Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
Just over 3 and a half years ago Boris Johnson made the disgraced national security risk Priti Patel Home Secretary.
Just over 6 months ago Sunak made the disgraced national security risk Suella Braverman Home Secretary.
Tell that to John Rentoul then
Looking at the tweet, plenty of people have made that point (or worse).
It's perfectly valid for criticise Starmer's choices 2015-20. But only if you are prepared to criticise Sunak for making some worse choices (campaigning for Johnson in Summer 2019 when other Conservative leadership candidates were available) and enacting terrible choices while in power (Braverman etc).
Not to airbrush out Sunak’s time as chancellor. Sunak’s personal record of getting value for tax payer money by fighting waste and fraud is probably the worst record ever, it’s an utterly shocking list of waste and failure, eat out to help out, Covid loans fraud, not just tens of billions of tax payer money throw away but he funded criminal enterprises by just handing it out to them! and now threat to the UK economy of his dodgy Financial Services Compensation Scheme go the way of the Silicon valley bank. wherever there has been proper sleaze and government corruption in recent years - especially around covid contracts and other schemes enriching Tories and their friends, Sunak has been at the heart of it this, enabling it as chancellor waving things through VIP lanes, eventing schemes, signing loans off.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I think there is a 20% chance that Sunak will be PM after the next election. The big issue is that the swing voters are accepting of Sunak but not of the Tory party. So it depends which prevails. This partly depends on labour of course. The several million Tory votes he needs can be put off by a leader (Jezza perhaps) and also by the party (the twenty or so MPs who can lose it for Labour by being the people they are).
Sunak can't deliver the party. They are just tainted. SKS intends to deliver leader+ party to the disaffected Tory voters. If he does I think he will be next PM.
Scotland (barring a Tory miracle) makes little difference to next PM. There has to be one. The SNP will not enable a Tory PM. By default it will enable a Labour one.
Up from 10%, heading to 30%.....
I haven't voted Tory in the last two GEs. I like Sunak and will vote Tory at the next one because I am fearful of a Labour Majority even though I quite like Starmer. Whether I am representative of other Tory "returners" I am not sure.
How was your brief stay at the Right Side Of History motel?
It was nice having you. Perhaps see you again one day.
As a centrist yourself you should be pleased that centrists such as myself are helping to return the Conservative Party to sanity in the same way I was pleased for Labour when they elected Starmer.
Joking aside, @kinabalu , did you consider yourself to be on the right side of history when a load of antisemites and communists held sway in the Labour Party, or did you just hold your nose and still tribally vote for them anyway?
Me a centrist? Hmm, dunno about that. If I were I'd have felt queasy voting for Labour under Jez but in all honesty I didn't. I wouldn't call this 'tribal' (although I suppose I am, a bit), it's more I'll always vote (either directly or tactically) for the main party of the Left to get into government (I don't do protest votes) and thus far this has always been the Labour Party. If the main party of the Left ever becomes a different party I'd change my vote to them.
The reluctance of public bodies to invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure might well be attributed to the "bionic duckweed" phenomenon noted by Roger Ford (linked upthread)
Why install chargers if the future is instead hydrogen (or something else) ?
Might also be related to their having no cash. A problem which government (and in many cases only government) can at the moment solve.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I actually agree with @HYUFD as I think Starmer will struggle against him
I'm with @Luckyguy1983 on this. Sunak wasn't able to persuade his party to ignore the Siren Call of Truss last summer, which is one reason they're in the mess they are now (OK, I admit that LG probably doesn't agree with that bit).
Sunak's background is finance, where the numbers do the persuasion for him. Nothing wrong with thinking in numbers, it's what I instinctively do. But when it comes to persuading lay neutrals of a case, Starmer is more effective because law means he has done it more for longer.
The difference is Sunak is optimistic and positive. whereas Starmer is all negative and doom and gloom and wholly uninspiring
And that's the million dollar question.
By next autumn, life for Mr, Mrs, Mx, Dr etc Average will either be noticeably better or it won't.
If it is, then game on, sure. The recent improvement in Conservative standing started when Sunak had a run of policy wins- Windsor, nurses' pay, new boats plan.
If not, and some of the wins are already unraveling, then Sunak's sunny optimism is just going to annoy people.
The wins aren't unravelling at all. Windsor was such a comprehensive win, all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on. On top of this, he added the major success of CPTPP accession.
In terms of dangers, the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through. If I were him, I would replace Braverman with May to have someone who has actually delivered in this area. Then he needs to avoid stupid help the rich policies like inheritance tax reductions.
“all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on”
Wrong again Will. I’m not moving on, the negative elements of Windsor will become clearer over time. Firstly, what was the point of striking a deal that didn’t restore Stormont? The deal should have been the leverage to solve that problem, unless you think the lack of democratic assembly is no problem at all and isn’t playing into the hands of SF with each passing minute? Secondly the problem elements with Windsor was always what will happen over time now we have handed EU the power to move NI further away from mainland Brexit and closer to the Republics EU membership, or EU unilaterally junk Windsor if not getting their way on doing that. Quite a lot was conceded for no very little gain is how history will know this deal.
“the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through.” What do you actually mean by further immigration policy to make sure impact of the boats promise goes through? What are you opaquely referring to?
We owe the DUP a big debt of gratitude for standing up to bullying from everyone, the NI Secretary, Sunak, Biden, and even the Clintons, to hold on to their red lines. It is a spectacularly poor negotiated outcome for NI, when we genuinely did 'hold the cards' - at least a good portion of them. Sunak is weak. His weakness endangers our country.
Straight after he shook hands with the EU on the EU offer Boris and Truss rejected as not good remotely good enough for UK, Sunak didn’t fly to NI to get the assembly working again - he had already blown the chance to do that - he flew in to snub the DUP instead tell Northern Ireland people in a coke factory how blessed and fortunate they are to benefit from being in EU single market, the brexiteers (himself) have taken the rest of the UK out of.
Bizarre in itself. But more bizarre how people try to spin this as a win for Sunak.
That day in the coke factory was Sunak having a very good day. Apparently.
In fairness, Single Market membership will probably prove a considerable boon for Northern Ireland. I can't see much benefit in Rishi concealing the fact. That the rest of the UK decided to ditch it because of a Spectator article by Gove and umbrage over Barack Obama (both reasons cited by PB posters) isn't really his problem.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
That's probably what she meant, but I know some Jewish people that experience racism every day. It just depends on how you dress.
Personally, I think she was trying to rationalise a key tenet of wokism (or whatever you call it), which is that lagging ethnic groups are lagging (less well paid jobs, potentially lower academic achievement) because they experience racial prejudice. This theory hits the buffers when you consider other immigrant groups, who have experienced racism, but managed to prosper strongly, and these include Jews, who historically have been so despised that they have even been banned from various trades, but still prospered over and above the benchmark population. Recategorising anti-Jewish racism as 'something else' is one way to square the circle.
I saw a good article on Covid origins this morning and it was actually in the Spectator (it had been recommended on my Google feed). It was one where they ignored the “Lab Leak!” stuff and actually homed in on the real concerns.
Which are China’s ongoing secrecy about their failure to act on live-animal markets (which were highlighted years ago as by far the biggest risk for zoonotic spillovers of viruses in general and coronaviruses in particular), and the way that the international community tiptoes around that.
China have been desperately trying to “prove” that covid came from outside of China and just happened to super-spread out from the Huanan Seafood market, brought in by a foreigner who happened to come to a fish market where there were no live animals for sale, nope, we’ve stopped that, it doesn’t happen any more, honest.
Which is why they deleted the samples taken from the market and hid any evidence about it. Coronaviruses in bats are mutating and evolving faster than ever due to them being pushed out of their historic habitats and mingling more.
People who live in the backwoods area near them get thousands of spillovers per year, with as many as 12% of them found with SARS-like antibodies between 2017-2019 due to previous spillovers that never got past them and superspread out.
And ferrying in animals who live near them and happen to provide the perfect intermediary route to allow these viruses the opportunity to mutate into a state where they can readily spillover into humans and selling them in busy live-animal markets, exposing tens of thousands of people for prolonged period to allow multiple spillovers in super-spreading conditions provide the dry tinder to allow one of those tens of thousands of sparks to catch fire into a new pandemic.
Why do they tiptoe around it? Is it fear of China’s authoritarian rulers and their reaction? Is it concern over criticizing a cultural practice? China know they need to stop these live-animal markets. We WILL have another pandemic. SARS-CoV-3. SARS-CoV-4. God knows when, but we’re getting more spillovers every year and faster mutation in the bat sources, so unless this gets stopped, it won’t be a very long time.
That’s the real story. That’s the true fear. Hats off to the Speccie for actually bringing it out.
No it isn't. Please don't embarrass yourself and insult everyone else's intelligence by pretending it is.
Andy Cooke, thank you for your post. As you say, that’s the real story.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
Or, in simple terms:
Abbot doesn't care about discrimination towards any group she's not a member of; and Corbyn doesn't care about discrimination towards any group that doesn't block vote for the Labour party.
Its not about who votes Labour, it is the narrow world view of the oppressor vs the oppressed. The big Jewish communities in the UK traditionally were Labour leaning for many years until Corbyn attracted hardcore anti-Semites to be part of his project, while he doesn't see any issues with bits of art containing all the anti-Jewish tropes.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
"Asians" in the US, particular suffer this. We have seen this in particular with university application, they are doing too well as school, so in has come policies that target them from gaining too many places.
The problem in America is so much of their law, customs and whole debate about race flows historically not just from slavery but also, within living memory, segregation, and all of that is about Black or White, with other races not getting a look-in. Even Native Americans are dealt with separately from this.
Interesting. China walks back ambassador’s remarks on sovereignty of post-Soviet states, as EU foreign ministers debate "recalibrating" the bloc's attitude towards Beijing https://twitter.com/HenryJFoy/status/1650460326574317568
Probably the ambassador is an idiot. Always seemed an unlikely way to signal such a change in Chinese foreign policy.
Or they were testing the reaction of the EU in a way that could be walked back.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
No bigger a mistake on anti-semitism than Starmer sitting in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet for three years....
