The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
ITV Wales has just featured the failed NHS in Wales and it is obvious that social care needs to be addressed to enable discharge from hospitals
It is also obvious that politicians need to come together across the UK to start the enormous job of making the NHS fit for purpose
The Policy Exchange used the data to create this chart on shared priorities (green), divisive policies (yellow), ones that few care about (blue) and ones with significant opposition (red - anti-strike laws, cracking down on environmental protests, anti-trans)
So people think we should cut everyone's taxes, while increasing NHS provision, all while reducing inflation caused by chasing scarce resources. The genius of the median voter!
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
My parents live in a small village in the Midlands. There’s a church and primary school but no shop, no pub or other service.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in church halls). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and bakery, post office and library.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
My parents live in a small village in the Midlands. There’s a church and primary school but no shop, no pub or other service.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in the church hall). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and bakery, post office and library.
Villages in rural Ireland, esp the West Coast, have a successful version of this. The pub is also a shop and a cafe and a general meeting place with noticeboard, perhaps even a post office
It is an excellent idea and brings life to any community
There’s usually a big incumbency bias in the best pm surveys, a lot of it driven by recognition (I expect a significant portion of the electorate still either don’t know who Keir Starmer is or don’t know what he stands for).
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
There's a lot of real poverty in rural England. Those people don't live in nice detached houses.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
He’s misread the mood on NHS workers for sure. Polling on the rail strikes shows them losing support over time and yougov had more people opposing than supporting late December.
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
I don’t think the EU would be ready to take us back. They’d need a decade or two of consistent British alignment and some sign of commitment. They would fear Brexit becoming just another partisan ping pong game like reproductive rights are in the US.
He’s misread the mood on NHS workers for sure. Polling on the rail strikes shows them losing support over time and yougov had more people opposing than supporting late December.
As I keep on telling HYUFD best PM isn't a good predictor of general election outcomes as approval ratings.
Because there is a built in incumbency bias.
Blair comfortably led Major as best PM in 1997 as Cameron led Brown as best PM in 2010.
As noted earlier you have to go back to 1979 to find when the winner of the best PM polling did not win the general election. However even then Thatcher only got a majority of less than 50 v Callaghan, it was no landslide
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
It’s feasible that the feeling takes hold in the country that Sunak is a half-decent PM surrounded by a cabinet of fools, just before the Tories decide to axe him and bring back Boris.
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
It’s feasible that the feeling takes hold in the country that Sunak is a half-decent PM surrounded by a cabinet of fools, just before the Tories decide to axe him and bring back Boris.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
It’s feasible that the feeling takes hold in the country that Sunak is a half-decent PM surrounded by a cabinet of fools, just before the Tories decide to axe him and bring back Boris.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
I suppose the real question is what are Starmer's core beliefs? If it's true that he's an economic Corbynite at heart, maybe he'd instead use his political capital to do things that would preclude rejoining.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
I don’t think the EU would be ready to take us back. They’d need a decade or two of consistent British alignment and some sign of commitment. They would fear Brexit becoming just another partisan ping pong game like reproductive rights are in the US.
Yes possibly. And there would also be the risk of a humiliating veto (on top of the humiliation of reversing Brexit)
Nonetheless it would be hugely in the interests of the EU, long term, to get the UK back inside
I'm idly speculating here. I do believe Starmer is likely to get an epochal majority. With which he will want to do something drastic and radical. Otherwise, what is the point of politics?
Starmer is a massive Remoaner and a 2nd voter. His instinct will be to take this road, but maybe he will be content with EEA or whatever
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
My parents live in a small village in the Midlands. There’s a church and primary school but no shop, no pub or other service.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in church halls). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and bakery, post office and library.
There simply isn't the volume of trade to support a small village shop, unless it's a glorified tuck shop that is run by volunteers.
What fills the gap that not having basic groceries within walking distance leaves is community. People looking out for each other and making sure their elderly neighbours don't run short of milk.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
On topic. Yes. They made the wrong call. Sunak position is a massive vote lower in the long run, but just short poll drops for now, it’s the long term damage being done to Sunak’s government brand that is the problem for the Tory’s here - the struggle on incomes goes on longer than inflation falls, the impact of this on all votes not just GE ones is where Sunak’s awful hard line stance on these popular strikes is letting the Tory down. The voters don’t want a hard line, they want to see talks, they want to see a government who can negotiate well and everyone settle on something fair and reasonable in the middle, and strike pain and crisis come to an end.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
I don't know if they want a society with domestic labour-cost inflation of 10%, though.
