Good morning all. Mild and breezy day in suburban south Manchester today. Daughters all off happily to school, cats fed, and a day to feel happy and productive. But before I get to the second half of that, an interesting article in Unherd today - while it looks superficially like an opinion piece, there's enough stats in there to be satisfying: https://unherd.com/2023/01/gentrification-is-not-a-sin/
In particular, I think the following is of interest:
"The rising number of middle-class jobs does become an issue if it’s happening faster in some places than others. And this, according to the data-blog cited at the start, is in fact the case. While the blog found that “the professionalisation pattern is clearly visible [beyond] big cities like London”, it also revealed that different areas are professionalising at different speeds. Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester. The rest were mostly commuter towns around the capital, or university cities such as Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick and Exeter.
...
One analysis I conducted in 2021 looked at parliamentary seats according to various deprivation metrics. The 100 English seats with the highest housing deprivation were almost exclusively in London. The 100 seats with the highest employment deprivation were, in most cases, a long way from big cities. Just eight seats featured on both lists (most of them, interestingly, in Birmingham). To put it bluntly, deprivation in half of the UK means you can’t get a decent house, and deprivation in the other half means you can’t get a decent job.
Another interesting element was party politics. Seats with high housing deprivation tended to swing towards Labour between 2010 and 2019. Constituencies with the fewest barriers to housing shifted Tory — including places which are deprived according to most other metrics. And a recent study by Ben Ansell showed a more specific consequence of this. It estimated, at constituency level, support for house-building — a topic that’s become especially charged over the past year. Enthusiasm was greatest in Labour-held city seats with high housing deprivation: places with transient communities, a precarious rental market, visible street homelessness, high internal inequality and pressure on services thanks to overcrowding. Constituencies where gentrification is, as we like to put it these days, “a thing”. Londoners may feel betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm outside the big cities. But is it really a surprise that those with a completely different experience of the housing market are less convinced about the need to build?"
Frustratingly, "Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester" is not sourced - if anyone can find a source I'd be most interested!
It looks like HS2 is going to make the Berlin airport look like a triumph of project management.
There will be many thousands of grifters on well paid contracts who will have made a good living out of it though.
That’s what happens when you delay & delay & delay & delay.
You still need to keep the consulting engineering partners on the payroll, because every delay changes the plans again, plus you need to keep a minimum number of people around otherwise you lose all the instutional knowledge that’s been built up in order to deliver the project at all.
Then you have to rebudget to account for inflationary cost increases. More expense.
HS2 really is UK in a nutshell it seems. Penny wise, pound foolish at every level.
Good morning all. Mild and breezy day in suburban south Manchester today. Daughters all off happily to school, cats fed, and a day to feel happy and productive. But before I get to the second half of that, an interesting article in Unherd today - while it looks superficially like an opinion piece, there's enough stats in there to be satisfying: https://unherd.com/2023/01/gentrification-is-not-a-sin/
In particular, I think the following is of interest:
"The rising number of middle-class jobs does become an issue if it’s happening faster in some places than others. And this, according to the data-blog cited at the start, is in fact the case. While the blog found that “the professionalisation pattern is clearly visible [beyond] big cities like London”, it also revealed that different areas are professionalising at different speeds. Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester. The rest were mostly commuter towns around the capital, or university cities such as Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick and Exeter.
...
One analysis I conducted in 2021 looked at parliamentary seats according to various deprivation metrics. The 100 English seats with the highest housing deprivation were almost exclusively in London. The 100 seats with the highest employment deprivation were, in most cases, a long way from big cities. Just eight seats featured on both lists (most of them, interestingly, in Birmingham). To put it bluntly, deprivation in half of the UK means you can’t get a decent house, and deprivation in the other half means you can’t get a decent job.
Another interesting element was party politics. Seats with high housing deprivation tended to swing towards Labour between 2010 and 2019. Constituencies with the fewest barriers to housing shifted Tory — including places which are deprived according to most other metrics. And a recent study by Ben Ansell showed a more specific consequence of this. It estimated, at constituency level, support for house-building — a topic that’s become especially charged over the past year. Enthusiasm was greatest in Labour-held city seats with high housing deprivation: places with transient communities, a precarious rental market, visible street homelessness, high internal inequality and pressure on services thanks to overcrowding. Constituencies where gentrification is, as we like to put it these days, “a thing”. Londoners may feel betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm outside the big cities. But is it really a surprise that those with a completely different experience of the housing market are less convinced about the need to build?"
Frustratingly, "Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester" is not sourced - if anyone can find a source I'd be most interested!
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Have you not been headhunted by the Saudis yet?
They’re building some insane amount of infrastructure at the moment - but the vast majority of it is on virgin desert. No planning problems, few natural features or existing infrastructure to work around, one man who’s clearly in charge of the project, who wants it built yesterday and clears all the problems out of the way…
A former colleague worked on an engineering project in the middle east, the project involved building a canal through the desert for the purpose of writing the clients name in the ground, so it is visible from space. What I recall happening was they got half way through the project and then he ran out of money, so a canal has been built, but only half of his name is written in to the ground, a totally bizarre situation. You can see it on google earth, but I can't remember exactly where it is and the middle east is a big place!
The French plan and build - look at the TGV decades ago. Similarly with the Japanese, Scandinavians and Germans. Even Italy has a great train system.
France has lots of empty space to build the TGV on.
Part of our challenge is geographic - we are a small, crowded island with a rocky central spine that makes engineering challenging
Part of the challenge may be the way we organise our housing. We don't have lots of low rise city apartment blocks like many countries do. Instead, we tend to have lots of little houses, which take up more space and leave less space for infrastructure. Just a thought - I've no real evidence for this.
It looks like HS2 is going to make the Berlin airport look like a triumph of project management.
There will be many thousands of grifters on well paid contracts who will have made a good living out of it though.
That’s what happens when you delay & delay & delay & delay.
You still need to keep the consulting engineering partners on the payroll, because every delay changes the plans again, plus you need to keep a minimum number of people around otherwise you lose all the instutional knowledge that’s been built up in order to deliver the project at all.
Then you have to rebudget to account for inflationary cost increases. More expense.