Is this post timed to go off at 12.30 everyday, irrespective of where in the world you are? Can you teach me how its done?
I feel your pain of a palpable hit.
Every time.
No pain here Mark. It doesn't affect me one way or the other if Labour win or lose the next GE. However, the Johnson and post- Johnsonian Conservatives are so dangerously malign I would like to see them able to regenerate in opposition. I would have thought you too would like the vile stain of Johnson removed with no possibility of resurrection after a close Sunak win.
When I was a little younger I was a Labour Party member pounding the streets like you do for the Johnsonian and post-Johnsonian Conservatives, but after Corbyn, I have no interest. I don't blame Starmer for holding his nose. Chuka Umuna did the right thing. What are his odds for future PM?
I was vocal, early last year, that Johnson had to go. I was equally vocal against Truss. Indeed, I left the Party - but Truss had gone before my standing order had been cancelled, so I did the decent thing - stayed on and voted again for Sunak (even though my preferred candidate was - and remains - Penny Mordaunt).
I shall be happy as a great big happy thing on his holidays if Boris gets banned from the House for long enough for a recall vote - and to see him lose that by-election.
But in the spirit of a better politics for this country, I find it hard to accept Labour putting forward Starmer as our next PM, when for three years he sat in Corbyn's shadow cabinet as antisemitism was a force in his Party. (I can't say I was impressed by his efforts to overturn the democratic will of the people who voted for Brexit, but that was a wider team effort.)
The stench from Johnson (like Corbyn) lingers. A deep cleanse is required. It is best to do that in opposition. Suella Braverman as Home Secretary is evidence for my argument, and she is just as rank as Johnson.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
"Asians" in the US, particular suffer this. We have seen this in particular with university application, they are doing too well as school, so in has come policies that target them from gaining too many places.
The problem in America is so much of their law, customs and whole debate about race flows historically not just from slavery but also, within living memory, segregation, and all of that is about Black or White, with other races not getting a look-in. Even Native Americans are dealt with separately from this.
This is a fair point and why when people try to make simple extrapolations from US issues / policies around race onto the UK they are just wrong. The same way you can't just pick up issues from apartheid (and post-apartheid) South Africa and try to claim anything similar in Europe.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
No bigger a mistake on anti-semitism than Starmer sitting in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet for three years....
"No bigger mistake..."
That's the old argument about whether it's moral to work for change within an organisation, or protest from the outside.
There isn't a simple right or wrong answer to that. Judging on outcomes - Corbyn is gone; Abbott is immediately suspended for anti-semitism pending further decision - Starmer appears to have made the right one.
But no doubt you'll continue to post your slogan.
Doubtless I will continue to believe that Starmer is not the PM for me.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
I think it's better for Diane Abbott no longer to be MP. I mean that as a kindness to her.
Regardless of this latest "misstep" and her politics, she isn't the person she used to be. If that's just age, if its the rumours around drink issues, the issues with her son, I don't know, but has been found struggling to get basic facts right or generally make a coherent argument on so many occasions over the past few years.
Given your last sentence, when Abbott does go there will be a place for her here on PB then.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I actually agree with @HYUFD as I think Starmer will struggle against him
I'm with @Luckyguy1983 on this. Sunak wasn't able to persuade his party to ignore the Siren Call of Truss last summer, which is one reason they're in the mess they are now (OK, I admit that LG probably doesn't agree with that bit).
Sunak's background is finance, where the numbers do the persuasion for him. Nothing wrong with thinking in numbers, it's what I instinctively do. But when it comes to persuading lay neutrals of a case, Starmer is more effective because law means he has done it more for longer.
The difference is Sunak is optimistic and positive. whereas Starmer is all negative and doom and gloom and wholly uninspiring
Inspiring is important and Starmer will need to try it more. But being optimistic and positive doesn't work on it's own either if the public dont believe it, and wont easily be made to believe it. Just saying things are great or will be great doesn't inspire if it looks like nonsense.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I actually agree with @HYUFD as I think Starmer will struggle against him
I'm with @Luckyguy1983 on this. Sunak wasn't able to persuade his party to ignore the Siren Call of Truss last summer, which is one reason they're in the mess they are now (OK, I admit that LG probably doesn't agree with that bit).
Sunak's background is finance, where the numbers do the persuasion for him. Nothing wrong with thinking in numbers, it's what I instinctively do. But when it comes to persuading lay neutrals of a case, Starmer is more effective because law means he has done it more for longer.
The difference is Sunak is optimistic and positive. whereas Starmer is all negative and doom and gloom and wholly uninspiring
And that's the million dollar question.
By next autumn, life for Mr, Mrs, Mx, Dr etc Average will either be noticeably better or it won't.
If it is, then game on, sure. The recent improvement in Conservative standing started when Sunak had a run of policy wins- Windsor, nurses' pay, new boats plan.
If not, and some of the wins are already unraveling, then Sunak's sunny optimism is just going to annoy people.
The wins aren't unravelling at all. Windsor was such a comprehensive win, all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on. On top of this, he added the major success of CPTPP accession.
In terms of dangers, the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through. If I were him, I would replace Braverman with May to have someone who has actually delivered in this area. Then he needs to avoid stupid help the rich policies like inheritance tax reductions.
“all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on”
Wrong again Will. I’m not moving on, the negative elements of Windsor will become clearer over time. Firstly, what was the point of striking a deal that didn’t restore Stormont? The deal should have been the leverage to solve that problem, unless you think the lack of democratic assembly is no problem at all and isn’t playing into the hands of SF with each passing minute? Secondly the problem elements with Windsor was always what will happen over time now we have handed EU the power to move NI further away from mainland Brexit and closer to the Republics EU membership, or EU unilaterally junk Windsor if not getting their way on doing that. Quite a lot was conceded for no very little gain is how history will know this deal.
“the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through.” What do you actually mean by further immigration policy to make sure impact of the boats promise goes through? What are you opaquely referring to?
We owe the DUP a big debt of gratitude for standing up to bullying from everyone, the NI Secretary, Sunak, Biden, and even the Clintons, to hold on to their red lines. It is a spectacularly poor negotiated outcome for NI, when we genuinely did 'hold the cards' - at least a good portion of them. Sunak is weak. His weakness endangers our country.
Straight after he shook hands with the EU on the EU offer Boris and Truss rejected as not good remotely good enough for UK, Sunak didn’t fly to NI to get the assembly working again - he had already blown the chance to do that - he flew in to snub the DUP instead tell Northern Ireland people in a coke factory how blessed and fortunate they are to benefit from being in EU single market, the brexiteers (himself) have taken the rest of the UK out of.
Bizarre in itself. But more bizarre how people try to spin this as a win for Sunak.
That day in the coke factory was Sunak having a very good day. Apparently.
In fairness, Single Market membership will probably prove a considerable boon for Northern Ireland. I can't see much benefit in Rishi concealing the fact. That the rest of the UK decided to ditch it because of a Spectator article by Gove and umbrage over Barack Obama (both reasons cited by PB posters) isn't really his problem.
It would only be a boon if it came with equally unrestricted access to the UK single market. I agree that would be good, and a better negotiator might have got closer to it as an outcome.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
Yep.
And there's a word for that.
If only Diane had made an 'edgy' joke about the extermination of Roma people being a positive, she'd have been fine. Or at least had simps defending her.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
One mistake??????????
Depends how bad the mistake is.
Abbott's mistake over the weekend was an absolute doozy, and her excuse pretty feeble.
The "it was just the first draft" only made matters worse.....
Even worse, it might actually have been true.
Have we seen this legendary final draft yet? I genuinely think having profferred that as an excuse it will be important, since if it still looks to make the same points the published version did she has no leg to stand on.
I saw a good article on Covid origins this morning and it was actually in the Spectator (it had been recommended on my Google feed). It was one where they ignored the “Lab Leak!” stuff and actually homed in on the real concerns.
Which are China’s ongoing secrecy about their failure to act on live-animal markets (which were highlighted years ago as by far the biggest risk for zoonotic spillovers of viruses in general and coronaviruses in particular), and the way that the international community tiptoes around that.
China have been desperately trying to “prove” that covid came from outside of China and just happened to super-spread out from the Huanan Seafood market, brought in by a foreigner who happened to come to a fish market where there were no live animals for sale, nope, we’ve stopped that, it doesn’t happen any more, honest.
Which is why they deleted the samples taken from the market and hid any evidence about it. Coronaviruses in bats are mutating and evolving faster than ever due to them being pushed out of their historic habitats and mingling more.
People who live in the backwoods area near them get thousands of spillovers per year, with as many as 12% of them found with SARS-like antibodies between 2017-2019 due to previous spillovers that never got past them and superspread out.
And ferrying in animals who live near them and happen to provide the perfect intermediary route to allow these viruses the opportunity to mutate into a state where they can readily spillover into humans and selling them in busy live-animal markets, exposing tens of thousands of people for prolonged period to allow multiple spillovers in super-spreading conditions provide the dry tinder to allow one of those tens of thousands of sparks to catch fire into a new pandemic.
Why do they tiptoe around it? Is it fear of China’s authoritarian rulers and their reaction? Is it concern over criticizing a cultural practice? China know they need to stop these live-animal markets. We WILL have another pandemic. SARS-CoV-3. SARS-CoV-4. God knows when, but we’re getting more spillovers every year and faster mutation in the bat sources, so unless this gets stopped, it won’t be a very long time.
That’s the real story. That’s the true fear. Hats off to the Speccie for actually bringing it out.
No it isn't. Please don't embarrass yourself and insult everyone else's intelligence by pretending it is.
Andy Cooke, thank you for your post. As you say, that’s the real story.
Hungary 44.8% Slovakia 28.2% Lithuania 27.6% Latvia 24.1% Poland 24.0% Czech Republic 23.5% Romania 21.6% Germany 21.2% Bulgaria 21.0% Sweden 19.7% Portugal 19.6% EU (overall) 19.2% ⬅️ UK 19.1%⬅️ Netherlands 17.8% Spain 16.5% France 15.9% Italy 13.2%
Source: TradingEconomics 6:41 AM · Apr 24, 2023
I blame Brexit.
