possible. But is tat the route you want to take, particularly when there is no certainty of success anyway.
Man y thanks - some very interesting posts from you today, as well as recently. Much appreciated.
Do remember with all of this that I am not sat there looking at the results from their wells, their seismic data nor their long term plans. I could be wrong with this. But it just seems unlikely based on the current state of publicly available information.
Constitutional purists here - is it “Queen Camilla” or is she “the Queen Consort”?
There seem to be a lot of announcers using the latter today, but from newsreel I’ve seen we didn’t use to call Mary or the Queen Mum “the Queen Consort.” It was just Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.
Is this something to do with the fact that they need to try and stop giving the impression that the “Queendom” has descended to Camilla rather than the crown passing to Charles?
My guess it’s to avoid confusion with the late Queen.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Are you sure? Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The Guardian piece was very certai she would come down by train, it now seems she is flying. "Secure lines" are ancient history, voice over 4G is always encrypted so all sorts of new protocols can be envisaged. They must have told Zahawi something pretty close to the truth, to persuade him to go into the chamber and nobble Truss.
Its very rigid protocol. Truss didnt leave the chamber, shes not going to just carry on if London Bridge has fallen. And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Most likely without wanting to sound ghoulish is there was an event such a sudden stroke or similar around lunchtime that left HM unconscious and the doctors were aware it was likely unsurvivable. I don’t think Truss was informed in the chamber that HM had died, though suspect she was told that it was likely imminent.
Yes, i think she was told basically HMQ gravely ill, London Bridge imminent
How can you tell? What piece of circumstantial evidence exists for the "gravely ill" hypothesis and rules out the "dead" hypothesis?
I certainly got the impression from watching Angela Rayner's face when she was handed the note for Keir that it was a "Oh, that's terribly sad to hear" rather than, what I'd expect, to be a more "Oh sh*t, holy hell" if it was saying "she's dead".
Maybe she truly didn't give much of a monkeys - but it really had that look about it.
On the question of what time the Queen died I believe it would have been shortly before Liz Truss was told in the commons and I believe the note did affirm the Queen had died.
I expect as part of London Bridge planning that the PM would be informed almost straight away and before the media
The PM is informed by the Queens Private Secretary on a secure line and is the first person outside the family/immediate household and doctors informed. The commons note would have said she is gravely ill and London Bridge was likely. There are no circumstances in which Nadhim Zahawi knew before the PM. She was told at 4.30, just moments before the other commonwealth leaders were informed
Ahem. I think you’ll that in the formal line of notification the Queen’s Most Loyal Intruder, Michael Fagan Esq, is informed 3rd, after the Queen’s Private Secretary, and the Honourable Imbiber of Heroin With The Queen’s Loyal Intruder (Dragontail Pursuivant) is 7th
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
How many people do you supppse the queen has met - however you define 'met' - in her life? It's quite possible it's more than any other human, ever.
Passport control operator?
Waterloo ticket collector in the 1960s? (But quite a few would be repeats, unless the collector was moved around.)
Truss I thought handled the events of yesterday well. They obviously will dominate buy she combined paying tribute to our lost Queen with welcoming our new King.
Luckily for her she also got her plans for an energy bill cap in before the news broke
Plus the restart of fracking.
I think the tories are going to need to be very careful about how they sell that one though.
British voters these days want cheap gas without fracking near them, just as they want great public services with low taxes, lots of new property but no development where they live, low government debt but lots of spending, and free speech but censorship of opinions they disagree with.
I suspect the fracking will quietly disappear...
Protecting everybody from the vagaries of the gas market seems odd for a government that wants fracking, to be sure.
You mean, encouraging p[eople to invest in dodgy and futile projects?
Private companies drilling for oil and gas don't know what they are doing?
Surprising then, that they are making such vast sums of money that some want windfall taxes on those profits.
They aren't, at least not in the UK. Did you never notice that not one of the O&G companies that does North Sea drilling, nor even conventional O&G drilling onshore, has shown any interest in fracking in the UK? It is all being done by companies you had never heard of a few years ago. Indeed most of them didn't even exist 15 years ago.