The laughters on you if you think settling up on these public sector strikes will break the economy and dramatically increase the domestic labour cost inflation to 10% for a sustainable period whilst energy price and inflation is down. But that’s my point, sadly, just like Sunak and his ministers, you are just not smart enough to get it are you? The Tories SHOULD WANT a period of wage increases, as this will address the real issue that reduces them to the under 100 seat rump at next election, it’s thanks to the thinking of your reply they will get all the blame for the pain of lower incomes.
Inflation and wage inflation is no problem at all to UK in this situation, but the fall in income is the real problem, and is utterly toxic when it comes to retaining voters. And, very much like you and your thinking, the hardline approach to not talking and settling up what is mere peanuts in the bigger picture will ensure the Tories are smeared all over for decades with the stench of lowering living standards.
Mike is right with the header. The mistake here on needlessly suppressing incomes and living standards by Sunak and his government is the biggest political blunder for decades - this is far more toxic to the Tory brand medium long term than anything Boris done.
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
It’s feasible that the feeling takes hold in the country that Sunak is a half-decent PM surrounded by a cabinet of fools, just before the Tories decide to axe him and bring back Boris.
I expect Sunak to fight the next GE
There seems clear evidence that he is finding the throne comforting, albeit with brown trousers:
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
My parents live in a small village in the Midlands. There’s a church and primary school but no shop, no pub or other service.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in church halls). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and bakery, post office and library.
There simply isn't the volume of trade to support a small village shop, unless it's a glorified tuck shop that is run by volunteers.
What fills the gap that not having basic groceries within walking distance leaves is community. People looking out for each other and making sure their elderly neighbours don't run short of milk.
That’s why a multipurpose facility is more likely to be viable. Obviously in the smallest of hamlets even that won’t work - there’s no facilities at all at our hamlet in Burgundy - but if a village is too small for a shop and a pub and a coffee shop it might be big enough for a combined pub/shop/coffee shop.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
What is Scotland 's polling ?
5 people and a 3 legged dog no doubt
Twenty-two supporters of the Scottish Lib Dems. By Stuart's reckoning that must be all of them.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
What is Scotland 's polling ?
5 people and a 3 legged dog no doubt
Twenty-two supporters of the Scottish Lib Dems. By Stuart's reckoning that must be all of them.
Some must have voted twice at least to get that many
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
My parents live in a small village in the Midlands. There’s a church and primary school but no shop, no pub or other service.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in church halls). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and bakery, post office and library.
There simply isn't the volume of trade to support a small village shop, unless it's a glorified tuck shop that is run by volunteers.
What fills the gap that not having basic groceries within walking distance leaves is community. People looking out for each other and making sure their elderly neighbours don't run short of milk.
That’s why a multipurpose facility is more likely to be viable. Obviously in the smallest of hamlets even that won’t work - there’s no facilities at all at our hamlet in Burgundy - but if a village is too small for a shop and a pub and a coffee shop it might be big enough for a combined pub/shop/coffee shop.
Such has been tried in various places. The problem is still footfall. You need quite a few people living nearby to make any kind of village business work.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
And (cards on table, as someone who is fairly sure we're making a mistake that should and will be reversed in good time) that bothers me a bit.
Brejoin in 2040ish can be passed, almost laughed, off as "Our parents screwed up but all that unpleasantness was nothing to do with us. Friends again?" And one thing the EU has always done is be a machine for making bygones, bygones. It's why it was created, really.
The 2025-30 cycle is going to be a bit too soon for that. It's probably psychologically a bit too soon for serious EEA talk. It really would be slinking back having failed in our project. But then you have the will of the people...
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
You should check again. The Republic of Yorkshire stands, magnificently, alone.
I’m with Ydoethur in this one. I drove myself to Yorkshire yesterday, and it was exactly where I expected it to be.
On topic. Yes. They made the wrong call. Sunak position is a massive vote lower in the long run, but just short poll drops for now, it’s the long term damage being done to Sunak’s government brand that is the problem for the Tory’s here - the struggle on incomes goes on longer than inflation falls, the impact of this on all votes not just GE ones is where Sunak’s awful hard line stance on these popular strikes is letting the Tory down. The voters don’t want a hard line, they want to see talks, they want to see a government who can negotiate well and everyone settle on something fair and reasonable in the middle, and strike pain and crisis come to an end.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
I don't know if they want a society with domestic labour-cost inflation of 10%, though.