HS2 really is UK in a nutshell it seems. Penny wise, pound foolish at every level.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
Here's a way he can win my vote - HS2 has to be committed to because it will be built eventually (just as Crossrail was built eventually after several "cancellations"), it'll just cost more later.
Though given the news with Khan and his toilets last night, I have some doubt over Labour's commitment to public transport.
I'm starting to sympathise with Max's view that we should shoot* the people who make the decisions in the Treasury.
* Something along those lines.
We vote for politicians who make these decisions. We believe their lies and false promises, don't hold them properly to account and choose fantasy over long term slow investment and improvement. Not all of us, of course, but collectively it is us, the public, who put us on this irrational path.
Well, he loves his family but hates everything to do with the royal institution, so whilst punishing him would be petty its not like he would object? He would still have some pull as a former prince.
Well, he loves his family but hates everything to do with the royal institution, so whilst punishing him would be petty its not like he would object? He would still have some pull as a former prince.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Have you not been headhunted by the Saudis yet?
They’re building some insane amount of infrastructure at the moment - but the vast majority of it is on virgin desert. No planning problems, few natural features or existing infrastructure to work around, one man who’s clearly in charge of the project, who wants it built yesterday and clears all the problems out of the way…
A former colleague worked on an engineering project in the middle east, the project involved building a canal through the desert for the purpose of writing the clients name in the ground, so it is visible from space. What I recall happening was they got half way through the project and then he ran out of money, so a canal has been built, but only half of his name is written in to the ground, a totally bizarre situation. You can see it on google earth, but I can't remember exactly where it is and the middle east is a big place!
My father worked on some projects in Saudi Arabia in the 70s (though Indians did the actual work I gather). Sounds like they spent most of their time playing cricket, drinking home made booze, and avoiding the locals. They seem to get more done now.
Still feel the Tories should've picked Penny. Very impressive response to the SNP. Well worth a watch.
Scotland is a nation of victims, says the SNP. No, it’s the nation of Burns, Fleming, Dunlop, McAdam…the Argylls and Lovat’s commandos. The Scottish people march to the fife and drum, not the saddest tune played on the smallest violin. https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1618728805572435970
I'm starting to sympathise with Max's view that we should shoot* the people who make the decisions in the Treasury.
* Something along those lines.
Maybe just fire them?
From a cannon?
Probably more practical than glw's suggestion of shooting them (from a bow*, like an arrow?)
*someone once told me that you shoot an arrow and fire a gun, I see the logic, kinda, but not sure it's a hard and fast rule (afterall, we - or the States - have active shooters, not active firers and they're not, generally, talking about bowmen)
I’ve been to Myanmar before but only the north (over the border from Chiang Rai)
I have to do a visa run out of Bangkok for a few days and I was considering Phnom Penh (which is always fascinating), or maybe Vientiane or Penang - but I’ve been to all those places. And my post Covid motto is ALWAYS TRY NEW (within reason)
Is Rangoon interesting? Food? History? People? I don’t need a combo of Venice and NYC, just somewhere that will be mildly diverting
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Didn't Einstein say that the most powerful force in the universe was compound interest?
I'm starting to sympathise with Max's view that we should shoot* the people who make the decisions in the Treasury.
* Something along those lines.
We vote for politicians who make these decisions. We believe their lies and false promises, don't hold them properly to account and choose fantasy over long term slow investment and improvement. Not all of us, of course, but collectively it is us, the public, who put us on this irrational path.
Well of course someone named NOTA would say that.
It's right though. We actively punish politicians who would attempt hard truths, and whilst they've chosen to go the fantasy route we reward them.
So, I was at the Kyiv railway station and realized there is a DAILY Intercity train to Kramatorsk (30 km from Bakhmut). It is literally a better and faster train than most Amtrak trains. Wow.
I'm starting to sympathise with Max's view that we should shoot* the people who make the decisions in the Treasury.
* Something along those lines.
Maybe just fire them?
From a cannon?
Trebuchet - crewed by giant mutated, intelligent haddock.
The problem isn’t stupid people. It’s systems and organisations that make stupid decisions.
Hence the ESA response to the rise of cheap , reusable space launch - “Don’t fund cheap reasonable launchers because we need that money for our expensive, non-reusable launcher.”
The French plan and build - look at the TGV decades ago. Similarly with the Japanese, Scandinavians and Germans. Even Italy has a great train system.
But as one French politician remarked “when we drain the swamp, we don’t consult the toads”…..
Sums up how the French political classes view the public. Actually sums up how most politicians view the public in most countries. Maybe the French are just more honest about it. Not, however, an attitude we should be encouraging and supporting.
This to my mind says a lot about Harry and Meghan. On finding out Meghan was pregnant they decide to tell their family on the day of Princess Eugenie's wedding. It was Eugenie's big day and not thinking about her just have to spread their own news. Why couldn't they have waited and told them the next day?
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
Both the US and UK are beset with short-termism, in both economic and wider policy. Both have majoritarian voting systems, whereas Europe does not. Go figure.
Still feel the Tories should've picked Penny. Very impressive response to the SNP. Well worth a watch.
Scotland is a nation of victims, says the SNP. No, it’s the nation of Burns, Fleming, Dunlop, McAdam…the Argylls and Lovat’s commandos. The Scottish people march to the fife and drum, not the saddest tune played on the smallest violin. https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1618728805572435970
Too many umms and erms; Penny should get some coaching. As it is, the tweeted version is better than the spoken.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
When I grew up in Denmark, where every station had forests of bikes, mostly unlocked, there was a kid in my class (American) who would routinely steal a bike to get where he wanted to go. He argued that there were so many that one would hardly be missed, and claimed that when convenient he'd return it to the original place when he came back.
I grew up in Belgium where people did (and still do, though not in Bruxelles) just prop their bikes against the outside of their houses next to the front door. The solution is to somehow not have bike theft as a central thwart of the national identity.
I was in Cambridge in the early 90's when the council tried a primitive free bike scheme. It lasted about three days.
As a council spokesman said "not all the bikes have been stolen - half of them are in our workshop because they've been vandalised".
Maybe we really don't deserve nice things.
If, as mentioned, the police don't do anything about solen bikes, why wouldn't they be stolen?
