An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
In a competition between which Military Industrial Complex runs out of materiel first, I think I’m going to be betting on the US/EU one rather than the Russian one.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
They think we should swallow any old shit, just like wot they used to do.
ITV showed a bar chart demonstrating an astronomical upscaling of pumping s*** into surface waters since 2016 and this was defended by Coffey and Green as no proof that pollution is getting worse because it is only since the Conservatives have been in power that we have been "monitoring" s*** being pumped into waterways. Their argument was it "might" have been worse during New Labour because New Labour weren't "monitoring " the amount of s*** pumped into the sea. Both Anoushka and Jonathan Ashworth were so bewildered by the front of the excuse they didn't counter.
What's a newspaper? My grandad read those I think.
On a similar subject. Cut up into conveniently sized squares, an absorbent substitute for Izal non-absorbent loo roll in the works lavatory prior to the Heath and Safety etc. At Work Act 1974.
Lib Dem policy clarification for Thursday morning.
Davey is not proposing limiting the profits of privatised companies. The Lib Dem policy on water companies is fairly clear and sensible:
- Enforce existing rules including more regularly taking companies that infringe to court, and increasing fines to levels that actually have an effect - Replace Ofwat with a regulator with more teeth - Set more ambitious binding water quality targets
All things that are perfectly reasonable, and if they are enough to scare off foreign investment then perhaps that’s not the kind of rent-seeking foreign investment we want.
A regulator with more teeth would limit profits. Though I acknowledge I'm probably more hard line than Davey on this.
Including chief, executives, and board members in those fined might help!
An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
And whilst it’s horrific for civilians to be having these Russian missiles hitting their homes, each one is one less missile being targeted at Ukrainian military resources.
It’s almost like a rubbish re-run of the blitz/fire bombing campaign where the enemy thinks hitting the civilian population will destroy the will to fight and forgetting that you probably need to stop the things that will destroy your own military as a priority.
Lib Dem policy clarification for Thursday morning.
Davey is not proposing limiting the profits of privatised companies. The Lib Dem policy on water companies is fairly clear and sensible:
- Enforce existing rules including more regularly taking companies that infringe to court, and increasing fines to levels that actually have an effect - Replace Ofwat with a regulator with more teeth - Set more ambitious binding water quality targets
All things that are perfectly reasonable, and if they are enough to scare off foreign investment then perhaps that’s not the kind of rent-seeking foreign investment we want.
A regulator with more teeth would limit profits. Though I acknowledge I'm probably more hard line than Davey on this.
Mildly interesting that Ruth Kelly, the orthodox Catholic New Labour minister rumoured to wear a cilice, is the new Water UK chair. A glutton for punishment it seems.
Lib Dem policy clarification for Thursday morning.
Davey is not proposing limiting the profits of privatised companies. The Lib Dem policy on water companies is fairly clear and sensible:
- Enforce existing rules including more regularly taking companies that infringe to court, and increasing fines to levels that actually have an effect - Replace Ofwat with a regulator with more teeth - Set more ambitious binding water quality targets
All things that are perfectly reasonable, and if they are enough to scare off foreign investment then perhaps that’s not the kind of rent-seeking foreign investment we want.
A regulator with more teeth would limit profits. Though I acknowledge I'm probably more hard line than Davey on this.
Mildly interesting that Ruth Kelly, the orthodox Catholic New Labour minister rumoured to wear a cilice, is the new Water UK chair. A glutton for punishment it seems.
The Gravy train for mediocre former politicians, irrespective of party, continues.
I must say I'm not a fan of Quentin Letts. He's not someone who's ever struck me as over-burdened with self-awareness, and is possibly the sort of individual that needs some kind of life-changing experience, to get him out of being stuck in various patterns.
Lib Dem policy clarification for Thursday morning.
Davey is not proposing limiting the profits of privatised companies. The Lib Dem policy on water companies is fairly clear and sensible:
- Enforce existing rules including more regularly taking companies that infringe to court, and increasing fines to levels that actually have an effect - Replace Ofwat with a regulator with more teeth - Set more ambitious binding water quality targets
All things that are perfectly reasonable, and if they are enough to scare off foreign investment then perhaps that’s not the kind of rent-seeking foreign investment we want.
A regulator with more teeth would limit profits. Though I acknowledge I'm probably more hard line than Davey on this.