The laughters on you if you think settling up on these public sector strikes will break the economy and dramatically increase the domestic labour cost inflation to 10% for a sustainable period whilst energy price and inflation is down. But that’s my point, sadly, just like Sunak and his ministers, you are just not smart enough to get it are you? The Tories SHOULD WANT a period of wage increases, as this will address the real issue that reduces them to the under 100 seat rump at next election, it’s thanks to the thinking of your reply they will get all the blame for the pain of lower incomes.
Inflation and wage inflation is no problem at all to UK in this situation, but the fall in income is the real problem, and is utterly toxic when it comes to retaining voters. And, very much like you and your thinking, the hardline approach to not talking and settling up what is mere peanuts in the bigger picture will ensure the Tories are smeared all over for decades with the stench of lowering living standards.
Mike is right with the header. The mistake here on needlessly suppressing incomes and living standards by Sunak and his government is the biggest political blunder for decades - this is far more toxic to the Tory brand medium long term than anything Boris done.
If inflation settles above 10% due to wage settlements, that won't lead to people being happier.
"we have more than 100 years of making things safe for children. Car seats, seat belts, no cigarette vending machines, fences around pools ... by contrast life went onto phone apps 10 yrs ago & the protections we have for kids are zero, absolutely zero""
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
It’s feasible that the feeling takes hold in the country that Sunak is a half-decent PM surrounded by a cabinet of fools, just before the Tories decide to axe him and bring back Boris.
I expect Sunak to fight the next GE
There seems clear evidence that he is finding the throne comforting, albeit with brown trousers:
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
And (cards on table, as someone who is fairly sure we're making a mistake that should and will be reversed in good time) that bothers me a bit.
Brejoin in 2040ish can be passed, almost laughed, off as "Our parents screwed up but all that unpleasantness was nothing to do with us. Friends again?" And one thing the EU has always done is be a machine for making bygones, bygones. It's why it was created, really.
The 2025-30 cycle is going to be a bit too soon for that. It's probably psychologically a bit too soon for serious EEA talk. It really would be slinking back having failed in our project. But then you have the will of the people...
Once you push it out that far, then the future state of the world in general becomes harder to predict.
Will there still be a Russian Federation? What will be the state of relations with China? What will Poland and Ukraine's relations with France and Germany be like?
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
I don’t think the EU would be ready to take us back. They’d need a decade or two of consistent British alignment and some sign of commitment. They would fear Brexit becoming just another partisan ping pong game like reproductive rights are in the US.
I heard Anna Soubry waxing lyrical about Starmer yesterday. She even agreed that he was right not to offer to rejoin the EU though she's desperate to do so. She just believes it'll be too fractious. She believed he'd make an excellent PM
"we have more than 100 years of making things safe for children. Car seats, seat belts, no cigarette vending machines, fences around pools ... by contrast life went onto phone apps 10 yrs ago & the protections we have for kids are zero, absolutely zero""
Just ordered a few bottles of wine from Vivino. Led astray by Leon once again...
Best tip with Vivino (and indeed most wine retailers) is to order from them once, registering for an account, and then hold back and wait for the offers to arrive..
And don’t forget to order via Quidco for a 6% cash rebate.
Kevin McCarthy will NOT be elected as next Speaker of US House.
Hard-shell wing-nuts garnered 10 votes for their preferred goober.
PLUS the 9 who voted for another un-KMcC option.
Three quick questions:
1. How many of the above, esp. from the 9, might be persuaded to switch to McCarthy on (some) subsequent roll call?
2. How many more sleeper votes (if any) do anti-McCarthyites have to call upon in very near future?
3. How long, or rather how many roll calls, will it take for the soft McCarthy vote to start eroding?
But, there are some non-loony Republicans who will never vote for the Matt Gaetz supported candidate and don't forget that the Democrats have an almost equal number of votes. We could end up with a moderate Republican yet (just joking about Liz Cheney).
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
All of which have gone from most villages - over expensive (and a lack of new housing) killed the primary school, supermarket delivery killed the village shop and post office.
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
My parents live in a small village in the Midlands. There’s a church and primary school but no shop, no pub or other service.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in church halls). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and bakery, post office and library.
There simply isn't the volume of trade to support a small village shop, unless it's a glorified tuck shop that is run by volunteers.
What fills the gap that not having basic groceries within walking distance leaves is community. People looking out for each other and making sure their elderly neighbours don't run short of milk.