There's a good opportunity in the UK for private sector cime solutions. There's private health to avoid the shitty NHS, but private dicks seem reserved for dodgy divorce cases.
Failing that (or in addition to it) as I've said before, a parallel law enforcement service (elected sheriffs) should be set up, and they should compete for budget. Then the police might get their finger out.
Moral panic news. Obviously rubbish; I've had quite a few cats and none of them have defecated on the floor, except in moments of extreme illness.
Dear God, what are they going to print on April 1sr?
We're not far off the Mail printing photos of clouds shaped like RuPaul and stirring pieces on the marvellous gender rigidity of the Royals.
'The Duke of Wessex has always been a real man..'
Isn't it that an American scare (based on USA classrooms have to have a cat litter tray in case of gun rampage Lockdowns) that's made it here by the magic of social media?
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Have you not been headhunted by the Saudis yet?
They’re building some insane amount of infrastructure at the moment - but the vast majority of it is on virgin desert. No planning problems, few natural features or existing infrastructure to work around, one man who’s clearly in charge of the project, who wants it built yesterday and clears all the problems out of the way…
A former colleague worked on an engineering project in the middle east, the project involved building a canal through the desert for the purpose of writing the clients name in the ground, so it is visible from space. What I recall happening was they got half way through the project and then he ran out of money, so a canal has been built, but only half of his name is written in to the ground, a totally bizarre situation. You can see it on google earth, but I can't remember exactly where it is and the middle east is a big place!
Ha ha. Yes it’s not uncommon for a few wealthy individuals to overstretch themselves on large personal projects. The Saudis have an unfinished 200-storey building, was supposed to be the tallest building in the world, but it’s been stuck at 100 floors for about three years now. There’s also a lot a very big houses that take longer to complete and probably cost a lot more than was expected. The actual government projects though, doing infrastructure and transport, are very well organised and managed. Qatar was a mess though, a lot of the World Cup stuff came very close to not happening.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
Yes, but on the other hand, my town was thrown up by the Victorians in a speculative frenzy in the second-half of the 19th Century. Roads zig zag up and down the hill, supported by walls - one of which collapsed four years ago creating a big crack in a road that had started to slide down the hill. So the road was closed, an award-winning engineering project to shore up the bank to stop it falling onto the homes below and to properly support the road has just been completed, the road re-opening just before Christmas.
At the same time, the council thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the other walls around the town, as part of which a team of engineers came into my garden and started drilling holes in the wall that holds up the road above. What they found, here and across the town, is that these Victorian walls aren't walls at all, in the sense that they have much structural strength - what the Victorians did is create an earth bank, pile their rubble and other building waste up against it, and then put a face on it so that it looks like a wall. Drill through the face and it's a just a pile of building crap.
So we're now into a big project with about fifty walls around the town being strengthened, and there's been a team of engineers outside for a couple of months now, working away drilling metal rods into the wall.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
This is reminiscent of China in the 00s, they got stuff done eye wateringly quickly. It is really best understood as the product of a lack of regulation and a vast amount of cheap labour, and just a general drive to get things done.
It isn't regulation which causes government to take decades to make their mind up about infrastructure projects or half cancel them halfway through.
Though of course the Tories are going to spend much of their energy tinkering with EU law on the statute book for the next year. And will probably make a hash of that, too.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
That's going to be the world's most motley tank regiment, and how they are going to carry and manage all the parts and have people trained to service such a variety of kit will be interesting to see
I’ve been to Myanmar before but only the north (over the border from Chiang Rai)
I have to do a visa run out of Bangkok for a few days and I was considering Phnom Penh (which is always fascinating), or maybe Vientiane or Penang - but I’ve been to all those places. And my post Covid motto is ALWAYS TRY NEW (within reason)
Is Rangoon interesting? Food? History? People? I don’t need a combo of Venice and NYC, just somewhere that will be mildly diverting
Luang Prabang, in N Laos is somewhere “different”. Only place I’ve seen Soviet flags flying for years. Currency is “interesting”, too.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
Yes, but on the other hand, my town was thrown up by the Victorians in a speculative frenzy in the second-half of the 19th Century. Roads zig zag up and down the hill, supported by walls - one of which collapsed four years ago creating a big crack in a road that had started to slide down the hill. So the road was closed, an award-winning engineering project to shore up the bank to stop it falling onto the homes below and to properly support the road has just been completed, the road re-opening just before Christmas...
Given it's taken a century and a half to require remediation, that's hardly 'on the other hand'.
You'd think the binary search part, the whizzing backwards and forwards, would be easy to automate. You might also think the actual looking for the appearance or disappearance of objects would be easy-ish to automate.
I did something like that when I was bored during lockdown and binge-watching Scandi-noir's. Seeing detectives sit for hours and hours going through CCTV footage. So wrote a little thing that just did a very quick & basic motion/object detection of a video stream, spat it out to look at. Then did a 2nd better/detailed run while you looked at the first one so you could see the 'HD' parts of interest.
Possibly quite useful - and if I didn't think it would take 10 years of meetings, procurement rounds and endless bid preparations I'd have considered selling it to the police.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
Yes, but on the other hand, my town was thrown up by the Victorians in a speculative frenzy in the second-half of the 19th Century. Roads zig zag up and down the hill, supported by walls - one of which collapsed four years ago creating a big crack in a road that had started to slide down the hill. So the road was closed, an award-winning engineering project to shore up the bank to stop it falling onto the homes below and to properly support the road has just been completed, the road re-opening just before Christmas.
At the same time, the council thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the other walls around the town, as part of which a team of engineers came into my garden and started drilling holes in the wall that holds up the road above. What they found, here and across the town, is that these Victorian walls aren't walls at all, in the sense that they have much structural strength - what the Victorians did is create an earth bank, pile their rubble and other building waste up against it, and then put a face on it so that it looks like a wall. Drill through the face and it's a just a pile of building crap.
So we're now into a big project with about fifty walls around the town being strengthened, and there's been a team of engineers outside for a couple of months now, working away drilling metal rods into the wall.
They are at least making little new homes for the bees and lizards at the same time...