The regular O&G companies which are making all that money have more sense than to invest in fracking.
I'm guessing fracking is to geology what Springtime for Hitler was to musical entertainment. As long as it loses money no-one is too surprised and the producers (sorry, The Producers) clean up. It's when profits are expected that investors get restive.
Oh I think the investors expect profits. They are either just being poorly advised or the very slight chance of getting a massive return outweighs the considerable risks of getting no return at all.
Like biotech.
Is it in your opinion possible for fracking to work - apologies if I haven't followed and you've answered before.
Not on current knowledge. It can work in other countries with vast areas of uniform geology but as with everything else, in Britain the Geology is just like our history and our society - a hotch potch of huge numbers of different varieties of rocks and terrains, often quite limited in extent and all horribly messed about by successive tectonic events. The closing of the Iapetus, the collision of Africa into Europe, the opening of the Atlantic and hundreds more - all have left their imprint on or rocks (how many people know that the Welsh coal fields only exist in the form they do because of the event that formed the Alps, or that bits of central Scotland started life in Siberia?)
What this means is that the volumes available, even if we were willing to cover the countryside in the thousands of wells necessary to exploit them, probably aren't economic anyway. Most observers from outside the fracking industry accept this.
There is a chance - not a tiny one but a small one - that they are wrong, but it seems unlikely at the moment.
Its a shame because I have no moral or political objection to fracking and if it were economic it would mean a job for life for me. But having looked at it a great deal when deciding whether to move in that direction, I concluded it is not viable as far as we can tell.
No harm in allowing more exploratory drilling then?
It is not just a case of drilling a hole and letting the gas come out. That works with conventional reservoirs because it is possible, through flowing, testing and monitoring, to calculate volumes, baffles and compartmentalisation all from the data collected from a single well. Reservoir engineering is a black art and one I hardly understand but it does This is not the case with fracking. You would need to drill dozens of wells scattered across the countryside every few hundred yards and until you had drilled them and fracked them you would have no idea whether your field was viable.
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
Good points but if companies are willing to sink capital on basis of returns if fracking is in fact viable and clean up costs are covered in advance (e.g. by insurance style payments) then I think it should be allowed. I also think that all resource extraction and infrastructure development schemes should directly compensate local residents (paid for by the developer).
Agreed but to do that you are going to have to change the whole basis of bankruptcy and liability as well. Because there will be no compensation if the company goes bust. Remember these are not long standing companies with lots of different assets and interests. They were usually set up specifically for the exploitation of Shale gas and will have little in the way of assets beyond a rented office. All the equipment for drilling the wells will be hired in - just as it is in conventional drilling - and if the enterprise fails there will be nothing left to compensate anyone, investors, public or probably the contractors either.
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
I am sceptical about fracking but wouldn't the government be insurer of last resort?.
Yes. But that removes all responsibility from the company which kind of takes us right back to where we were at the start of these discussions.
If you remove all financial liability and regulatory control from an operation pretty much anything is possible. But is tat the route you want to take, particularly when there is no certainty of success anyway.
Man y thanks - some very interesting posts from you today, as well as recently. Much appreciated.
Do remember with all of this that I am not sat there looking at the results from their wells, their seismic data nor their long term plans. I could be wrong with this. But it just seems unlikely based on the current state of publicly available information.
Quite so. But by the same token, why should we let them trash people's neighbourhoods on such data as we have?
Comments
Both Truss and Sunak visited the Queen several weeks ago, where photos were taken of them being invited to form a government. The appropriate set of photos was released on Tuesday.
Meanwhile the Queen has not been with us for a fortnight or more, but it was felt that we needed the PM transition prior to the transition of monarch.
Do I believe this? Er, no!
I've just had my bill from British Gas. It shows my usage is -£31. While I had some issues in this regard with a faulty meter which ran backwards when the solar panels were producing net power, I thought the new meter had fixed this.
It would appear to be something to do with 'replacement charges' which have been whacked on to the last four months of my bill. Which amount to about four times the value of the power I've used.
Is this the Sunak scheme for cutting household bills, or have BG decided to be nice, or is it just a cockup?