That’s why a multipurpose facility is more likely to be viable. Obviously in the smallest of hamlets even that won’t work - there’s no facilities at all at our hamlet in Burgundy - but if a village is too small for a shop and a pub and a coffee shop it might be big enough for a combined pub/shop/coffee shop.
Well, maybe. I think fundamentally that whatever it has to offer has to be enough to draw in people from a wide enough area including those who will drive there. So it has to attract people from the small hamlets and isolated dwellings to drive there instead of to the nearest town.
Of course, in the furthest reaches of rural Ireland and in rural France, the nearest town is probably further away than in many places in rural England, and so the competition is less.
But our nearest town here is down to its last five pubs, so it's a damn struggle for somewhere less than a twentieth of the size to support one, even combined with other services.
The Royal Mail carries out some very important functions
Today I was lucky enough to be part of the essential spreading of the message that a local estate agent chain is "now certified as Net Zero!". They've sent a little boastful leaflet (not really a leaflet, just a piece of card folded in half) to everybody in the area. It has a picture of a girl hugging a globe on the front
All I can say is thank fuck someone's finally taking the carbon footprint of estate agents seriously. I'd been kept up at night worrying about those bastards and their footprints. Once I've delivered them to all 534 addresses on my route, I'll be able to sleep again
I mock them, but they have helped pay my wages so I will try to ensure they're all delivered. Trouble is, they've made them so small - about A6 - that they can and do slide out of bundles of mail quite often
On topic. Yes. They made the wrong call. Sunak position is a massive vote lower in the long run, but just short poll drops for now, it’s the long term damage being done to Sunak’s government brand that is the problem for the Tory’s here - the struggle on incomes goes on longer than inflation falls, the impact of this on all votes not just GE ones is where Sunak’s awful hard line stance on these popular strikes is letting the Tory down. The voters don’t want a hard line, they want to see talks, they want to see a government who can negotiate well and everyone settle on something fair and reasonable in the middle, and strike pain and crisis come to an end.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
I don't know if they want a society with domestic labour-cost inflation of 10%, though.
The laughters on you if you think settling up on these public sector strikes will break the economy and dramatically increase the domestic labour cost inflation to 10% for a sustainable period whilst energy price and inflation is down. But that’s my point, sadly, just like Sunak and his ministers, you are just not smart enough to get it are you? The Tories SHOULD WANT a period of wage increases, as this will address the real issue that reduces them to the under 100 seat rump at next election, it’s thanks to the thinking of your reply they will get all the blame for the pain of lower incomes.
Inflation and wage inflation is no problem at all to UK in this situation, but the fall in income is the real problem, and is utterly toxic when it comes to retaining voters. And, very much like you and your thinking, the hardline approach to not talking and settling up what is mere peanuts in the bigger picture will ensure the Tories are smeared all over for decades with the stench of lowering living standards.
Mike is right with the header. The mistake here on needlessly suppressing incomes and living standards by Sunak and his government is the biggest political blunder for decades - this is far more toxic to the Tory brand medium long term than anything Boris done.
If inflation settles above 10% due to wage settlements, that won't lead to people being happier.
It’s sounds like you are trying to defend the government position on this hard line on pay deals 🤣 it’s easily the most stupidest political decision of my lifetime.
You are not listening are you, you can’t get your head round why this government have been so utterly stupid to have done this, can you?
Till very recently I thought the parliamentary arithmetic of Labour coming from about 200 seats to a working majority would be pretty immpoissible for them. But then this government has made the most stupidest political position of my lifetime, and has made Tories sub 150 seats pretty much nailed on. By settling with the nurses, ambulance people inflation would be 4% or less at next GE - by not settling with them it will be 4% or less at next GE. The same. However, what will actually cost votes at next GE is the incomes gaps, the incomes falls, the fall in living standards, and rather than trying to dodge the blame for that, the Tory leadership have pulled it all over themselves. In front of our eyes here everyday a political party are stitching themselves up for voters struggle to live. It’s the most stupid political mistake I have ever seen.
It’s just like the effective messaging from the Tory 92 camping being used by a government, on itself.
Don’t you get it? Ignore inflation, it’s headed down quickly in any pay scenario you can come up with - and this is not a militant Union winter of discontent Labour out for eighteen years thing the mail was trying to sell - the truth here is the Tories SHOULD WANT to settle these disputes, it’s in their political interest to be seen negotiating and settling, it’s in their political interest to lower the income pain to save votes.