That Victoria approach to "wall" building was exactly what we found when we did our kitchen extension and looked to replace the retaining wall holding up our neighbour's house and garden (we live on a hill so their house is about two feet higher than ours). There was no wall, just earth and rubble faced with a thin layer of cement! The houses have virtually no foundations either, little wonder there isn't a straight line anywhere in the house.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
That's going to be the world's most motley tank regiment, and how they are going to carry and manage all the parts and have people trained to service such a variety of kit will be interesting to see
They appear to have managed so far with the wide variety of kit that's been sent over.
I can see three possible things through the fog that surrounds this stuff:
*) Their mechanics and techies learn enough to keep/get things running, including a heck of a lot of improvisation.
*) 'Normal' peacetime maintenance goes out the window in what, for the Ukrainians, is total war. Maintenance that may extend the life of an engine to 20,000 hours isn't done because the kit probably won't last that long.
*) Neighbouring countries are doing a heck of a lot of the difficult / time-consuming maintenance and refurbishment. I can image General Dynamics moving a fair few extra people into Poland, for instance.
This isn't to denigrate the Ukrainians or their technical skills; it's just that they need to concentrate on keeping things going for the next few months, not thinking of the state it will be in at the beginning of 2024.
This isn't as true for more complex systems, such as missile systems or planes.
As an aside, there were several reports from late last year that the Russians were fielding tanks that, in some cases, could hardly move, had no sighting systems. or main guns that did not work.
It's sh*t, but needs must in war, and their presence may still be useful.
Bit by bit HS2 has gone from being something that might be worth it to just being a complete and utter waste of money. Once again Treasury groupthink strikes again. Sack the lot of them.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
That's going to be the world's most motley tank regiment, and how they are going to carry and manage all the parts and have people trained to service such a variety of kit will be interesting to see
More T72s isn't going to exacerbate the problem. The French Leclerc, which they're considering sending, on the other hand...
FWIW, it sounds as though they won't get the Abrams until the end of the year at the earliest, so we're really just talking about a large number of Leopards, and a handful of Challengers - which might end up as a reserve for defending some strategic point.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons.
If we want to take freight off roads, which roads particularly need it off them, what freight needs to go where, and what does the solution look like? If we need extra rail capacity, where do we need it, where will we need it in 50 years and who will need to go where? Damn sure those answers will NOT be spending 100 billion on HS2, they will be smaller, more focused, and cheaper projects, that might actually work.
This was always a grandiose EU project, linking the entire continent by rail - that's why it has limped on like the black knight regardless of mounting evidence that it's shit. That's also why it's not a great infrastructure solution for the UK, same way that the electricity interconnectors to the EU are not a great energy solution for the UK. We left the EU because things that were done for the EU as a whole happened to be bad for the UK. It's time our political class woke up to that fact, stopped keeping everything in aspick for the glorious day when they plan to give back control and be feted by Ursula at the 8 course gala dinner. If they hate the UK that much, fuck off and retire, otherwise get with the programme.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
If the Czechs and Poles can refurb T-72s, the Ukranians probably have a steady supply of caputured Russian ones they can send the other way. They’ll be much easier to operate and maintain than the Western tanks, if not quite as capable.
The French plan and build - look at the TGV decades ago. Similarly with the Japanese, Scandinavians and Germans. Even Italy has a great train system.
But as one French politician remarked “when we drain the swamp, we don’t consult the toads”…..
Sums up how the French political classes view the public. Actually sums up how most politicians view the public in most countries. Maybe the French are just more honest about it. Not, however, an attitude we should be encouraging and supporting.
On truly essential large projects it might be. It shouldn't be so hard to take strategic decisions.
Bit by bit HS2 has gone from being something that might be worth it to just being a complete and utter waste of money. Once again Treasury groupthink strikes again. Sack the lot of them.
It was always a complete and utter waste of money. This is just reality catching up.
Bit by bit HS2 has gone from being something that might be worth it to just being a complete and utter waste of money. Once again Treasury groupthink strikes again. Sack the lot of them.
It's tempting to think of this in terms of the sunk costs fallacy, and maybe the Treasury are. But this is yet another unforced political error too; an open goal for Labour to say 'we'll actually finish HS2 and not leave it as a white elephant shuttle from Neasden to Birmingham Airport'.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
That's going to be the world's most motley tank regiment, and how they are going to carry and manage all the parts and have people trained to service such a variety of kit will be interesting to see
More T72s isn't going to exacerbate the problem. The French Leclerc, which they're considering sending, on the other hand...
FWIW, it sounds as though they won't get the Abrams until the end of the year at the earliest, so we're really just talking about a large number of Leopards, and a handful of Challengers - which might end up as a reserve for defending some strategic point.
I'd be amazed if some Abrams were not in Ukraine by April. Yes, the noise is that it will take a really long time, but I do wonder if that's just a little American maskirovka.
Bit by bit HS2 has gone from being something that might be worth it to just being a complete and utter waste of money. Once again Treasury groupthink strikes again. Sack the lot of them.
It was always a complete and utter waste of money. This is just reality catching up.
No it was a worthwhile project - but the Trasury are unable to calculate the benefits of frequent local train services (although you only have to look at London compared to say Leeds to see the benefits) so they gave them a value of £0 and ignored them.
Bit by bit HS2 has gone from being something that might be worth it to just being a complete and utter waste of money. Once again Treasury groupthink strikes again. Sack the lot of them.
It's tempting to think of this in terms of the sunk costs fallacy, and maybe the Treasury are. But this is yet another unforced political error too; an open goal for Labour to say 'we'll actually finish HS2 and not leave it as a white elephant shuttle from Neasden to Birmingham Airport'.
Hopefully you mean 'finish' in the Mortak Kombat sense.
I’ve been to Myanmar before but only the north (over the border from Chiang Rai)
I have to do a visa run out of Bangkok for a few days and I was considering Phnom Penh (which is always fascinating), or maybe Vientiane or Penang - but I’ve been to all those places. And my post Covid motto is ALWAYS TRY NEW (within reason)
Is Rangoon interesting? Food? History? People? I don’t need a combo of Venice and NYC, just somewhere that will be mildly diverting
Luang Prabang, in N Laos is somewhere “different”. Only place I’ve seen Soviet flags flying for years. Currency is “interesting”, too.