The regulator is pretty good at allowing charges to increase though. Problem is regulators often appear to go native with those they regulate.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
They think we should swallow any old shit, just like wot they used to do.
Nice one. What he means is if you stop shitting on the proles they'll only shit on themselves. Ergo they should shut the f*ck up.
And so should any trendy vicar types who start whingeing about the proles' conditions, or about the management of public resources, or anything else for that matter, because hey some of us went to boarding school [*], okay.
He sounds as thick as a brick and cocky with it. If something's acceptable it's not an issue. I wonder what Alicia thinks of him.
One aspect of the “Benin Bronzes” story that hasn’t been much explored is “where did the bronze come from?” Turns out, the Rheinland. How did it get to Benin? From Portuguese slave traders who used it to pay for slaves- which Benin provided. How did the British get them? After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade.
"After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade."
Rubbish.
Also Benin supposedly banned the sale of slaves in the 16th century.
Thats rubbish I'm afraid. Ouidah in Benin was the most important slave trade port in West Africa. Over a million slaves passed through it between 1660 and 1860.
Edit - Worth adding of course that this does support the first part of your posting. When the Benin Bronzes were taken in 1897, the slave trade had been effectively extinct in Benin for more than 3 decades.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
We could always sell Scotland Might get a few quid.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
It’s just cheap politics. I don’t get the point about overseas investors. Why shouldn’t they get dividends as well as domestic investors ? Surely a better point would have been the level of dividends paid out rather than just discriminating on the recipients based on where they are based.
I don't disagree - but from the point of view of the UK, dividends remitted overseas, versus paid into (say) pension funds, are more damaging.
It's indeed the level of profits and dividends - generated by benefit of monopoly position rather than good performance - which I object to.
I think the problem is really one of lax regulation. We have toothless regulation in this country that seem to side with those they regulate. OFGEM are another example.
We need firm regulation of private monopolies. Instead we simply get guaranteed price rises and guaranteed profits. I cannot switch from Northumbria water yet I’ve had a 15% and a 7% increase the last two years.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
They think we should swallow any old shit, just like wot they used to do.
ITV showed a bar chart demonstrating an astronomical upscaling of pumping s*** into surface waters since 2016 and this was defended by Coffey and Green as no proof that pollution is getting worse because it is only since the Conservatives have been in power that we have been "monitoring" s*** being pumped into waterways. Their argument was it "might" have been worse during New Labour because New Labour weren't "monitoring " the amount of s*** pumped into the sea. Both Anoushka and Jonathan Ashworth were so bewildered by the front of the excuse they didn't counter.
What's a newspaper? My grandad read those I think.
On a similar subject. Cut up into conveniently sized squares, an absorbent substitute for Izal non-absorbent loo roll in the works lavatory prior to the Heath and Safety etc. At Work Act 1974.
I always used the squares with pictures of Thatcher on them.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
If we sold Will and Kate to the USA it would plummet Harry and Meghan’s value.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
We could always sell Scotland Might get a few quid.
Yes please! We might get a buyer that values us more than the current asset stripping owners.
An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
And whilst it’s horrific for civilians to be having these Russian missiles hitting their homes, each one is one less missile being targeted at Ukrainian military resources.
It’s almost like a rubbish re-run of the blitz/fire bombing campaign where the enemy thinks hitting the civilian population will destroy the will to fight and forgetting that you probably need to stop the things that will destroy your own military as a priority.
Most service personnel have civilian family members. Many of the latter haven't been through military training and what it does to the mind.
I'm a civilian and if a missile ever lands on my house because a British administration is at war with a foreign one, I'm unlikely to consider that I've simply taken one for the team without thinking of what the war is about and where it might go.
What do you make of what Prigozhin has been saying? If references to mahogany desks give way to direct criticism of Putin, one of them may be for the chop. That will probably be Prigozhin but if it's Putin then his replacement ain't going to be no peacemaker.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
We could always sell Scotland Might get a few quid.
Management buy-out? But the SNP are potless, aren't they?
Malc, I suspect, might argue that Scotland has been sold out a few times already!
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
It’s just cheap politics. I don’t get the point about overseas investors. Why shouldn’t they get dividends as well as domestic investors ? Surely a better point would have been the level of dividends paid out rather than just discriminating on the recipients based on where they are based.