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
What is Scotland 's polling ?
5 people and a 3 legged dog no doubt
Twenty-two supporters of the Scottish Lib Dems. By Stuart's reckoning that must be all of them.
Some must have voted twice at least to get that many
For what it's worth the Scottish subsample is: SNP - 39% LAB - 22% CON - 17% LIB - 16% The last time the Lib Dems polled 16% across Scotland in an actual election was... 2010 UKGE when they received 18.9% of the vote.
Is thirteen years now the length of a Scottish political generation? Have memories of Lib Dem betrayal faded that quickly?
The NHS crisis has the potential to send the Tories down below twenty points, into the mid teens
Why do you think the Government is happy for Ambulance drivers and nurses to strike. Those strikes are going to result in the blame being shared rather than everyone blaming the Government.
I don't believe that will happen. 80%+ of people will blame the government
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
I doubt that Starmer will ask the Euroquestion until he is utterly confident of the answer. He's a lawyer, after all.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
I get the feeling the rejection of the Tories will be so primal and so visceral Starmer might get a massive majority, along with a defimite public mood of Bollocks To Everything The Tories Did - and that will very much include Brexit (this is after another tough year and another tough winter in 23/24 - quite likely)
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
I don’t think the EU would be ready to take us back. They’d need a decade or two of consistent British alignment and some sign of commitment. They would fear Brexit becoming just another partisan ping pong game like reproductive rights are in the US.
I heard Anna Soubry waxing lyrical about Starmer yesterday. She even agreed that he was right not to offer to rejoin the EU though she's desperate to do so. She just believes it'll be too fractious. She believed he'd make an excellent PM
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14% Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
What is Scotland 's polling ?
5 people and a 3 legged dog no doubt
Twenty-two supporters of the Scottish Lib Dems. By Stuart's reckoning that must be all of them.
Some must have voted twice at least to get that many
For what it's worth the Scottish subsample is: SNP - 39% LAB - 22% CON - 17% LIB - 16% The last time the Lib Dems polled 16% across Scotland in an actual election was... 2010 UKGE when they received 18.9% of the vote.
Is thirteen years now the length of a Scottish political generation? Have memories of Lib Dem betrayal faded that quickly?
Just ordered a few bottles of wine from Vivino. Led astray by Leon once again...
Best tip with Vivino (and indeed most wine retailers) is to order from them once, registering for an account, and then hold back and wait for the offers to arrive..
And don’t forget to order via Quidco for a 6% cash rebate.
Hot oenophile news: recently learned there's something called Chianti governo which does the ripasso/amarone thing but with Chianti rather than valpolicella. Rather good.
On topic. Yes. They made the wrong call. Sunak position is a massive vote lower in the long run, but just short poll drops for now, it’s the long term damage being done to Sunak’s government brand that is the problem for the Tory’s here - the struggle on incomes goes on longer than inflation falls, the impact of this on all votes not just GE ones is where Sunak’s awful hard line stance on these popular strikes is letting the Tory down. The voters don’t want a hard line, they want to see talks, they want to see a government who can negotiate well and everyone settle on something fair and reasonable in the middle, and strike pain and crisis come to an end.
Boris would have been better at managing this cost of living crisis and associated strikes than out of touch greenhorn Sunak.
I don't know if they want a society with domestic labour-cost inflation of 10%, though.
The laughters on you if you think settling up on these public sector strikes will break the economy and dramatically increase the domestic labour cost inflation to 10% for a sustainable period whilst energy price and inflation is down. But that’s my point, sadly, just like Sunak and his ministers, you are just not smart enough to get it are you? The Tories SHOULD WANT a period of wage increases, as this will address the real issue that reduces them to the under 100 seat rump at next election, it’s thanks to the thinking of your reply they will get all the blame for the pain of lower incomes.
Inflation and wage inflation is no problem at all to UK in this situation, but the fall in income is the real problem, and is utterly toxic when it comes to retaining voters. And, very much like you and your thinking, the hardline approach to not talking and settling up what is mere peanuts in the bigger picture will ensure the Tories are smeared all over for decades with the stench of lowering living standards.
Mike is right with the header. The mistake here on needlessly suppressing incomes and living standards by Sunak and his government is the biggest political blunder for decades - this is far more toxic to the Tory brand medium long term than anything Boris done.
If inflation settles above 10% due to wage settlements, that won't lead to people being happier.
It’s sounds like you are trying to defend the government position on this hard line on pay deals 🤣 it’s easily the most stupidest political decision of my lifetime.