I rather liked Luang Prabang, though we slept through the main attraction. The Buddhist monks turn out en masse at 06:30 every morning in an orgy of drum-assisted pan-handling. Apparently dollars are also welcome.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
Smart move by the UK government to be first to announce in this round, gets good press and can look like it shifted others.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons..
Nonsense. The WCML is on the point of being full. We need a new rail line to deal with that problem. Surely it's obvious we should build the best reail line we can?
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
Bit by bit HS2 has gone from being something that might be worth it to just being a complete and utter waste of money. Once again Treasury groupthink strikes again. Sack the lot of them.
The Treasury needs to be abolished and the tasks it performs split into completely seperate entities. Problem is it increaaes the power of No 10 and reduces the power of the Chancellor so while it's usually something a Labour Government looks it it wasn't done in 1997 due to the relationship between Brown and Blair (which had problems even then).
Still feel the Tories should've picked Penny. Very impressive response to the SNP. Well worth a watch.
Scotland is a nation of victims, says the SNP. No, it’s the nation of Burns, Fleming, Dunlop, McAdam…the Argylls and Lovat’s commandos. The Scottish people march to the fife and drum, not the saddest tune played on the smallest violin. https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1618728805572435970
A brilliant line, but I find her constant 'umming' and 'erring' really annoying. David Davis levels of annoying.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons..
Nonsense. The WCML is on the point of being full. We need a new rail line to deal with that problem. Surely it's obvious we should build the best reail line we can?
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
Until a short time before the pandemic I travelled regularly on the West Coast Main Line, and I don't think I often saw more than a quarter of the seats occupied.
I’ve been to Myanmar before but only the north (over the border from Chiang Rai)
I have to do a visa run out of Bangkok for a few days and I was considering Phnom Penh (which is always fascinating), or maybe Vientiane or Penang - but I’ve been to all those places. And my post Covid motto is ALWAYS TRY NEW (within reason)
Is Rangoon interesting? Food? History? People? I don’t need a combo of Venice and NYC, just somewhere that will be mildly diverting
Luang Prabang, in N Laos is somewhere “different”. Only place I’ve seen Soviet flags flying for years.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons..
Nonsense. The WCML is on the point of being full. We need a new rail line to deal with that problem. Surely it's obvious we should build the best reail line we can?
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
Until a short time before the pandemic I travelled regularly on the West Coast Main Line, and I don't think I often saw more than a quarter of the seats occupied.
Really? I also often travelled on the WCML at various points and I very seldom saw a train that wasn't standing room only. That includes the semi-fast from Crewe to Euston via Nuneaton and Northampton.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons..
Nonsense. The WCML is on the point of being full. We need a new rail line to deal with that problem. Surely it's obvious we should build the best reail line we can?
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
Until a short time before the pandemic I travelled regularly on the West Coast Main Line, and I don't think I often saw more than a quarter of the seats occupied.
The line being full of trains doesn't have to mean that the trains are full.
I’ve been to Myanmar before but only the north (over the border from Chiang Rai)
I have to do a visa run out of Bangkok for a few days and I was considering Phnom Penh (which is always fascinating), or maybe Vientiane or Penang - but I’ve been to all those places. And my post Covid motto is ALWAYS TRY NEW (within reason)
Is Rangoon interesting? Food? History? People? I don’t need a combo of Venice and NYC, just somewhere that will be mildly diverting
Luang Prabang, in N Laos is somewhere “different”. Only place I’ve seen Soviet flags flying for years. Currency is “interesting”, too.
I rather liked Luang Prabang, though we slept through the main attraction. The Buddhist monks turn out en masse at 06:30 every morning in an orgy of drum-assisted pan-handling. Apparently dollars are also welcome.
Luang is lovely. Been there several times. It is pricey now because it is trendy and cute
But I fancy something new….
I hear Burmese food is shite (quite an achievement in indochina) but I can always eat Indian curries
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
Smart move by the UK government to be first to announce in this round, gets good press and can look like it shifted others.
It's also a bit unfair. Several eastern European countries had given useful numbers of ex-Soviet tanks to Ukraine last year; allegedly not all of these were acknowledged. We're obsessing with modern 'western' tanks, but those donations were probably just as important.
Also, kit is turning up in Ukraine that no-one openly admits to. Allegedly Belgian M113A1 are now in Ukraine, having been purchased from a private Belgian company by the UK.
And never to forget one of Ukraine's biggest arms suppliers: Russia...
Still feel the Tories should've picked Penny. Very impressive response to the SNP. Well worth a watch.
Scotland is a nation of victims, says the SNP. No, it’s the nation of Burns, Fleming, Dunlop, McAdam…the Argylls and Lovat’s commandos. The Scottish people march to the fife and drum, not the saddest tune played on the smallest violin. https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1618728805572435970
A brilliant line, but I find her constant 'umming' and 'erring' really annoying. David Davis levels of annoying.
It's an enduring problem, though. We tend to be swayed by people who are fluent and lucid, not always to our advantage. I won't bother to mention them by name.
Still feel the Tories should've picked Penny. Very impressive response to the SNP. Well worth a watch.
Scotland is a nation of victims, says the SNP. No, it’s the nation of Burns, Fleming, Dunlop, McAdam…the Argylls and Lovat’s commandos. The Scottish people march to the fife and drum, not the saddest tune played on the smallest violin. https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1618728805572435970
A brilliant line, but I find her constant 'umming' and 'erring' really annoying. David Davis levels of annoying.
It's an enduring problem, though. We tend to be swayed by people who are fluent and lucid, not always to our advantage. I won't bother to mention them by name.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
Both the US and UK are beset with short-termism, in both economic and wider policy. Both have majoritarian voting systems, whereas Europe does not. Go figure.
Europe is by no means immune to these white elephants and projects with massive overruns. Someone has already mentioned Berlin Brandenburg Airport which makes Crossrail look like planning and execution perfection. Also in Germany is the Stuttgart 21 rail project which is currently 6 years late and nearly 4 x over budget. Then there is the Flamanville EPR project 11 years late and currently 5 x over budget.