Why is that list weighted heavily towards Eastern Europe? I suspect the original poster, a known troll, was trying to imply something.
Are you disputing the numbers and if so please publish your link
(Just for the record, it's a complete list, save for Luxembourg, Cyprus and Ireland, which all sit underneath Italy - but are included in the average.)
What about Belgium etc?
The initial list omits around 10 EU members, but for some reason includes all those close to Ukraine and more greatly exposed both to food and energy cost pressure.
Welcome back @FrancisUrquhart are you up to date with the Mandalorian ?
This is the way.
Don't you mean the woman-alorian ?
I have been super busy past few months and only dropping by briefly....but I watch a couple of episodes and its bad isn't it, like really really really bad. Will anybody notice if all the writer in Hollywood go on strike?
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
No bigger a mistake on anti-semitism than Starmer sitting in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet for three years....
Is this post timed to go off at 12.30 everyday, irrespective of where in the world you are? Can you teach me how its done?
I feel your pain of a palpable hit.
Every time.
No pain here Mark. It doesn't affect me one way or the other if Labour win or lose the next GE. However, the Johnson and post- Johnsonian Conservatives are so dangerously malign I would like to see them able to regenerate in opposition. I would have thought you too would like the vile stain of Johnson removed with no possibility of resurrection after a close Sunak win.
When I was a little younger I was a Labour Party member pounding the streets like you do for the Johnsonian and post-Johnsonian Conservatives, but after Corbyn, I have no interest. I don't blame Starmer for holding his nose. Chuka Umuna did the right thing. What are his odds for future PM?
I was vocal, early last year, that Johnson had to go. I was equally vocal against Truss. Indeed, I left the Party - but Truss had gone before my standing order had been cancelled, so I did the decent thing - stayed on and voted again for Sunak (even though my preferred candidate was - and remains - Penny Mordaunt).
I shall be happy as a great big happy thing on his holidays if Boris gets banned from the House for long enough for a recall vote - and to see him lose that by-election.
But in the spirit of a better politics for this country, I find it hard to accept Labour putting forward Starmer as our next PM, when for three years he sat in Corbyn's shadow cabinet as antisemitism was a force in his Party. (I can't say I was impressed by his efforts to overturn the democratic will of the people who voted for Brexit, but that was a wider team effort.)
“but Truss had gone before my standing order had been cancelled, so I did the decent thing - stayed on and voted again for Sunak”
But members didn’t get a vote second time round, it was MP stitch up?
Will the PB annals show you supported Boris, campaigned to have him elected. And now like Peter you won’t follow him to death? You deny him?
I don’t actually like the phrase and type of politics Rentaul is tweeting to spark this game of who once supported what here. I hope he is reading. To me it’s a bit like the lesson from John 13:31–38. We campaign in politics and speak up without any real understanding? Just bravado? I don’t believe that. I believe politics is more nuanced and it’s unfair to use this type of attack line.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
No bigger a mistake on anti-semitism than Starmer sitting in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet for three years....
"No bigger mistake..."
That's the old argument about whether it's moral to work for change within an organisation, or protest from the outside.
There isn't a simple right or wrong answer to that. Judging on outcomes - Corbyn is gone; Abbott is immediately suspended for anti-semitism pending further decision - Starmer appears to have made the right one.
But no doubt you'll continue to post your slogan.
Doubtless I will continue to believe that Starmer is not the PM for me.
Now that is fair enough.
Until such time as Dominic Grieve becomes Tory Leader, the Conservative PM candidate won't float my boat either.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
Welcome back @FrancisUrquhart are you up to date with the Mandalorian ?
This is the way.
Don't you mean the woman-alorian ?
I have been super busy past few months and only dropping by briefly....but I watch a couple of episodes and its bad isn't it, like really really really bad. Will anybody notice if all the writer in Hollywood go on strike?
I quite like it still tbh - though I think the end of season 2 was probably the high point, s3e6 a bit of an aberration.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
That Anthony Seldon book being serialised in The Times shows why Boris Johnson is so unfit to be PM.
Yep. Government was completely dysfunctional under him. The reality was exactly as one imagined it. This doesn't always happen. Sometimes what you imagine goes on behind the scenes with someone proves to be off the mark but not here. Johnson truly is as he so often presents - a clueless clown.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I actually agree with @HYUFD as I think Starmer will struggle against him
I'm with @Luckyguy1983 on this. Sunak wasn't able to persuade his party to ignore the Siren Call of Truss last summer, which is one reason they're in the mess they are now (OK, I admit that LG probably doesn't agree with that bit).
Sunak's background is finance, where the numbers do the persuasion for him. Nothing wrong with thinking in numbers, it's what I instinctively do. But when it comes to persuading lay neutrals of a case, Starmer is more effective because law means he has done it more for longer.
The difference is Sunak is optimistic and positive. whereas Starmer is all negative and doom and gloom and wholly uninspiring
And that's the million dollar question.
By next autumn, life for Mr, Mrs, Mx, Dr etc Average will either be noticeably better or it won't.
If it is, then game on, sure. The recent improvement in Conservative standing started when Sunak had a run of policy wins- Windsor, nurses' pay, new boats plan.
If not, and some of the wins are already unraveling, then Sunak's sunny optimism is just going to annoy people.
The wins aren't unravelling at all. Windsor was such a comprehensive win, all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on. On top of this, he added the major success of CPTPP accession.
In terms of dangers, the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through. If I were him, I would replace Braverman with May to have someone who has actually delivered in this area. Then he needs to avoid stupid help the rich policies like inheritance tax reductions.
“all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on”
Wrong again Will. I’m not moving on, the negative elements of Windsor will become clearer over time. Firstly, what was the point of striking a deal that didn’t restore Stormont? The deal should have been the leverage to solve that problem, unless you think the lack of democratic assembly is no problem at all and isn’t playing into the hands of SF with each passing minute? Secondly the problem elements with Windsor was always what will happen over time now we have handed EU the power to move NI further away from mainland Brexit and closer to the Republics EU membership, or EU unilaterally junk Windsor if not getting their way on doing that. Quite a lot was conceded for no very little gain is how history will know this deal.
“the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through.” What do you actually mean by further immigration policy to make sure impact of the boats promise goes through? What are you opaquely referring to?
We owe the DUP a big debt of gratitude for standing up to bullying from everyone, the NI Secretary, Sunak, Biden, and even the Clintons, to hold on to their red lines. It is a spectacularly poor negotiated outcome for NI, when we genuinely did 'hold the cards' - at least a good portion of them. Sunak is weak. His weakness endangers our country.
Straight after he shook hands with the EU on the EU offer Boris and Truss rejected as not good remotely good enough for UK, Sunak didn’t fly to NI to get the assembly working again - he had already blown the chance to do that - he flew in to snub the DUP instead tell Northern Ireland people in a coke factory how blessed and fortunate they are to benefit from being in EU single market, the brexiteers (himself) have taken the rest of the UK out of.
Bizarre in itself. But more bizarre how people try to spin this as a win for Sunak.
That day in the coke factory was Sunak having a very good day. Apparently.
In fairness, Single Market membership will probably prove a considerable boon for Northern Ireland. I can't see much benefit in Rishi concealing the fact. That the rest of the UK decided to ditch it because of a Spectator article by Gove and umbrage over Barack Obama (both reasons cited by PB posters) isn't really his problem.
Yes it is. It is his problem. And his successor as leader. And their successor. Not least as where you say rest of UK voted for Brexit, Scotland clearly didn’t.
Do you not understand how Sunak’s coke factory speech was perceived in Scotland, and by every remainer in England and Wales?
“Crisis? What crisis? You have all the benefits of the EU single market.”
That was Sunak enjoying a big win and a very good day.
I have been super busy past few months and only dropping by briefly....but I watch a couple of episodes and its bad isn't it, like really really really bad. Will anybody notice if all the writer in Hollywood go on strike?
Hungary 44.8% Slovakia 28.2% Lithuania 27.6% Latvia 24.1% Poland 24.0% Czech Republic 23.5% Romania 21.6% Germany 21.2% Bulgaria 21.0% Sweden 19.7% Portugal 19.6% EU (overall) 19.2% ⬅️ UK 19.1%⬅️ Netherlands 17.8% Spain 16.5% France 15.9% Italy 13.2%
Source: TradingEconomics 6:41 AM · Apr 24, 2023
I blame Brexit.
Why is that list weighted heavily towards Eastern Europe? I suspect the original poster, a known troll, was trying to imply something.
Are you disputing the numbers and if so please publish your link
(Just for the record, it's a complete list, save for Luxembourg, Cyprus and Ireland, which all sit underneath Italy - but are included in the average.)
What about Belgium etc?
The initial list omits around 10 EU members, but for some reason includes all those close to Ukraine and more greatly exposed both to food and energy cost pressure.
The initial list is fine. It highlights that UK and EU overall food inflation in March were almost the same, and by including some of the countries with higher rates it shows that the EU average is lifted a bit by some Eastern European countries (the equivalent Eurozone number is 17.5).
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
Welcome back @FrancisUrquhart are you up to date with the Mandalorian ?
This is the way.
Don't you mean the woman-alorian ?
I have been super busy past few months and only dropping by briefly....but I watch a couple of episodes and its bad isn't it, like really really really bad. Will anybody notice if all the writer in Hollywood go on strike?
I quite like it still tbh - though I think the end of season 2 was probably the high point, s3e6 a bit of an aberration.
TBH, they should have just gone with bounty hunter does bounty hunter things, each week, new planet, new species. With the baby in tow, who from time to time gets him out of trouble and get to learn a bit more about him from characters along the way.
It seemed to work ok for Star Trek for 50 years....and of course the likes of Knight Rider and the Fall Guy in the 80/90s were very popular, which was basically bounty hunter stories.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
I didn't expect Diane Abbott to every change her views, but having had exactly the same conversation as I did six years ago, I am still disappointed.
I have been super busy past few months and only dropping by briefly....but I watch a couple of episodes and its bad isn't it, like really really really bad. Will anybody notice if all the writer in Hollywood go on strike?