Director General’s Statement on Serious Situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/statements/director-generals-statement-on-serious-situation-at-ukraines-zaporizhzhya-nuclear-power-plant
Today, I have learned from IAEA staff on the site of the serious situation that developed last night at Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
The power infrastructure feeding the city of Enerhodar, home to the NPP’s operators and their families, has been destroyed by shelling of the switchyard at the city’s thermal power plant, leading to a complete power black-out in Enerhodar: no running water, no power, no sewage.
Given the increased and continued shelling, there is little likelihood of re-establishing reliable offsite power to the ZNPP, especially as the shelling continually and repeatedly damages the power infrastructure.
As a result, the IAEA understands that the operator, having no longer confidence in the restoration of offsite power, is considering shutting down the only remaining operating reactor. The entire power plant would then be fully reliant on emergency diesel generators for ensuring vital nuclear safety and security functions. And as a consequence, the operator would not be able to re-start the reactors unless offsite power was reliably re-established.
Furthermore, there are indications that, with the increasingly dire circumstances that the people of Energodar are facing, there is the significant risk of an impact on the availability of essential staff on site to continue to safely and securely operate ZNPP.
This is an unsustainable situation and is becoming increasingly precarious. Enerhodar has gone dark. The power plant has no offsite power. And we have seen that once infrastructure is repaired, it is damaged once again.
This is completely unacceptable. It cannot stand....
NAIROBI, Kenya — Though Queen Elizabeth II was revered by many in Africa, her death also reignited a different sort of conversation — one that touched on the legacy of the British Empire and the brutality the monarchy meted out to people in its former colonies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/world/africa/queen-africa-british-empire.html
There will be more from this war…
If you are drilling on the prairies in the USA or the North German plains in Poland then this is viable. By which I mean it can be done cheaply and with little disturbance to the local community. If you are doing it in Lancashire where you have a village every mile and all manner of other obstructions then it becomes far more expensive to the point of being uneconomic - even before you know if you even have anything worth producing.
Now I can accept that that can be a price worth paying if the geology turns out to be right. If it doesn't then the company goes bust and someone else has to deal with all the environmental damage that has been done.
BUT
If we’re playing this game that also aligns with having just enough time to sneak out the energy announcement, because it was required for the nation.
Eg could you not say that before you get a licence for drilling, there must be a bond set aside to clean up any environmental damage afterwards?
And we have been told she, and the heads of commonwealth realms were informed at 4.30 pm BST.
Are we sure Trump didn't write it himself?
Sadly the length thing occasionally seems to work - look at how big my legal complaint is, you must back down!
And I suspect any sane insurance broker looking at the potential liabilities from these operations would run a mile.
And as the RFU haven't gone mad I may take the oppprtunity to finally, after 13 years in Sale, get down to Heywood Road tomorrow to watch Sale FC play Leeds Tykes.
Which feels like exactly the kind of communal event we should be doing at a time like this.
Still pissed off about the uncertainty over the eleven plus. But I'd struggle to put it in any box other than freakishly unlucky.
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1568267855870758917
I believe @TOPPING is 13,248th in the line of information
The real puzzle was what happened with the Sussexes. If Charles’s household knew at 8.30am and we on pb knew at 12.30pm, why did it take the silly bugger until after 8pm(?) to make it over?
"Elizabeth the Great" (says Boris Johnson),
"a champion of freedom and democracy" (again Liz Truss).
If they go much further, this Tory government may be the first to leave office by dint of having made such a large number of British people vomit.
Crowds' perceptions can change fast.
Those who booed Meghan may be booing you next, King Summerisle, if next year's crop fails...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man
What would you expect them to say? 'Not a fan myself, she was a bit dull'?
Rudy Giuliani being the pick of the litter. A litter of rabid, mange-ridden mongrels.
Speaking of lawyers AND the Royal Family, did PBers notice that Ghislaine Maxwell's crack legal team is now suing . . . wait for it . . . her brother.
Who allegedly promised to cover her reportedly immense legal bills but since her conviction has allegedly failed to pay up.