There are plenty of other projects in a similar state with some of them highlighted by the EU Court of Auditors.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
When I grew up in Denmark, where every station had forests of bikes, mostly unlocked, there was a kid in my class (American) who would routinely steal a bike to get where he wanted to go. He argued that there were so many that one would hardly be missed, and claimed that when convenient he'd return it to the original place when he came back.
I grew up in Belgium where people did (and still do, though not in Bruxelles) just prop their bikes against the outside of their houses next to the front door. The solution is to somehow not have bike theft as a central thwart of the national identity.
I was in Cambridge in the early 90's when the council tried a primitive free bike scheme. It lasted about three days.
As a council spokesman said "not all the bikes have been stolen - half of them are in our workshop because they've been vandalised".
Maybe we really don't deserve nice things.
If, as mentioned, the police don't do anything about solen bikes, why wouldn't they be stolen?
There's a good opportunity in the UK for private sector cime solutions. There's private health to avoid the shitty NHS, but private dicks seem reserved for dodgy divorce cases.
Failing that (or in addition to it) as I've said before, a parallel law enforcement service (elected sheriffs) should be set up, and they should compete for budget. Then the police might get their finger out.
A chap I worked lived in a village where a hedge fund big wheel also lived.
The big cheese got annoyed with the constant petty unsolved crime. So he hired 24/7 security - for the village. Couple of security guards in not quite police uniforms, in a car that wasn’t quite a police car.
They drove around photographing the local scumbags. Which kind of embarrassed them out of committing crime.
The local police took umbrage. They launched a campaign of arresting, questioning the security guards and generally harassing them.
So the story goes, a moderately senior police officer showed up at the big cheese’s house and told him this would go on until he got rid of the private security. The reply was “I’ve got no problem with what you are doing. Gets the police in the village”.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
Smart move by the UK government to be first to announce in this round, gets good press and can look like it shifted others.
It's also a bit unfair. Several eastern European countries had given useful numbers of ex-Soviet tanks to Ukraine last year; allegedly not all of these were acknowledged. We're obsessing with modern 'western' tanks, but those donations were probably just as important.
Also, kit is turning up in Ukraine that no-one openly admits to. Allegedly Belgian M113A1 are now in Ukraine, having been purchased from a private Belgian company by the UK.
And never to forget one of Ukraine's biggest arms suppliers: Russia...
A tranche of M109s was from a Belgian company that has bought the entire Belgian army complement when they were surplused.
They bought for Ukraine by various nations, including the U.K.
Why is he talking about that gloriously crap Cornwall space launch?
There you go - you DECLINEST - enemy of our nation. We need “Hunt Hoickism” because it’s not any government mismanagement that’s got us here, but all those opposition to government people talking us down drags us down with a declinist mindset.
Take Starmer as a perfect example. When has he ever said any good news at PMQs? All he does is try to find something that’s not going well at the moment and big it up - all the good things going well only get reported by the MPs sitting behind the Tory front bench.
With “Hunt Hoickism” we can positive think positive talk our way out of the country’s current problems. Simples.
He’s a Chancellor and he’s very rich, so he knows what he’s doing - such people are natural leaders of a country.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons..
Nonsense. The WCML is on the point of being full. We need a new rail line to deal with that problem. Surely it's obvious we should build the best reail line we can?
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
No, it's not obvious at all, either that a new rail line is the solution, or if it is the solution, that we must build 'the best rail line we can'. The fact that you've made these starting assumptions shows your thinking on this to be naive at best.
As for capacity, evidence please. Not as part of an HS2 justification, proper comparative figures, alongside the fullness or otherwise of all the other rail lines, and roads. Does this evidence take into account future improvements in virtual meetings, which would affect the main reason for city to city travel other than leisure?
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
Yes, but on the other hand, my town was thrown up by the Victorians in a speculative frenzy in the second-half of the 19th Century. Roads zig zag up and down the hill, supported by walls - one of which collapsed four years ago creating a big crack in a road that had started to slide down the hill. So the road was closed, an award-winning engineering project to shore up the bank to stop it falling onto the homes below and to properly support the road has just been completed, the road re-opening just before Christmas.
At the same time, the council thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the other walls around the town, as part of which a team of engineers came into my garden and started drilling holes in the wall that holds up the road above. What they found, here and across the town, is that these Victorian walls aren't walls at all, in the sense that they have much structural strength - what the Victorians did is create an earth bank, pile their rubble and other building waste up against it, and then put a face on it so that it looks like a wall. Drill through the face and it's a just a pile of building crap.
So we're now into a big project with about fifty walls around the town being strengthened, and there's been a team of engineers outside for a couple of months now, working away drilling metal rods into the wall.
They are at least making little new homes for the bees and lizards at the same time...
That Victoria approach to "wall" building was exactly what we found when we did our kitchen extension and looked to replace the retaining wall holding up our neighbour's house and garden (we live on a hill so their house is about two feet higher than ours). There was no wall, just earth and rubble faced with a thin layer of cement! The houses have virtually no foundations either, little wonder there isn't a straight line anywhere in the house.
Yep, and my whole town is like that. The Victorians just dug a trench and then started off by laying a row of bricks in it.
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
That's going to be the world's most motley tank regiment, and how they are going to carry and manage all the parts and have people trained to service such a variety of kit will be interesting to see
More T72s isn't going to exacerbate the problem. The French Leclerc, which they're considering sending, on the other hand...
FWIW, it sounds as though they won't get the Abrams until the end of the year at the earliest, so we're really just talking about a large number of Leopards, and a handful of Challengers - which might end up as a reserve for defending some strategic point.
They might earmark the Challengers for securing the H19 road out of Sevastopol...
Morocco is delivering 20 refurbished (by the Czechs) T-72B tanks to Ukraine. As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
That's going to be the world's most motley tank regiment, and how they are going to carry and manage all the parts and have people trained to service such a variety of kit will be interesting to see
More T72s isn't going to exacerbate the problem. The French Leclerc, which they're considering sending, on the other hand...
FWIW, it sounds as though they won't get the Abrams until the end of the year at the earliest, so we're really just talking about a large number of Leopards, and a handful of Challengers - which might end up as a reserve for defending some strategic point.
They might earmark the Challengers for securing the H19 road out of Sevastopol...