And yet still not as bad as Obi-Wan, or Boba Fett
Or Solo: A Star Wars Story...or.....Disney Star Wars is just terrible. And they have how many more of these shit movies and tv shows in the works?
They had a winner with Mando and the Baby Yoda sidekick if they had kept it simple.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
I wonder where my Ghanaian ex fits in that picture? - lived in a big house in Hampstead, high end Mercedes etc. Stopped for Driving While Black every other day.,..
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
I didn't expect Diane Abbott to every change her views, but having had exactly the same conversation as I did six years ago, I am still disappointed.
I didn’t expect she’d ever change her views either, but she must have understood the sensitivity around the careful use of language when discussing race. It’s not as if there haven’t been a load of stories on the subject since 2015.
At the very least, she might have had her letter read by someone else, before posting it off to a national newspaper!
Hungary 44.8% Slovakia 28.2% Lithuania 27.6% Latvia 24.1% Poland 24.0% Czech Republic 23.5% Romania 21.6% Germany 21.2% Bulgaria 21.0% Sweden 19.7% Portugal 19.6% EU (overall) 19.2% ⬅️ UK 19.1%⬅️ Netherlands 17.8% Spain 16.5% France 15.9% Italy 13.2%
Source: TradingEconomics 6:41 AM · Apr 24, 2023
I blame Brexit.
Why is that list weighted heavily towards Eastern Europe? I suspect the original poster, a known troll, was trying to imply something.
Are you disputing the numbers and if so please publish your link
(Just for the record, it's a complete list, save for Luxembourg, Cyprus and Ireland, which all sit underneath Italy - but are included in the average.)
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
Massively lower fuel and maintenance costs. More internal space. Better performance.
When the price of electric cars falls below that of ICE vehicles, then there will be very few purchasers of petrol vehicles.
Massively lower fuel costs?
Well, let's run the numbers shall we?
Average usable battery capacity of an electric car is about 75KWh, and UK domestic energy prices are around 33p/KWh. Which means it'll cost you (from empty) approximately £25 to full up your car (at home) with electricity. For average range, we should probably go with about 250 miles, although I have a friend who regularly gets more than 300 miles from his standard battery Tesla Model 3. In general, most electric cars will do 3-4 miles per KWh on the road.
So, your electricity cost per mile is about 8-10p, assuming you can charge at home.
A modern, efficient petrol car will probably do 40 miles to the gallon across a range of driving scenarios. A litre of petrol in the UK is about £1.50, and there are 4.5 liters per gallon. So you're paying £6.75/gallon, and going about 40 miles with it (if it's a new modern car). Or about 17p per mile.
Now, if you don't charge at home, the numbers will be very different. But let us not forget that there are 20 million houses in the UK, of which around two thirds have off street parking or a garage (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2019). So that's a lot of people (around half of all households, and way more than half of all car owning households) that have access to home charging.
The vast bulk of the difference is of course duty and tax. And that will not be sustainable as the balance starts to change. Duty on fuel is a major source of government income and will need replaced.
That is, of course, completely true.
But let me show you a chart:
Fifteen years ago, anyone who thought widescale solar deployment in the UK made economic sense was smoking crack.
But prices continue to fall. Like with silicon chips, there's been a very consistent improvement in power-cost over time.
And as technology keeps getting better, that will keep happening.
There is long-term downward pressure on electricity prices, that has just been hidden by the Ukraine war.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
I wonder where my Ghanaian ex fits in that picture? - lived in a big house in Hampstead, high end Mercedes etc. Stopped for Driving While Black every other day.,..
Yes. If you are a racist copper (and sadly, that seems like quite a number of them), the wealthy / powerful black person is a threat. Aren't they supposed to be poor? They must be dealing drugs...
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
EDIT : on depreciation of EVs. There have been times where some EVs sold for more than the current sale price, due to shortages. The market is gradually moving to rational second hand prices.
I sold a three year old EV less than a month ago, for more than 75% of what I paid for it new.
Now, that's in the US, not the UK. But there certainly wasn't an excess depreciation issue I needed to endure.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I actually agree with @HYUFD as I think Starmer will struggle against him
I'm with @Luckyguy1983 on this. Sunak wasn't able to persuade his party to ignore the Siren Call of Truss last summer, which is one reason they're in the mess they are now (OK, I admit that LG probably doesn't agree with that bit).
Sunak's background is finance, where the numbers do the persuasion for him. Nothing wrong with thinking in numbers, it's what I instinctively do. But when it comes to persuading lay neutrals of a case, Starmer is more effective because law means he has done it more for longer.
The difference is Sunak is optimistic and positive. whereas Starmer is all negative and doom and gloom and wholly uninspiring
And that's the million dollar question.
By next autumn, life for Mr, Mrs, Mx, Dr etc Average will either be noticeably better or it won't.
If it is, then game on, sure. The recent improvement in Conservative standing started when Sunak had a run of policy wins- Windsor, nurses' pay, new boats plan.
If not, and some of the wins are already unraveling, then Sunak's sunny optimism is just going to annoy people.
The wins aren't unravelling at all. Windsor was such a comprehensive win, all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on. On top of this, he added the major success of CPTPP accession.
In terms of dangers, the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through. If I were him, I would replace Braverman with May to have someone who has actually delivered in this area. Then he needs to avoid stupid help the rich policies like inheritance tax reductions.
“all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on”
Wrong again Will. I’m not moving on, the negative elements of Windsor will become clearer over time. Firstly, what was the point of striking a deal that didn’t restore Stormont? The deal should have been the leverage to solve that problem, unless you think the lack of democratic assembly is no problem at all and isn’t playing into the hands of SF with each passing minute? Secondly the problem elements with Windsor was always what will happen over time now we have handed EU the power to move NI further away from mainland Brexit and closer to the Republics EU membership, or EU unilaterally junk Windsor if not getting their way on doing that. Quite a lot was conceded for no very little gain is how history will know this deal.
“the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through.” What do you actually mean by further immigration policy to make sure impact of the boats promise goes through? What are you opaquely referring to?
We owe the DUP a big debt of gratitude for standing up to bullying from everyone, the NI Secretary, Sunak, Biden, and even the Clintons, to hold on to their red lines. It is a spectacularly poor negotiated outcome for NI, when we genuinely did 'hold the cards' - at least a good portion of them. Sunak is weak. His weakness endangers our country.
Straight after he shook hands with the EU on the EU offer Boris and Truss rejected as not good remotely good enough for UK, Sunak didn’t fly to NI to get the assembly working again - he had already blown the chance to do that - he flew in to snub the DUP instead tell Northern Ireland people in a coke factory how blessed and fortunate they are to benefit from being in EU single market, the brexiteers (himself) have taken the rest of the UK out of.
Bizarre in itself. But more bizarre how people try to spin this as a win for Sunak.
That day in the coke factory was Sunak having a very good day. Apparently.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
What Diane Abbott was, dimly, trying to say, was that rich, successful people are Essentially White.
So the current U.K. cabinet is 100% Ze Pure Aryan.
Hungary 44.8% Slovakia 28.2% Lithuania 27.6% Latvia 24.1% Poland 24.0% Czech Republic 23.5% Romania 21.6% Germany 21.2% Bulgaria 21.0% Sweden 19.7% Portugal 19.6% EU (overall) 19.2% ⬅️ UK 19.1%⬅️ Netherlands 17.8% Spain 16.5% France 15.9% Italy 13.2%
Source: TradingEconomics 6:41 AM · Apr 24, 2023
I blame Brexit.
Why is that list weighted heavily towards Eastern Europe? I suspect the original poster, a known troll, was trying to imply something.
Are you disputing the numbers and if so please publish your link
(Just for the record, it's a complete list, save for Luxembourg, Cyprus and Ireland, which all sit underneath Italy - but are included in the average.)
What about Belgium etc?
The initial list omits around 10 EU members, but for some reason includes all those close to Ukraine and more greatly exposed both to food and energy cost pressure.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
Given that it evidently wasn't on ability, I must confess I'm at a loss to answer. Did they draw straws?
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
What Diane Abbott was, dimly, trying to say, was that rich, successful people are Essentially White.
So the current U.K. cabinet is 100% Ze Pure Aryan.
Like when Kwasi Kwarteng was described as “superficially” black by Rupa Huq, because he was rich and successful....now less of the success, perhaps he is just black?
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
And given Dubair petrol prices, I think it's reasonable to assume that that is the rational economic choice: cheap gas, many miles, fast refuelling.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
No bigger a mistake on anti-semitism than Starmer sitting in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet for three years....
"No bigger mistake..."
That's the old argument about whether it's moral to work for change within an organisation, or protest from the outside.
There isn't a simple right or wrong answer to that. Judging on outcomes - Corbyn is gone; Abbott is immediately suspended for anti-semitism pending further decision - Starmer appears to have made the right one.
But no doubt you'll continue to post your slogan.
Doubtless I will continue to believe that Starmer is not the PM for me.
That's a perfectly fair attitude; I don't much care for him either. Your previous comment wasn't.
I saw a good article on Covid origins this morning and it was actually in the Spectator (it had been recommended on my Google feed). It was one where they ignored the “Lab Leak!” stuff and actually homed in on the real concerns.
Which are China’s ongoing secrecy about their failure to act on live-animal markets (which were highlighted years ago as by far the biggest risk for zoonotic spillovers of viruses in general and coronaviruses in particular), and the way that the international community tiptoes around that.
China have been desperately trying to “prove” that covid came from outside of China and just happened to super-spread out from the Huanan Seafood market, brought in by a foreigner who happened to come to a fish market where there were no live animals for sale, nope, we’ve stopped that, it doesn’t happen any more, honest.
Which is why they deleted the samples taken from the market and hid any evidence about it. Coronaviruses in bats are mutating and evolving faster than ever due to them being pushed out of their historic habitats and mingling more.
People who live in the backwoods area near them get thousands of spillovers per year, with as many as 12% of them found with SARS-like antibodies between 2017-2019 due to previous spillovers that never got past them and superspread out.