You are not listening are you, you can’t get your head round why this government have been so utterly stupid to have done this, can you?
Till very recently I thought the parliamentary arithmetic of Labour coming from about 200 seats to a working majority would be pretty immpoissible for them. But then this government has made the most stupidest political position of my lifetime, and has made Tories sub 150 seats pretty much nailed on. By settling with the nurses, ambulance people inflation would be 4% or less at next GE - by not settling with them it will be 4% or less at next GE. The same. However, what will actually cost votes at next GE is the incomes gaps, the incomes falls, the fall in living standards, and rather than trying to dodge the blame for that, the Tory leadership have pulled it all over themselves. In front of our eyes here everyday a political party are stitching themselves up for voters struggle to live. It’s the most stupid political mistake I have ever seen.
It’s just like the effective messaging from the Tory 92 camping being used by a government, on itself.
Don’t you get it? Ignore inflation, it’s headed down quickly in any pay scenario you can come up with - and this is not a militant Union winter of discontent Labour out for eighteen years thing the mail was trying to sell - the truth here is the Tories SHOULD WANT to settle these disputes, it’s in their political interest to be seen negotiating and settling, it’s in their political interest to lower the income pain to save votes.
A sign of increasing Russian alarm, perhaps? Or merely they can't buy their imported weapons in roubles any more and are running out of foreign currency reserves?
Or, quite possibly, they might just be flailing around making mistakes.
Doesn't do him much good when the party are so far behind even if that is so. He can only do so much, particularly when other measures don't show him beating out Starmer.
I agree but this poll does reverse Starmer as best PM, and Sunak is the conservative party 's only hope of mitigating 2024 GE
It’s feasible that the feeling takes hold in the country that Sunak is a half-decent PM surrounded by a cabinet of fools, just before the Tories decide to axe him and bring back Boris.
When he became PM I expected him to be a half decent PM, or even better, but his actions so far suggest that was wildly optimistic. His appointments and handling of the strikes beggar belief and would be seen as self inflicted own goals if the bar had not sunk so low under Johnson and Truss. His presentation is generally fine, but decision making and strategy woeful.
The BBC reports it's the first time in a century that the majority party has failed to elect a Speaker in the opening round of voting, so even assuming this gameplaying goes nowhere, it is pretty funny.
It seems little commented that natural gas prices have been plummeting back down to earth.
That alone has probably saved the government more money and had a bigger impact on future inflation than the difference between the two sides on NHS payrises.
They're shooting themselves in the foot for something that is marginal at an overall economic level. Politically they should be dividing and conquering between the 'worthy' and 'unworthy'.
It seems little commented that natural gas prices have been plummeting back down to earth.
That alone has probably saved the government more money and had a bigger impact on future inflation than the difference between the two sides on NHS payrises.
They're shooting themselves in the foot for something that is marginal at an overall economic level. Politically they should be dividing and conquering between the 'worthy' and 'unworthy'.
That's fine, but common-sense morality doesn't determine pay settlements, otherwise nurses would be paid a hundred times more than bankers. For example, train drivers aren't seen as angels, but they clearly enjoy a stronger negotiating position than nurses due to the organisation of their industry. If the government can pay nurses 20%, it can afford 20% for other professions that can negotiate harder. And so on.
Private sector wages are growing by 6.5% and will outpace inflation before long.
Expecting NHS workers to settle for much less is pointless.
As pointed out upthread, the government ought to welcome increases in real wages.
They did, indeed they celebrated them...
... until the government was at risk of having to pay them.
The greater the gap between private sector pay increases (which increase tax revenues thanks to fiscal drag) and public sector pay increases (which increase public spending) the faster the deficit will be reduced.
Given that even private sector wages are falling by several percent in real terms then the government strategy demands an eye-watering real terms cut in public sector pay.
This is the one thing that this government exists to do. If they back down from this strategy it precipitates a major crisis.
Comments
It's the only way to save the Tories.
MTG just voted for him, however. What you might call a mixed blessing?
Keir Starmer: +10% (–)
Rishi Sunak: -4% (-1)
Jeremy Hunt: -9% (–)
Changes +/- 11 December
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-2-3-january-2023 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1610337752070979588/photo/1
I can think of multiple places in the Dales where all that is left is the pub and they exist because of summer tourist trade.