Given the collection of tanks the Ukrainians are operating already, 3 more types won’t be the end of the world.
MPs have been saying privately that they think Zahawi is doomed and they don’t want to be seen to be backing a ‘dead man walking’. They’ve grown bored over the past year of defending dud policies and people in their party, only for a screeching handbrake turn a day or so later. One MP defending a particularly egregious policy on the radio discovered the inevitable U-turn had taken place while he was in the studio, and vowed never to bother being loyal again.
The problem...though, is that voter boredom might not be because people don’t want politics in their lives to the extent it has been forced on them recently. It may instead be because they don’t want the Conservatives in their lives any more.
The psychodrama of the previous year made boring necessary. But Sunak needs to give his MPs a sense that they’re fighting for the right cause and that he’s got fire in his belly too. Bored voters are one thing, but a party that’s bored of governing is quite another.
Slight correction, its not most people dont want tories. Most of us see all politicians from all parties as crap. I frankly no longer give a shit who is elected next because they won't fix anything anyway merely make our lives slightly more miserable.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The question isn't why wasn't it approved earlier, it's why hasn't it been totally canned earlier, and indeed why was it ever conceived. Granted, a new railway line will take some trains off old railway lines and some freight off the road - but these are justifications after the fact, not reasons..
Nonsense. The WCML is on the point of being full. We need a new rail line to deal with that problem. Surely it's obvious we should build the best reail line we can?
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
Until a short time before the pandemic I travelled regularly on the West Coast Main Line, and I don't think I often saw more than a quarter of the seats occupied.
Really? I also often travelled on the WCML at various points and I very seldom saw a train that wasn't standing room only. That includes the semi-fast from Crewe to Euston via Nuneaton and Northampton.
I should think I travelled on that line about 60 times in the period from 2013 to the pandemic. I seem to remember one occasion when I had to stand, when there were really serious problems.
Comments
Obviously rubbish; I've had quite a few cats and none of them have defecated on the floor, except in moments of extreme illness.
Mild and breezy day in suburban south Manchester today. Daughters all off happily to school, cats fed, and a day to feel happy and productive.
But before I get to the second half of that, an interesting article in Unherd today - while it looks superficially like an opinion piece, there's enough stats in there to be satisfying:
https://unherd.com/2023/01/gentrification-is-not-a-sin/
In particular, I think the following is of interest:
"The rising number of middle-class jobs does become an issue if it’s happening faster in some places than others. And this, according to the data-blog cited at the start, is in fact the case. While the blog found that “the professionalisation pattern is clearly visible [beyond] big cities like London”, it also revealed that different areas are professionalising at different speeds. Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester. The rest were mostly commuter towns around the capital, or university cities such as Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick and Exeter.
...
One analysis I conducted in 2021 looked at parliamentary seats according to various deprivation metrics. The 100 English seats with the highest housing deprivation were almost exclusively in London. The 100 seats with the highest employment deprivation were, in most cases, a long way from big cities. Just eight seats featured on both lists (most of them, interestingly, in Birmingham). To put it bluntly, deprivation in half of the UK means you can’t get a decent house, and deprivation in the other half means you can’t get a decent job.
Another interesting element was party politics. Seats with high housing deprivation tended to swing towards Labour between 2010 and 2019. Constituencies with the fewest barriers to housing shifted Tory — including places which are deprived according to most other metrics. And a recent study by Ben Ansell showed a more specific consequence of this. It estimated, at constituency level, support for house-building — a topic that’s become especially charged over the past year. Enthusiasm was greatest in Labour-held city seats with high housing deprivation: places with transient communities, a precarious rental market, visible street homelessness, high internal inequality and pressure on services thanks to overcrowding. Constituencies where gentrification is, as we like to put it these days, “a thing”. Londoners may feel betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm outside the big cities. But is it really a surprise that those with a completely different experience of the housing market are less convinced about the need to build?"
Frustratingly, "Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester" is not sourced - if anyone can find a source I'd be most interested!
You still need to keep the consulting engineering partners on the payroll, because every delay changes the plans again, plus you need to keep a minimum number of people around otherwise you lose all the instutional knowledge that’s been built up in order to deliver the project at all.
Then you have to rebudget to account for inflationary cost increases. More expense.
HS2 really is UK in a nutshell it seems. Penny wise, pound foolish at every level.
Before Spare unlike most British voters most Americans thought they should keep their royal titles
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1618624991171411968?s=20&t=31eIQNPiH5EKduvqMa2MMA
Though given the news with Khan and his toilets last night, I have some doubt over Labour's commitment to public transport.
* Something along those lines.
“the best tax cut right now is a cut in inflation”
https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1618905100415602689
Scotland is a nation of victims, says the SNP. No, it’s the nation of Burns, Fleming, Dunlop, McAdam…the Argylls and Lovat’s commandos. The Scottish people march to the fife and drum, not the saddest tune played on the smallest violin.
https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1618728805572435970
*someone once told me that you shoot an arrow and fire a gun, I see the logic, kinda, but not sure it's a hard and fast rule (afterall, we - or the States - have active shooters, not active firers and they're not, generally, talking about bowmen)
Has anyone ever been to Yangon/Rangoon?
I’ve been to Myanmar before but only the north (over the border from Chiang Rai)
I have to do a visa run out of Bangkok for a few days and I was considering Phnom Penh (which is always fascinating), or maybe Vientiane or Penang - but I’ve been to all those places. And my post Covid motto is ALWAYS TRY NEW (within reason)
Is Rangoon interesting? Food? History? People? I don’t need a combo of Venice and NYC, just somewhere that will be mildly diverting
It's right though. We actively punish politicians who would attempt hard truths, and whilst they've chosen to go the fantasy route we reward them.
I need to write a 🧵 on 🇺🇦 railway during the war.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mxpoliakov/status/1618874805964664832
The problem isn’t stupid people. It’s systems and organisations that make stupid decisions.
Hence the ESA response to the rise of cheap , reusable space launch - “Don’t fund cheap reasonable launchers because we need that money for our expensive, non-reusable launcher.”
https://www.gbnews.uk/royal/prince-harry-reveals-charles-william-and-kates-instant-reactions-to-meghan-markles-pregnancy/431880
Meanwhile, in unreality TV news...