And ferrying in animals who live near them and happen to provide the perfect intermediary route to allow these viruses the opportunity to mutate into a state where they can readily spillover into humans and selling them in busy live-animal markets, exposing tens of thousands of people for prolonged period to allow multiple spillovers in super-spreading conditions provide the dry tinder to allow one of those tens of thousands of sparks to catch fire into a new pandemic.
Why do they tiptoe around it? Is it fear of China’s authoritarian rulers and their reaction? Is it concern over criticizing a cultural practice? China know they need to stop these live-animal markets. We WILL have another pandemic. SARS-CoV-3. SARS-CoV-4. God knows when, but we’re getting more spillovers every year and faster mutation in the bat sources, so unless this gets stopped, it won’t be a very long time.
That’s the real story. That’s the true fear. Hats off to the Speccie for actually bringing it out.
No it isn't. Please don't embarrass yourself and insult everyone else's intelligence by pretending it is.
Andy Cooke, thank you for your post. As you say, that’s the real story.
Ok dear.
Please tell us your 'theories' about the MH17 shootdown again, just so we can evaluate your judgement...
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
And given Dubair petrol prices, I think it's reasonable to assume that that is the rational economic choice: cheap gas, many miles, fast refuelling.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Yes, for the subset of that group that normally buys new or nearly-new cars.
For those who buy old cars though, it might be a long time before making the switch makes sense.
I saw a good article on Covid origins this morning and it was actually in the Spectator (it had been recommended on my Google feed). It was one where they ignored the “Lab Leak!” stuff and actually homed in on the real concerns.
Which are China’s ongoing secrecy about their failure to act on live-animal markets (which were highlighted years ago as by far the biggest risk for zoonotic spillovers of viruses in general and coronaviruses in particular), and the way that the international community tiptoes around that.
China have been desperately trying to “prove” that covid came from outside of China and just happened to super-spread out from the Huanan Seafood market, brought in by a foreigner who happened to come to a fish market where there were no live animals for sale, nope, we’ve stopped that, it doesn’t happen any more, honest.
Which is why they deleted the samples taken from the market and hid any evidence about it. Coronaviruses in bats are mutating and evolving faster than ever due to them being pushed out of their historic habitats and mingling more.
People who live in the backwoods area near them get thousands of spillovers per year, with as many as 12% of them found with SARS-like antibodies between 2017-2019 due to previous spillovers that never got past them and superspread out.
And ferrying in animals who live near them and happen to provide the perfect intermediary route to allow these viruses the opportunity to mutate into a state where they can readily spillover into humans and selling them in busy live-animal markets, exposing tens of thousands of people for prolonged period to allow multiple spillovers in super-spreading conditions provide the dry tinder to allow one of those tens of thousands of sparks to catch fire into a new pandemic.
Why do they tiptoe around it? Is it fear of China’s authoritarian rulers and their reaction? Is it concern over criticizing a cultural practice? China know they need to stop these live-animal markets. We WILL have another pandemic. SARS-CoV-3. SARS-CoV-4. God knows when, but we’re getting more spillovers every year and faster mutation in the bat sources, so unless this gets stopped, it won’t be a very long time.
That’s the real story. That’s the true fear. Hats off to the Speccie for actually bringing it out.
No it isn't. Please don't embarrass yourself and insult everyone else's intelligence by pretending it is.
Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
How effective is this line? Just 3.5 years ago, Rishi Sunak campaigned to make Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab…
To be honest, I don't think either that or the Starmer/Corbyn line are particularly effective.
Occasionally, people used to throw the fact that he was first elected under the banner of Foot's "longest suicide note in history" at Blair. But I'm not sure it ever appealed to anyone but the Tory faithful, and possibly slightly helped Blair among traditional Labour ("well, he can't be all bad, then...").
When politicians become leaders, I think people tend to judge them on that. For Starmer, that includes expelling Corbyn, and people will (probably correctly) see that as more instructive than the fact he was relatively loyal when Corbyn had the top job. For Sunak, Johnson and Truss form no part of his plans, and rather helpfully for him rebelled on NI Protocol, underlining the point.
Maybe the public are wrong on that - I personally think the roles of Starmer and Sunak as loyal(ish) lieutenants to Corbyn and Johnson in the fairly recent past does have some relevance. But I'd suggest in purely electoral terms, these are pretty niche interest campaign lines.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
If it were the first time she’d come out with something blatantly racist, then perhaps so. This isn’t the first time though, she has been making similar comments for years.
She thinks that racism is only ever a problem when white people attack black people, and that any other racism is perfectly fine.
I suspect that what she was trying to say is that black people/ people of colour deal with racism every day, when other minorities do not. The lack of sensitivity to Jewish people who have the history of the holocaust was very dumb though, and for her to even "go there" given the recent problems in Labour with respect to antisemitism is astonishing in political terms. I imagine Starmer is delighted.
Yes, she thinks that black people, and only black people, ever experience racism, and that only white people can be racist.
The actuality, of course, being that racism occurs across all races, albeit not equally in different places.
Worse, and why Starmer has had to deal with her today, is that there was a huge problem in his own party not so long ago, with blactant racism aimed towards Jews, from the far left of the party. Of all the things he wanted to be talking about today, this wasn’t on the list yesterday morning, he’ll be hoping to turn it into a net positive by dealing harshly with the recalcitrant MP. She’ll almost certainly be stood down at the next election, asked to retire gracefully to avoid a disciplinary case.
Racism is not just about prejudice and/or discrimination against an individual or groups; it is also about a power differential. When there is a minority that lacks power of the majority, racism becomes much more powerful.
Which is why racism by the police, or teachers, or doctors, had more dramatic effects than if I was to go up to my neighbour and say something horribly racist (which I wouldn't). My only power against the victim of the abuse are my words; if I were an authority figure, then I might have much more power.
I fear the problem with the likes of Corbyn and Abbott is that they see Jews as amongst the 'powerful'. Therefore they think any racism directed towards them in the UK matters less than it does towards other ethnic minorities, who lack such power. In this, they are utterly wrong, and indeed I'd argue that it's racist to view Jews as 'powerful' in the first place, as it feeds into old Antisemitic tropes.
I'm also concerned that other ethnic minorities, such as Asians, don't get quite the same concern from them.
In their heads, Jews are WAY more prosperous and powerful than everyone else, and, by extension, than they actually are.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
They must be confused as anything when they see a photo of the current Cabinet. How did the Conservatives manage to get such a diverse-looking group of people at the top table, without imposing targets or quotas for each minority?
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
And given Dubair petrol prices, I think it's reasonable to assume that that is the rational economic choice: cheap gas, many miles, fast refuelling.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Yes, for the subset of that group that normally buys new or nearly-new cars.
For those who buy old cars though, it might be a long time before making the switch makes sense.
3dhm a litre by the way, about $0.80 or £0.65
Of course:
But that's the nature of any transition. It would make no sense to pull existing vehicles off the road, which have many years of good useful life in them.
At the same time, a larger and larger proportion of new cars sold are going to be electric, and that means - in time - there will be meaningful numbers of used electric vehicles being sold.
Five years from now, I'd reckon that electric (full EV + PHEV) will be half the new car market. Five years from that, they will dominate.
In the last year, in the US where petrol prices are much lower than the UK, the share of fully electric new car sales has gone from 4.4% to 7.1%, and it's only going one way.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
And given Dubair petrol prices, I think it's reasonable to assume that that is the rational economic choice: cheap gas, many miles, fast refuelling.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Yes, for the subset of that group that normally buys new or nearly-new cars.
For those who buy old cars though, it might be a long time before making the switch makes sense.
3dhm a litre by the way, about $0.80 or £0.65
In possibly the only useful contribution I can make to this discussion, the votes of classically-Tory voting second-hand car dealers are going begging. The usual purchase price of a second-hand car is around £5k. But it is not likely that second hand EVs will attain that threshold. Any party tha makes it easier for those dealers to continue selling second hand ICE cars will gain votes.
It was only a few days ago that labour officials were 'reacting with glee' to their (rather pathetic) personal attacks on Sunak; I think Sunak is looking a lot slicker and more professional and is so undoing a lot of the harm that arose through Boris Johnson's divisive political style and personal attacks.
I'm a Sunak fan. And he is significantly better as an operator than either of his predecessors. His problem remains delivery. In that he created 5 priorities, insisted they are everyone's priorities when that obviously isn't true, and then screwed up delivery of them.
HY said he would do well in the debates - does being taken apart because you promised stuff you haven't delivered work for late polling surges?
I actually agree with @HYUFD as I think Starmer will struggle against him
I'm with @Luckyguy1983 on this. Sunak wasn't able to persuade his party to ignore the Siren Call of Truss last summer, which is one reason they're in the mess they are now (OK, I admit that LG probably doesn't agree with that bit).
Sunak's background is finance, where the numbers do the persuasion for him. Nothing wrong with thinking in numbers, it's what I instinctively do. But when it comes to persuading lay neutrals of a case, Starmer is more effective because law means he has done it more for longer.
The difference is Sunak is optimistic and positive. whereas Starmer is all negative and doom and gloom and wholly uninspiring
And that's the million dollar question.
By next autumn, life for Mr, Mrs, Mx, Dr etc Average will either be noticeably better or it won't.
If it is, then game on, sure. The recent improvement in Conservative standing started when Sunak had a run of policy wins- Windsor, nurses' pay, new boats plan.
If not, and some of the wins are already unraveling, then Sunak's sunny optimism is just going to annoy people.
The wins aren't unravelling at all. Windsor was such a comprehensive win, all the PBers telling us the negative elements would come out in time have quickly moved on. On top of this, he added the major success of CPTPP accession.
In terms of dangers, the boats policy was good, but he needs to follow it up with further immigration policy reforms to make sure the actual impact goes through. If I were him, I would replace Braverman with May to have someone who has actually delivered in this area. Then he needs to avoid stupid help the rich policies like inheritance tax reductions.
“The wins aren't unravelling at all.”
What has happened since Sunak’s government formed, mostly driven by Braverman and her “unaccountable” friends on back benches and not the cabinet - but whole government is fellow traveller with her, the history books will make clear - is the language the Conservative Party always used to describe those coming across the channel to surrender to border staff, has completely changed. They are now all illegals. Every single one of them.