The sense of a country unanchored and ungoverned is vivid. Sunak cannot escape this. The polls do not lie
I wonder if Starmer would win a Rejoin the EU referendum. He might get a majority in 2024 that is so big he feels able to call one, and be confident of winning it
I never thought I would write that. I'm a Leaver so I do not like it. But I can now see it happening
It is also obvious that politicians need to come together across the UK to start the enormous job of making the NHS fit for purpose
My Congresswoman, Pramila Jayapal just voted for Hakeem Jeffries. Then his name was called - big cheer from Dems.
You really want to be able to walk to somewhere to get basic groceries otherwise you’re stuck without a car. An updated reimagining of the French Bar-Tabac could be perfect for smaller settlements: combining the functions of pub, village shop, post office (and in the French case betting shop). They also have the Mairie of course, something we generally lack. And the salle de fêtes (which we do have in church halls). The British rural version could be a cosy micro pub with attached pizza takeaway, farm shop and
bakery, post office and library.
And that shouldn't be in 2024-9... Should it? But then again, it's amazing to look back and see how quickly the 2019 edifice fell apart.
I mean, I'm amazed,and I was the one who said Johnson's term could be ten years or ten days.
It is an excellent idea and brings life to any community
Incumbency bias.
Indeed, possible that he will end up with fewer votes than Hakeem Jeffries for starters, though HJ will also be short of voting majority.
Note that so far, number of members voting "Present" = zero
At that point he might have a unique opportunity to say: This is an unprecedented crisis, we have to radically change course and go back in the EU. I can see him winning that vote at a canter, in these circumstances
And I've always dismissed the idea of Rejoin, until now
Highly gratifying!
https://twitter.com/gd10/status/1605166730745094146?s=61&t=27LsbeFbmn2s0MxKquYdfA
He should agree a deal with the NHS workers and let the rest carry on.
As noted earlier you have to go back to 1979 to find when the winner of the best PM polling did not win the general election. However even then Thatcher only got a majority of less than 50 v Callaghan, it was no landslide
I suppose picking out the embers of hope in the ashes of the latest poll may help but looking at some other parts of the electoral bonfire.
London - Labour 47%, Conservative 27%, LD 14%
Scotland - look for yourself - @StuartDickson will be having a fit.
We talked at the weekend about the Conservative vote retention from 2019 - 57% of the then Conservative vote is still loyal but 20% has gone to Labour and only 11% in the Don't Know category which is less than some other polls have suggested. 7% to Reform and the rest scattered among other parties.
Nonetheless it would be hugely in the interests of the EU, long term, to get the UK back inside
I'm idly speculating here. I do believe Starmer is likely to get an epochal majority. With which he will want to do something drastic and radical. Otherwise, what is the point of politics?
Starmer is a massive Remoaner and a 2nd voter. His instinct will be to take this road, but maybe he will be content with EEA or whatever
What fills the gap that not having basic groceries within walking distance leaves is community. People looking out for each other and making sure their elderly neighbours don't run short of milk.
McCarthy (regular repulsive Rep): 202
Jefferies (Democrat): 211
Biggs (rebel repulsive Rep): 10
Others: 9
Second vote to follow
Sunak doing far better in London than nationally
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_England
Inflation and wage inflation is no problem at all to UK in this situation, but the fall in income is the real problem, and is utterly toxic when it comes to retaining voters. And, very much like you and your thinking, the hardline approach to not talking and settling up what is mere peanuts in the bigger picture will ensure the Tories are smeared all over for decades with the stench of lowering living standards.
Mike is right with the header. The mistake here on needlessly suppressing incomes and living standards by Sunak and his government is the biggest political blunder for decades - this is far more toxic to the Tory brand medium long term than anything Boris done.
https://twitter.com/jasemonkey/status/1609992635292258307?t=D3mTycHUJ_79Zqog1opnIg&s=19
combined pub/shop/coffee shop.
Brejoin in 2040ish can be passed, almost laughed, off as "Our parents screwed up but all that unpleasantness was nothing to do with us. Friends again?" And one thing the EU has always done is be a machine for making bygones, bygones. It's why it was created, really.
The 2025-30 cycle is going to be a bit too soon for that. It's probably psychologically a bit too soon for serious EEA talk. It really would be slinking back having failed in our project. But then you have the will of the people...
Kevin McCarthy will NOT be elected as next Speaker of US House.
Hard-shell wing-nuts garnered 10 votes for their preferred goober.
PLUS the 9 who voted for another un-KMcC option.