Any lawyer who is asked to represent Trump & Co & Etc. certainly must & will factor into their thinking, a calculation of likelihood that 45 will actually pay HIS bills.
On that note, note this:
Fortune.com - Trump’s Truth Social reportedly owes over $1 million in backdated payments
https://fortune.com/2022/08/29/trump-truth-social-debt-million-sec-spac-merger/
A number of North Sea companies have been driven to having to surrender fields in the North Sea and abandon UK operations entirely in recent years because they could no longer show they had the necessary monetary reserves to pay for future end of life field abandonments as required by UK law. It strikes me from everything I am looking at that the business plan for fracking in the UK is only viable if they are not expected to pick up the failure costs and that the UK Government - when they were still allowing fracking operations - were going along with this.
(Not getting at you. I do know about Flood Re but that at least has some sort of general public interest in it - towns are where they were before.)
I have never had free money from any other colour of Government. Free money Conservatives are awesome.
"Well, don't you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you're going to have to have another blood sacrifice? And next year, no one less than the king of Summerisle himself will do."
He argues that his duties as President interfered with his ability to timely file the instant lawsuit. But, for the reasons discussed below, Plaintiff’s claims are not meritorious, and most are completely lacking any evidentiary support as required by the Federal Rules. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 11. Moreover, Plaintiff’s presidency evidently did not deter him from filing other lawsuits in his personal capacity during the duration of his term in elected office....But even if Plaintiff’s RICO claims were timely, they still fail on the merits at every step of the analysis
Ilove this sort of thing particularly
Plaintiff cites United States v. Grubb, 11 F.3d 426 (4th Cir. 1993), as supporting the contrary position: that an FBI investigation is sufficient to support an obstruction of justice charge. But that case doesn’t say so, and it actually hurts Plaintiff’s position
It is not simply that I find the Amended Complaint “inadequate in any respect”; it is inadequate in nearly every respect. Defendants presented substantively identical arguments in support of dismissal in the earlier round of briefing on Plaintiff’s original Complaint. But despite this briefing, Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint failed to cure any of the deficiencies. Instead, Plaintiff added eighty new pages of largely irrelevant allegations that did nothing to salvage the legal sufficiency of his claims
All the young lads in three piece suits and big quiffs, all the young women in nice dresses, heels and pearls. All dreaming of being PM one day.
Lots of free booze too. Fearsome hangovers. I remember standing about 10 foot away from Phillip Hammond as he valiantly tried to give a speech to a raucous, shitfaced crowd, me included, who were paying him no attention whatsoever. About 11 at night. God knows what he was saying.
We know when the PM and commonwealth realm heads were informed, 4.30pm BST yesterday.
If you remove all financial liability and regulatory control from an operation pretty much anything is possible. But is tat the route you want to take, particularly when there is no certainty of success anyway.
I once followed a case in the US of an AirBnB type operator who had gone bust holding onto my deposit (which I got back from my credit card).
The judge in his summing up remarked that “when the facts are against you, you pound the law, when the law is against you, you pound the facts, when both are against you, you pound the table….”
From memory on 9/11 didn't President Bush get informed of the attacks and finish reading to school children before he left?
Truss would have to keep calm until she was off view of the camera at least.
What I meant to say, is that RG and etc., are a litter of JUNKYARD dogs, as illustrated below:
https://whyy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/fourseasonstotallandscaping-trumpgiuliani-768x432.jpg
ADDENDUM - 2nd Public Announcement:
I wish to apologize immediately, totally and unconditionally for my indefensible, cruel and unforgivable aspersions upon junkyard dogs, or any other breed, kind or type of canine, by connecting them in ANY way with the likes of Rudy Giuliani.
At a time like this, there is no better pick-me-up than really top class pedantry.
There seem to be a lot of announcers using the latter today, but from newsreel I’ve seen we didn’t use to call Mary or the Queen Mum “the Queen Consort.” It was just Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth or The Queen.
Is this something to do with the fact that they need to try and stop giving the impression that the “Queendom” has descended to Camilla rather than the crown passing to Charles?
Maybe she truly didn't give much of a monkeys - but it really had that look about it.