The problem there is so obvious. Processing has been giving out 70% 80% asylum to stay in UK to many groups of them. Do you see what I mean? Increasing processing speed can now quickly turn out results completely at odds with the government’s new rhetoric and the “promise” to voters from what this years policy announcement delivers.
Where the Tories have taken the eye off this ball and dropped it, is asylum is not immigration.
Asylum is not immigration. The Tories should have stayed with that position, not made the stupid mistake Sunak and Braverman did a couple of months ago. This mistake appears irrecoverable now this side of the general election, despite Sunak is already trying to recover the mistake and row back (no pun intended) on what he promised voters.
In other words, the new asylum policy, what you call a big win, it’s already unravelling into a mess
Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
How effective is this line? Just 3.5 years ago, Rishi Sunak campaigned to make Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab…
It's the sort of line you can get away with if people like you more than the other lot. But its not easy.
Depends on your reading of 2019. If you think that Johnson was a lot better than Corbyn, then "Starmer backed Corbyn" still trumps "Sunak backed Johnson".
If there wasn't much in it (and for me, it was a struggle to decide who was worse, they were both awful), then Starmer's attempts to make amends are worth more than Sunak's failure to do anything meaningful.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
One mistake??????????
Depends how bad the mistake is.
Abbott's mistake over the weekend was an absolute doozy, and her excuse pretty feeble.
The "it was just the first draft" only made matters worse.....
The reality is that it is exactly how a particular subset of politicians (and some of the public) see the world, the black / white Corbyn view that there are oppressors, who can't suffer things like racism, and oppressed who get a pass for bad things like being racist, anti-Semitic, etc...and because Jews / Israel are stereotyped as successful, they aren't part of the oppressed class and then you get the Corbyn-esque blind spot to the fact they suffer discrimination.
The "first draft" excuse to me sounded like basically an admission that the letter, as published, contained her authentic views.
It is like having too much to drink, and waking up in the morning trying to write off having spoken your mind as "but I was drunk". It just means "I meant what I said, I'd just rather not have said it."
The first draft may well have contained Abbott's views, but what it lacked was the context that she was countering an article which said White people suffer more racism than Black people, and specifically Jews, Travellers and Irish. Abbott then relied on the semantic point that racism is defined as impacting Blacks rather than Whites, which rather begs the question.
So even if Abbott's views are wrong or objectionable, it is still possible they were badly articulated in that first draft, or that they might have been seen as part of a wider debate in light of the previous article.
There’s a flawed kernel of truth within her arguments, which I don’t think she really understands herself - certainly she’s unable coherently to express it.
Jewish people experienced systematic prejudice and brutal persecution in Europe long before the Transatlantic save trade - and the prejudice was as much religious as against the ‘other’. But ‘racism’ was a term which didn’t then exist: ‘race’ itself dates as a word in English from the 16th century, didn’t mean peoples of common forbears with common distinguishing characteristics until the 18th, and didn’t acquire its pseudo-scientific modern meaning until late in the nineteenth.
Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and other 'inferior races' was to an extent informed and inspired by American treatment of black and indigenous people in the 19th century. That fact alone ought to explode her argument if she thought about it.
So what? What he does for a living is perfectly legal. Why shouldn't he be a candidate? Surprised Guido is such a prude.
I think making the content while supposedly at work is more of an issue. Just like there isn't anything wrong with watching big tractor videos (as claimed by that Tory MP), just not during work time or putting on expenses (like Jacqui Smiths ex-husband).
So what? What he does for a living is perfectly legal. Why shouldn't he be a candidate? Surprised Guido is such a prude.
I think making the content while supposedly at work is more of an issue. Just like there isn't anything wrong with watching big tractor videos (as claimed by that Tory MP), just not during work time.
Thin gruel. If he'd made a cat video while at work nobody would ever mention it.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
And given Dubair petrol prices, I think it's reasonable to assume that that is the rational economic choice: cheap gas, many miles, fast refuelling.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Yes, for the subset of that group that normally buys new or nearly-new cars.
For those who buy old cars though, it might be a long time before making the switch makes sense.
3dhm a litre by the way, about $0.80 or £0.65
Of course:
But that's the nature of any transition. It would make no sense to pull existing vehicles off the road, which have many years of good useful life in them.
At the same time, a larger and larger proportion of new cars sold are going to be electric, and that means - in time - there will be meaningful numbers of used electric vehicles being sold.
Five years from now, I'd reckon that electric (full EV + PHEV) will be half the new car market. Five years from that, they will dominate.
In the last year, in the US where petrol prices are much lower than the UK, the share of fully electric new car sales has gone from 4.4% to 7.1%, and it's only going one way.
Oh indeed, but I think the concern is that the legislators are trying to force the change too quickly, rather than it happening organically.
Which means that the public are not yet on board, and certain disadvantaged groups such as shift workers or those living in rural areas or in shared accommodation will struggle with making the change.
The UK is trying to ban sales of new cars with engines in less than seven years’ time. Funnily enough, the EU just failed to back a similar change, after the Germans and Italians objected.
Governments should be working to enable the charging network to grow much faster than it has done up until now.
Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
How effective is this line? Just 3.5 years ago, Rishi Sunak campaigned to make Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab…
It's the sort of line you can get away with if people like you more than the other lot. But its not easy.
Depends on your reading of 2019. If you think that Johnson was a lot better than Corbyn, then "Starmer backed Corbyn" still trumps "Sunak backed Johnson".
If there wasn't much in it (and for me, it was a struggle to decide who was worse, they were both awful), then Starmer's attempts to make amends are worth more than Sunak's failure to do anything meaningful.
It's a fact of life under FPTP that if you want to hold high national office, compromising under such leaders is at some stage unavoidable.
Had Starmer served under a PM Corbyn, would you have judged him more harshly ? I might.
So what? What he does for a living is perfectly legal. Why shouldn't he be a candidate? Surprised Guido is such a prude.
I think making the content while supposedly at work is more of an issue. Just like there isn't anything wrong with watching big tractor videos (as claimed by that Tory MP), just not during work time.
Thin gruel. If he'd made a cat video while at work nobody would ever mention it.
My shock was more that people actually pay him for it. Each to their own. The whole OnlyFans thing in general, I just don't get...people are paying money in order to be able to message somebody in a "call centre" pretending to be loads of these "e-girls" at the same time.
That Anthony Seldon book being serialised in The Times shows why Boris Johnson is so unfit to be PM.
Yep. Government was completely dysfunctional under him. The reality was exactly as one imagined it. This doesn't always happen. Sometimes what you imagine goes on behind the scenes with someone proves to be off the mark but not here. Johnson truly is as he so often presents - a clueless clown.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
Massively lower fuel and maintenance costs. More internal space. Better performance.
When the price of electric cars falls below that of ICE vehicles, then there will be very few purchasers of petrol vehicles.
Massively lower fuel costs?
Well, let's run the numbers shall we?
Average usable battery capacity of an electric car is about 75KWh, and UK domestic energy prices are around 33p/KWh. Which means it'll cost you (from empty) approximately £25 to full up your car (at home) with electricity. For average range, we should probably go with about 250 miles, although I have a friend who regularly gets more than 300 miles from his standard battery Tesla Model 3. In general, most electric cars will do 3-4 miles per KWh on the road.
So, your electricity cost per mile is about 8-10p, assuming you can charge at home.
A modern, efficient petrol car will probably do 40 miles to the gallon across a range of driving scenarios. A litre of petrol in the UK is about £1.50, and there are 4.5 liters per gallon. So you're paying £6.75/gallon, and going about 40 miles with it (if it's a new modern car). Or about 17p per mile.
Now, if you don't charge at home, the numbers will be very different. But let us not forget that there are 20 million houses in the UK, of which around two thirds have off street parking or a garage (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2019). So that's a lot of people (around half of all households, and way more than half of all car owning households) that have access to home charging.
The vast bulk of the difference is of course duty and tax. And that will not be sustainable as the balance starts to change. Duty on fuel is a major source of government income and will need replaced.
That is, of course, completely true.
But let me show you a chart:
Fifteen years ago, anyone who thought widescale solar deployment in the UK made economic sense was smoking crack.
But prices continue to fall. Like with silicon chips, there's been a very consistent improvement in power-cost over time.
And as technology keeps getting better, that will keep happening.
There is long-term downward pressure on electricity prices, that has just been hidden by the Ukraine war.
One of the biggest plus points of solar is that it works at any scale. Distributed wind generation just can't compete economically.
Starmer has just said on Sky Abbotts comments were anti semitic
The journalist came back that that admittance means she cannot stand for labour
Starmer struggling with response
Should one mistake end her parliamentary career? Seems a bit harsh.
No bigger a mistake on anti-semitism than Starmer sitting in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet for three years....
Is this post timed to go off at 12.30 everyday, irrespective of where in the world you are? Can you teach me how its done?
I feel your pain of a palpable hit.
Every time.
No pain here Mark. It doesn't affect me one way or the other if Labour win or lose the next GE. However, the Johnson and post- Johnsonian Conservatives are so dangerously malign I would like to see them able to regenerate in opposition. I would have thought you too would like the vile stain of Johnson removed with no possibility of resurrection after a close Sunak win.
When I was a little younger I was a Labour Party member pounding the streets like you do for the Johnsonian and post-Johnsonian Conservatives, but after Corbyn, I have no interest. I don't blame Starmer for holding his nose. Chuka Umuna did the right thing. What are his odds for future PM?
I was vocal, early last year, that Johnson had to go. I was equally vocal against Truss. Indeed, I left the Party - but Truss had gone before my standing order had been cancelled, so I did the decent thing - stayed on and voted again for Sunak (even though my preferred candidate was - and remains - Penny Mordaunt).
I shall be happy as a great big happy thing on his holidays if Boris gets banned from the House for long enough for a recall vote - and to see him lose that by-election.
But in the spirit of a better politics for this country, I find it hard to accept Labour putting forward Starmer as our next PM, when for three years he sat in Corbyn's shadow cabinet as antisemitism was a force in his Party. (I can't say I was impressed by his efforts to overturn the democratic will of the people who voted for Brexit, but that was a wider team effort.)