Three quick questions:
1. How many of the above, esp. from the 9, might be persuaded to switch to McCarthy on (some) subsequent roll call?
2. How many more sleeper votes (if any) do anti-McCarthyites have to call upon in very near future?
3. How long, or rather how many roll calls, will it take for the soft McCarthy vote to start eroding?
@GoodwinMJ
"we have more than 100 years of making things safe for children. Car seats, seat belts, no cigarette vending machines, fences around pools ... by contrast life went onto phone apps 10 yrs ago & the protections we have for kids are zero, absolutely zero""
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1609283243723083778
Will there still be a Russian Federation? What will be the state of relations with China? What will Poland and Ukraine's relations with France and Germany be like?
The sub sampling is all pointing to Tory vote efficiency declining. And Labour's improving.
Agree that his train travels are fun to watch! (BUT does Sunil feel the same? He's our expert.)
Best tip with Vivino (and indeed most wine retailers) is to order from them once, registering for an account, and then hold back and wait for the offers to arrive..
And don’t forget to order via Quidco for a 6% cash rebate.
Of course, in the furthest reaches of rural Ireland and in rural France, the nearest town is probably further away than in many places in rural England, and so the competition is less.
But our nearest town here is down to its last five pubs, so it's a damn struggle for somewhere less than a twentieth of the size to support one, even combined with other services.
Today I was lucky enough to be part of the essential spreading of the message that a local estate agent chain is "now certified as Net Zero!". They've sent a little boastful leaflet (not really a leaflet, just a piece of card folded in half) to everybody in the area. It has a picture of a girl hugging a globe on the front
All I can say is thank fuck someone's finally taking the carbon footprint of estate agents seriously. I'd been kept up at night worrying about those bastards and their footprints. Once I've delivered them to all 534 addresses on my route, I'll be able to sleep again
I mock them, but they have helped pay my wages so I will try to ensure they're all delivered. Trouble is, they've made them so small - about A6 - that they can and do slide out of bundles of mail quite often
You are not listening are you, you can’t get your head round why this government have been so utterly stupid to have done this, can you?
Till very recently I thought the parliamentary arithmetic of Labour coming from about 200 seats to a working majority would be pretty immpoissible for them. But then this government has made the most stupidest political position of my lifetime, and has made Tories sub 150 seats pretty much nailed on. By settling with the nurses, ambulance people inflation would be 4% or less at next GE - by not settling with them it will be 4% or less at next GE. The same. However, what will actually cost votes at next GE is the incomes gaps, the incomes falls, the fall in living standards, and rather than trying to dodge the blame for that, the Tory leadership have pulled it all over themselves. In front of our eyes here everyday a political party are stitching themselves up for voters struggle to live. It’s the most stupid political mistake I have ever seen.
It’s just like the effective messaging from the Tory 92 camping being used by a government, on itself.
Don’t you get it? Ignore inflation, it’s headed down quickly in any pay scenario you can come up with - and this is not a militant Union winter of discontent Labour out for eighteen years thing the mail was trying to sell - the truth here is the Tories SHOULD WANT to settle these disputes, it’s in their political interest to be seen negotiating and settling, it’s in their political interest to lower the income pain to save votes.
Today's circus in House of Representatives, is almost as entertaining as last year's Liz Trussterfeck in House of Commons.
SNP - 39%
LAB - 22%
CON - 17%
LIB - 16%
The last time the Lib Dems polled 16% across Scotland in an actual election was...
2010 UKGE when they received 18.9% of the vote.
Is thirteen years now the length of a Scottish political generation? Have memories of Lib Dem betrayal faded that quickly?
Expecting NHS workers to settle for much less is pointless.
As pointed out upthread, the government ought to welcome increases in real wages.
If the government give up on it then they'd need to create the fourth economic strategy in six months.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-natural-gas-debts-foreign-currency/32202098.html
A sign of increasing Russian alarm, perhaps? Or merely they can't buy their imported weapons in roubles any more and are running out of foreign currency reserves?
Or, quite possibly, they might just be flailing around making mistakes.
... until the government was at risk of having to pay them.
That alone has probably saved the government more money and had a bigger impact on future inflation than the difference between the two sides on NHS payrises.
They're shooting themselves in the foot for something that is marginal at an overall economic level. Politically they should be dividing and conquering between the 'worthy' and 'unworthy'.
Given that even private sector wages are falling by several percent in real terms then the government strategy demands an eye-watering real terms cut in public sector pay.
This is the one thing that this government exists to do. If they back down from this strategy it precipitates a major crisis.