Nadine Dorries is hosting a new weekly show on Fridays on Talk TV - and her first guest will be... Boris Johnson
https://twitter.com/breeallegretti/status/1618897197717676032
'The Duke of Wessex has always been a real man..'
There's a good opportunity in the UK for private sector cime solutions. There's private health to avoid the shitty NHS, but private dicks seem reserved for dodgy divorce cases.
Failing that (or in addition to it) as I've said before, a parallel law enforcement service (elected sheriffs) should be set up, and they should compete for budget. Then the police might get their finger out.
It's the only one we got
Not much of a launch site
Never seem to get aloft
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/26/politics/adam-schiff-california-senate-campaign/index.html
https://www.geplus.co.uk/features/retaining-walls-on-the-case-of-a-collapse-on-the-isle-of-wight-09-03-2022/
At the same time, the council thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the other walls around the town, as part of which a team of engineers came into my garden and started drilling holes in the wall that holds up the road above. What they found, here and across the town, is that these Victorian walls aren't walls at all, in the sense that they have much structural strength - what the Victorians did is create an earth bank, pile their rubble and other building waste up against it, and then put a face on it so that it looks like a wall. Drill through the face and it's a just a pile of building crap.
So we're now into a big project with about fifty walls around the town being strengthened, and there's been a team of engineers outside for a couple of months now, working away drilling metal rods into the wall.
https://islandroads.com/structures-programme/
They are at least making little new homes for the bees and lizards at the same time...
As well as 14 Leopard tanks, Poland is sending 60 more PT-91 tanks (a heavily modernised T-72)
This is starting to get into the 'really useful' numbers category.
Though of course the Tories are going to spend much of their energy tinkering with EU law on the statute book for the next year. And will probably make a hash of that, too.
Possibly quite useful - and if I didn't think it would take 10 years of meetings, procurement rounds and endless bid preparations I'd have considered selling it to the police.
I can see three possible things through the fog that surrounds this stuff:
*) Their mechanics and techies learn enough to keep/get things running, including a heck of a lot of improvisation.
*) 'Normal' peacetime maintenance goes out the window in what, for the Ukrainians, is total war. Maintenance that may extend the life of an engine to 20,000 hours isn't done because the kit probably won't last that long.
*) Neighbouring countries are doing a heck of a lot of the difficult / time-consuming maintenance and refurbishment. I can image General Dynamics moving a fair few extra people into Poland, for instance.
This isn't to denigrate the Ukrainians or their technical skills; it's just that they need to concentrate on keeping things going for the next few months, not thinking of the state it will be in at the beginning of 2024.
This isn't as true for more complex systems, such as missile systems or planes.
As an aside, there were several reports from late last year that the Russians were fielding tanks that, in some cases, could hardly move, had no sighting systems. or main guns that did not work.
It's sh*t, but needs must in war, and their presence may still be useful.
The French Leclerc, which they're considering sending, on the other hand...
FWIW, it sounds as though they won't get the Abrams until the end of the year at the earliest, so we're really just talking about a large number of Leopards, and a handful of Challengers - which might end up as a reserve for defending some strategic point.
If we want to take freight off roads, which roads particularly need it off them, what freight needs to go where, and what does the solution look like? If we need extra rail capacity, where do we need it, where will we need it in 50 years and who will need to go where? Damn sure those answers will NOT be spending 100 billion on HS2, they will be smaller, more focused, and cheaper projects, that might actually work.
This was always a grandiose EU project, linking the entire continent by rail - that's why it has limped on like the black knight regardless of mounting evidence that it's shit. That's also why it's not a great infrastructure solution for the UK, same way that the electricity interconnectors to the EU are not a great energy solution for the UK. We left the EU because things that were done for the EU as a whole happened to be bad for the UK. It's time our political class woke up to that fact, stopped keeping everything in aspick for the glorious day when they plan to give back control and be feted by Ursula at the 8 course gala dinner. If they hate the UK that much, fuck off and retire, otherwise get with the programme.
Still, it's an ill wind. This could be a major boost for Old Oak Common.
The rest of your post is just Europhobic paranoia.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-64400776
https://littlebuddythecat.com/2022/01/26/are-schools-forced-to-accommodate-kids-who-identify-as-cats/
This thread has done the decent thing and resigned
But I fancy something new….
I hear Burmese food is shite (quite an achievement in indochina) but I can always eat Indian curries
Also, kit is turning up in Ukraine that no-one openly admits to. Allegedly Belgian M113A1 are now in Ukraine, having been purchased from a private Belgian company by the UK.
And never to forget one of Ukraine's biggest arms suppliers: Russia...
There are plenty of other projects in a similar state with some of them highlighted by the EU Court of Auditors.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/transport/news/europes-transport-mega-projects-over-budget-and-delayed-says-eu-watchdog/
This is by no means a purely Anglophile/Majoritarian issue as you seem to imply.
The big cheese got annoyed with the constant petty unsolved crime. So he hired 24/7 security - for the village. Couple of security guards in not quite police uniforms, in a car that wasn’t quite a police car.
They drove around photographing the local scumbags. Which kind of embarrassed them out of committing crime.
The local police took umbrage. They launched a campaign of arresting, questioning the security guards and generally harassing them.
So the story goes, a moderately senior police officer showed up at the big cheese’s house and told him this would go on until he got rid of the private security. The reply was “I’ve got no problem with what you are doing. Gets the police in the village”.
They bought for Ukraine by various nations, including the U.K.
Take Starmer as a perfect example. When has he ever said any good news at PMQs? All he does is try to find something that’s not going well at the moment and big it up - all the good things going well only get reported by the MPs sitting behind the Tory front bench.
With “Hunt Hoickism” we can positive think positive talk our way out of the country’s current problems. Simples.
He’s a Chancellor and he’s very rich, so he knows what he’s doing - such people are natural leaders of a country.
As for capacity, evidence please. Not as part of an HS2 justification, proper comparative figures, alongside the fullness or otherwise of all the other rail lines, and roads. Does this evidence take into account future improvements in virtual meetings, which would affect the main reason for city to city travel other than leisure?