The stench from Johnson (like Corbyn) lingers. A deep cleanse is required. It is best to do that in opposition. Suella Braverman as Home Secretary is evidence for my argument, and she is just as rank as Johnson.
But you forgot to add, in with a good chance of beating Badenoch to LOTO.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
EDIT : on depreciation of EVs. There have been times where some EVs sold for more than the current sale price, due to shortages. The market is gradually moving to rational second hand prices.
I sold a three year old EV less than a month ago, for more than 75% of what I paid for it new.
Now, that's in the US, not the UK. But there certainly wasn't an excess depreciation issue I needed to endure.
I sold a 2-and-a-half year old eniro last November for 80% of its price when new, so it's the same in the UK. Apparently second-hand prices have dropped somewhat since due to Musk's price cuts for Teslas
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
I fear the outcome will be that a lot of people won't be able to afford an electric car, so it won't matter if there aren't many chargers.
The lack of urgency may be that everyone is expecting better and/or standardised charging technology to come along so making a big investment now might be a waste of time.
Are commercial vehicles going to be exempt from the electric mandate? I see a big future in diesel Transits.
The depreciation of electric vehicles is the market expanding - previously there were very few second hand electric vehicles.
Commercial short range stuff is going electric in a big way.
I can definitely see the utility for commercial fleets which typically go to a small number of sites per day and are parked back at HQ overnight.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Most “white vans” put relatively few miles on the clock per day. Bit like taxis. A London cabby told me that he did 150 miles on a big day.
Most vans will go to the job in the morning, and back in the evening. Perhaps a couple of errands during the day.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
And given Dubair petrol prices, I think it's reasonable to assume that that is the rational economic choice: cheap gas, many miles, fast refuelling.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Yes, for the subset of that group that normally buys new or nearly-new cars.
For those who buy old cars though, it might be a long time before making the switch makes sense.
3dhm a litre by the way, about $0.80 or £0.65
In possibly the only useful contribution I can make to this discussion, the votes of classically-Tory voting second-hand car dealers are going begging. The usual purchase price of a second-hand car is around £5k. But it is not likely that second hand EVs will attain that threshold. Any party tha makes it easier for those dealers to continue selling second hand ICE cars will gain votes.
Check out what second hand Prius go for. That’s the future for electric cars as well. There just aren’t enough old, but good electric cars. Yet.
So what? What he does for a living is perfectly legal. Why shouldn't he be a candidate? Surprised Guido is such a prude.
I think making the content while supposedly at work is more of an issue. Just like there isn't anything wrong with watching big tractor videos (as claimed by that Tory MP), just not during work time.
Thin gruel. If he'd made a cat video while at work nobody would ever mention it.
My shock was more that people actually pay him for it. Each to their own. The whole OnlyFans thing in general, I just don't get...people are paying money in order to be able to message somebody in a "call centre" pretending to be loads of these "e-girls" at the same time.
His prices are quite low in terms of sex work though - if he was a good looking girl he could add a zero or three to them.
1) It’s not actually Disney 2) Disney’s lawyers are famously litigious 3) The account is using the n-word quite freely 4) Also claiming all kinds of adult humour is coming to Disney soon
1) It’s not actually Disney 2) Disney’s lawyers are famously litigious 3) The account is using the n-word quite freely 4) Also claiming all kinds of adult humour is coming to Disney soon
1) It’s not actually Disney 2) Disney’s lawyers are famously litigious 3) The account is using the n-word quite freely 4) Also claiming all kinds of adult humour is coming to Disney soon
Absolute shitshow.
Apropos of nothing but if you ever make home made porn for personal use that you don't want the world to see make sure you have a Disney film playing in the background.
If the video becomes public Disney's lawyers will have the video taken down for copyright infringement.
VW Group's Canadian Cell Plant Will Have An Annual Output Of 90 GWh https://insideevs.com/news/663774/vw-group-canadian-cell-plant-annual-output-90-gwh/ Volkswagen Group has released more details about its planned battery cell gigafactory in Canada, which will be the company's largest to date in the world and the country's largest manufacturing plant.
Set to be located in St. Thomas, Ontario and operated by the automaker's PowerCo SE battery subsidiary, the battery plant will have an annual production capacity of up to 90 GWh in the final expansion phase.
For comparison's sake, VW Group's battery gigafactory near Valencia, Spain, will have an annual output of 60 GWh when fully ramped, while the facility in Salzgitter, Germany will produce 40 GWh worth of battery cells each year.
The German automaker plans to invest up to $5.3 billion (4.8 billion euros) until 2030 in the Canadian facility that has the potential to create up to 3,000 highly skilled jobs at the factory and tens of thousands more indirect jobs in the region. The company will receive a lot more money from the Canadian federal government, though.
According to The Detroit News, Canada agreed to subsidies that may top $9.7 billion (13 billion Canadian dollars) over a decade, matching what VW would have got via the Inflation Reduction Act if it had located the plant in the US. The government will provide annual production subsidies as well as a grant toward the factory's capital cost...
Production planned from 2027. 90GWh is around 1.2m cars with 75kWh - so a decade's production of perhaps 10m, allowing for ramp up of production. So a battery subsidy of around $1,000 per car, which isn't ridiculous in order to get serious production up and running.
I have a strange feeling that this whole everyone is going to have an electric car idea is not going to happen. We should be seeing electric chargers being installed everywhere on a mass scale now and it is simply not happening.
The depreciation in value of electric vehicles is accelerating all the time
Perhaps synthetic fuels are the future
Massively lower fuel and maintenance costs. More internal space. Better performance.
When the price of electric cars falls below that of ICE vehicles, then there will be very few purchasers of petrol vehicles.
Massively lower fuel costs?
Well, let's run the numbers shall we?
Average usable battery capacity of an electric car is about 75KWh, and UK domestic energy prices are around 33p/KWh. Which means it'll cost you (from empty) approximately £25 to full up your car (at home) with electricity. For average range, we should probably go with about 250 miles, although I have a friend who regularly gets more than 300 miles from his standard battery Tesla Model 3. In general, most electric cars will do 3-4 miles per KWh on the road.
So, your electricity cost per mile is about 8-10p, assuming you can charge at home.
A modern, efficient petrol car will probably do 40 miles to the gallon across a range of driving scenarios. A litre of petrol in the UK is about £1.50, and there are 4.5 liters per gallon. So you're paying £6.75/gallon, and going about 40 miles with it (if it's a new modern car). Or about 17p per mile.
Now, if you don't charge at home, the numbers will be very different. But let us not forget that there are 20 million houses in the UK, of which around two thirds have off street parking or a garage (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2019). So that's a lot of people (around half of all households, and way more than half of all car owning households) that have access to home charging.
The vast bulk of the difference is of course duty and tax. And that will not be sustainable as the balance starts to change. Duty on fuel is a major source of government income and will need replaced.
That is, of course, completely true.
But let me show you a chart:
Fifteen years ago, anyone who thought widescale solar deployment in the UK made economic sense was smoking crack.
But prices continue to fall. Like with silicon chips, there's been a very consistent improvement in power-cost over time.
And as technology keeps getting better, that will keep happening.
There is long-term downward pressure on electricity prices, that has just been hidden by the Ukraine war.
One of the biggest plus points of solar is that it works at any scale. Distributed wind generation just can't compete economically.
Wind generation is distributed - it's just that the component turbines need to be very big. But that's quibbling; I get your point.
Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
How effective is this line? Just 3.5 years ago, Rishi Sunak campaigned to make Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab…
It's the sort of line you can get away with if people like you more than the other lot. But its not easy.
Depends on your reading of 2019. If you think that Johnson was a lot better than Corbyn, then "Starmer backed Corbyn" still trumps "Sunak backed Johnson".
If there wasn't much in it (and for me, it was a struggle to decide who was worse, they were both awful), then Starmer's attempts to make amends are worth more than Sunak's failure to do anything meaningful.
It's a fact of life under FPTP that if you want to hold high national office, compromising under such leaders is at some stage unavoidable.
Had Starmer served under a PM Corbyn, would you have judged him more harshly ? I might.
At some point, I'd love Starmer to burst out laughing (would be good anyway) and say "You saw the polls. There wasn't any chance of that happening at all."
It won't happen, because it would be breaking the fourth wall too much. But it would a) be true and b) wind up the Corbyn crew something rotten.
But yes. Facilitating bad people in a position of power is worse than facilitating bad people in a position of impotent talking.
Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
How effective is this line? Just 3.5 years ago, Rishi Sunak campaigned to make Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab…
It's the sort of line you can get away with if people like you more than the other lot. But its not easy.
Depends on your reading of 2019. If you think that Johnson was a lot better than Corbyn, then "Starmer backed Corbyn" still trumps "Sunak backed Johnson".
If there wasn't much in it (and for me, it was a struggle to decide who was worse, they were both awful), then Starmer's attempts to make amends are worth more than Sunak's failure to do anything meaningful.
It's a fact of life under FPTP that if you want to hold high national office, compromising under such leaders is at some stage unavoidable.
Had Starmer served under a PM Corbyn, would you have judged him more harshly ? I might.
At some point, I'd love Starmer to burst out laughing (would be good anyway) and say "You saw the polls. There wasn't any chance of that happening at all."
It won't happen, because it would be breaking the fourth wall too much. But it would a) be true and b) wind up the Corbyn crew something rotten.
But yes. Facilitating bad people in a position of power is worse than facilitating bad people in a position of impotent talking.
What Diane Abbott was, dimly, trying to say, was that rich, successful people are Essentially White.
So the current U.K. cabinet is 100% Ze Pure Aryan.
Of course ban me from PB and polite society but the UK and "The West" is generally majority white. So there is no surprise if this is superficially so.
But it shows the poverty of their thinking because in Africa there are rich, successful people and in Israel, there are poor Jews.
Pool old Labour and the left. They just can't help themselves. But of course I understand why our PB of the left posters are happy to vote for them because all this racism isn't as important as giving the Junior Doctors a 35% payrise.
Just 3½ years ago, Keir Starmer campaigned to make Diane Abbott home sec
How effective is this line? Just 3.5 years ago, Rishi Sunak campaigned to make Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab…
It's the sort of line you can get away with if people like you more than the other lot. But its not easy.
Depends on your reading of 2019. If you think that Johnson was a lot better than Corbyn, then "Starmer backed Corbyn" still trumps "Sunak backed Johnson".
If there wasn't much in it (and for me, it was a struggle to decide who was worse, they were both awful), then Starmer's attempts to make amends are worth more than Sunak's failure to do anything meaningful.
It's a fact of life under FPTP that if you want to hold high national office, compromising under such leaders is at some stage unavoidable.
Had Starmer served under a PM Corbyn, would you have judged him more harshly ? I might.
At some point, I'd love Starmer to burst out laughing (would be good anyway) and say "You saw the polls. There wasn't any chance of that happening at all."
It won't happen, because it would be breaking the fourth wall too much. But it would a) be true and b) wind up the Corbyn crew something rotten.
But yes. Facilitating bad people in a position of power is worse than facilitating bad people in a position of impotent talking.
Ah, yes, the line used by Labour canvassers on the doorstep in 2017, which got him pretty close...
Comments
A problem which government (and in many cases only government) can at the moment solve.
I'm not so sure about white van man, though that's not really the point.
I was envisaging those who don't want to go electric - for whatever reason - claiming to need a commercial vehicle.
Though having checked, it seems the threshold is 3.5T, so light vans are currently lined up with domestic vehicles for a 2030 end date.
Ok?
I agree that calling this one mistake is risible.
This is the way.
I have been super busy past few months and only dropping by briefly....but I watch a couple of episodes and its bad isn't it, like really really really bad. Will anybody notice if all the writer in Hollywood go on strike?
But members didn’t get a vote second time round, it was MP stitch up?
Will the PB annals show you supported Boris, campaigned to have him elected. And now like Peter you won’t follow him to death? You deny him?
I don’t actually like the phrase and type of politics Rentaul is tweeting to spark this game of who once supported what here. I hope he is reading. To me it’s a bit like the lesson from John 13:31–38. We campaign in politics and speak up without any real understanding? Just bravado? I don’t believe that. I believe politics is more nuanced and it’s unfair to use this type of attack line.
Until such time as Dominic Grieve becomes Tory Leader, the Conservative PM candidate won't float my boat either.
London cabs spend all day in heavy traffic, but cabs in other places will do much higher mileages. Where I am, a long but thin city, two drivers share a car, and it averages 1,000km a day. Three-year-old cars have 1m km on the odometer, most of them are Toyota hybrids.
Therefore they must be the oppressors. The fact that Jewish people are, as an average, on relatively higher incomes, obviously hides a significant discrepancy in their lived experiences. However for Corbyn and Abbott, it just does not compute.
They would never accept that because there can be wealthy or powerful black Britons, racism against them does not exist, but they fail to extend that argument.
If the choice is between someone who campaigned for Corbyn to be PM and someone who campaigned for him not to be PM, it's not difficult.
Do you not understand how Sunak’s coke factory speech was perceived in Scotland, and by every remainer in England and Wales?
“Crisis? What crisis? You have all the benefits of the EU single market.”
That was Sunak enjoying a big win and a very good day.
It seemed to work ok for Star Trek for 50 years....and of course the likes of Knight Rider and the Fall Guy in the 80/90s were very popular, which was basically bounty hunter stories.
They had a winner with Mando and the Baby Yoda sidekick if they had kept it simple.
At the very least, she might have had her letter read by someone else, before posting it off to a national newspaper!
LABOUR’S X-RATED CANDIDATE CAUGHT SHORT AT WORK
https://order-order.com/2023/04/24/labours-x-rated-candidate-caught-short-at-work/
But let me show you a chart:
Fifteen years ago, anyone who thought widescale solar deployment in the UK made economic sense was smoking crack.
But prices continue to fall. Like with silicon chips, there's been a very consistent improvement in power-cost over time.
And as technology keeps getting better, that will keep happening.
There is long-term downward pressure on electricity prices, that has just been hidden by the Ukraine war.
Sunak's cabinet: 60% privately educated.
May's cabinet: 30% privately educated.
Now, that's in the US, not the UK. But there certainly wasn't an excess depreciation issue I needed to endure.
He *really* likes Coke.
So the current U.K. cabinet is 100% Ze Pure Aryan.
But that's not many peoples' use cases. There are a lot of cars that drive 6,000 miles a year, and are owned by people who have a garage or off street parking. For that group, we're rapidly heading towards a point where the economic rational case will clearly be to go electric.
Your previous comment wasn't.
For those who buy old cars though, it might be a long time before making the switch makes sense.
3dhm a litre by the way, about $0.80 or £0.65
Occasionally, people used to throw the fact that he was first elected under the banner of Foot's "longest suicide note in history" at Blair. But I'm not sure it ever appealed to anyone but the Tory faithful, and possibly slightly helped Blair among traditional Labour ("well, he can't be all bad, then...").
When politicians become leaders, I think people tend to judge them on that. For Starmer, that includes expelling Corbyn, and people will (probably correctly) see that as more instructive than the fact he was relatively loyal when Corbyn had the top job. For Sunak, Johnson and Truss form no part of his plans, and rather helpfully for him rebelled on NI Protocol, underlining the point.
Maybe the public are wrong on that - I personally think the roles of Starmer and Sunak as loyal(ish) lieutenants to Corbyn and Johnson in the fairly recent past does have some relevance. But I'd suggest in purely electoral terms, these are pretty niche interest campaign lines.
But that's the nature of any transition. It would make no sense to pull existing vehicles off the road, which have many years of good useful life in them.
At the same time, a larger and larger proportion of new cars sold are going to be electric, and that means - in time - there will be meaningful numbers of used electric vehicles being sold.
Five years from now, I'd reckon that electric (full EV + PHEV) will be half the new car market. Five years from that, they will dominate.
In the last year, in the US where petrol prices are much lower than the UK, the share of fully electric new car sales has gone from 4.4% to 7.1%, and it's only going one way.
What has happened since Sunak’s government formed, mostly driven by Braverman and her “unaccountable” friends on back benches and not the cabinet - but whole government is fellow traveller with her, the history books will make clear - is the language the Conservative Party always used to describe those coming across the channel to surrender to border staff, has completely changed. They are now all illegals. Every single one of them.
The problem there is so obvious. Processing has been giving out 70% 80% asylum to stay in UK to many groups of them. Do you see what I mean? Increasing processing speed can now quickly turn out results completely at odds with the government’s new rhetoric and the “promise” to voters from what this years policy announcement delivers.
Where the Tories have taken the eye off this ball and dropped it, is asylum is not immigration.
Asylum is not immigration. The Tories should have stayed with that position, not made the stupid mistake Sunak and Braverman did a couple of months ago. This mistake appears irrecoverable now this side of the general election, despite Sunak is already trying to recover the mistake and row back (no pun intended) on what he promised voters.
In other words, the new asylum policy, what you call a big win, it’s already unravelling into a mess
https://conservativehome.com/2023/04/20/enver-solomon-sunak-wont-stop-the-boats-i-know-it-you-know-it-so-we-need-less-harsh-more-compassionate-alternative/
I do agree with you though, CPTPP accession is a Major success for Sunak and the UK, and is at least one win not so quickly unraveling.
If there wasn't much in it (and for me, it was a struggle to decide who was worse, they were both awful), then Starmer's attempts to make amends are worth more than Sunak's failure to do anything meaningful.
Jewish people experienced systematic prejudice and brutal persecution in Europe long before the Transatlantic save trade - and the prejudice was as much religious as against the ‘other’. But ‘racism’ was a term which didn’t then exist: ‘race’ itself dates as a word in English from the 16th century, didn’t mean peoples of common forbears with common distinguishing characteristics until the 18th, and didn’t acquire its pseudo-scientific modern meaning until late in the nineteenth.
Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and other 'inferior races' was to an extent informed and inspired by American treatment of black and indigenous people in the 19th century. That fact alone ought to explode her argument if she thought about it.
Which means that the public are not yet on board, and certain disadvantaged groups such as shift workers or those living in rural areas or in shared accommodation will struggle with making the change.
The UK is trying to ban sales of new cars with engines in less than seven years’ time. Funnily enough, the EU just failed to back a similar change, after the Germans and Italians objected.
Governments should be working to enable the charging network to grow much faster than it has done up until now.
Had Starmer served under a PM Corbyn, would you have judged him more harshly ? I might.
Apparently second-hand prices have dropped somewhat since due to Musk's price cuts for Teslas
All the celebs who said they wouldn't pay for it
Apologies for the unfortunate typo, which I'm now unable to correct.
Of course taking the two positions together meant "pass me a glass of whisky and a revolver"
Or nothing.
He also gave one to "Disney Junior UK" (Disney's lawyers might have nixed it already)>
https://twitter.com/canokar/status/1650440400971112450
This account has been “organization verified”.
1) It’s not actually Disney
2) Disney’s lawyers are famously litigious
3) The account is using the n-word quite freely
4) Also claiming all kinds of adult humour is coming to Disney soon
Absolute shitshow.
I can't imagine a politician in recent British history worth campaigning for Corbyn against.
(Edit: at least, not one from a major party.)
If the video becomes public Disney's lawyers will have the video taken down for copyright infringement.
But that's quibbling; I get your point.
It won't happen, because it would be breaking the fourth wall too much. But it would a) be true and b) wind up the Corbyn crew something rotten.
But yes. Facilitating bad people in a position of power is worse than facilitating bad people in a position of impotent talking.
One reason I favour PR.
But it shows the poverty of their thinking because in Africa there are rich, successful people and in Israel, there are poor Jews.
Pool old Labour and the left. They just can't help themselves. But of course I understand why our PB of the left posters are happy to vote for them because all this racism isn't as important as giving the Junior Doctors a 35% payrise.
Lab maj 48.1%
No maj 41.3%
Con maj 15.2%
https://smarkets.com/event/41817534/politics/uk/next-uk-general-election/next-general-election-overall-majority
(Not sure why they don't add up to 100%).