I don't disagree - but from the point of view of the UK, dividends remitted overseas, versus paid into (say) pension funds, are more damaging.
It's indeed the level of profits and dividends - generated by benefit of monopoly position rather than good performance - which I object to.
I think the problem is really one of lax regulation. We have toothless regulation in this country that seem to side with those they regulate. OFGEM are another example.
We need firm regulation of private monopolies. Instead we simply get guaranteed price rises and guaranteed profits. I cannot switch from Northumbria water yet I’ve had a 15% and a 7% increase the last two years.
This is the same old story across the board in Britain.
Europe runs very effectively on privatised medicine. Many if not most EUropean countries have a far better health system than the UK and there is significant private involvement in that. But as it stands that won't work in the UK.
Why? Because in other countries that private input comes with strict controls, regulations and limits on profit. Tell a company they can provide private services but they can only make a maximum 5% profit on those services and most will do the sums and decide it is worth it. A steady profit of 5% it nothing to be sniffed at. Particularly long term. Their work is strictly regulated and the system, almost always, works.
But in the UK we have one main party opposed to any private involvement in health povision and another who thinks it should be a free for all with no regulation. The oft used and utterly idiotic 'light touch' argument.
This is the same across so many other aspects of public service provision. Private input is very much the best way to go as it avoids much of the problem of political expediency which characterised the nationalised services. But it only works if the people in Government have the power to regulate for the best interests of the public/customer. Something the current Tory party as the chamions of privatisation are unwilling or unable to do.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
If we sold Will and Kate to the USA it would plummet Harry and Meghan’s value.
An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
In a competition between which Military Industrial Complex runs out of materiel first, I think I’m going to be betting on the US/EU one rather than the Russian one.
For the time being, it's stocks of kit rather than new production. Neither side can make anything like the numbers that are being used.
Note last night's attacks were largely cruise missiles. The KH-101s are well over $10m - and were probably shot down by stuff like IRIS-T, which uses missiles costing around €400k.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
According to Therese Coffey it appears to be worse than a decade ago because the Conservatives are now "monitoring" the amount of s*** we pump into our rivers. So who knows? It might have been worse, but for all this Conservative "monitoring".
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
In a competition between which Military Industrial Complex runs out of materiel first, I think I’m going to be betting on the US/EU one rather than the Russian one.
For the time being, it's stocks of kit rather than new production. Neither side can make anything like the numbers that are being used.
Note last night's attacks were largely cruise missiles. The KH-101s are well over $10m - and were probably shot down by stuff like IRIS-T, which uses missiles costing around €400k.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
We could always sell Scotland Might get a few quid.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
One thing - Our courts don't seem willing to give out big enough fines (£216m is peanuts for this sort of systemic abuse). Any sort of court case of this ilk in the USA generally has a fine beginning with a 'b' and not an 'm' - whilst US court awards often seem excessive to me I think the colossal amounts they tend to award for stubbing your toe or w/e are probably better in cases like this for changing future behaviour.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
We could always sell Scotland Might get a few quid.
Management buy-out? But the SNP are potless, aren't they?
Malc, I suspect, might argue that Scotland has been sold out a few times already!
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Monbiot makes multiple points there, though ; budgets for monitoring at the EA have been reduced by 55% over the last ten years, prosecutions have gone down by a staggering. 98%.
This is because the Cameron administration effectively changed the entire model of monitoring to "self-reporting" and self-regulation, which must be near the root of it.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
According to Therese Coffey it appears to be worse than a decade ago because the Conservatives are now "monitoring" the amount of s*** we pump into our rivers. So who knows? It might have been worse, but for all this Conservative "monitoring".
There is some truth to that, and it is perfectly possible that there is not much more sh*t being pumped into our rivers than in the past.
AIUI, it's also a significant issue in Scotland as well, where the works are publicly-owned.
Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
Dumped shit all over the coutryside.
Dumped shit all over the voters.
@Channel4News "I'm not going to apologise... what was done was done."
Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng refuses to apologise over his time in office alongside Liz Truss, and tells @cathynewman he would like to see lower taxes under Rishi Sunak.
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity...
Justin is a bit thick. Amol Rajan is actually pretty good; he seems to do his prep, as he's quite sharp.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
Also, population increase. Slough always told the ONS that you can measure their population (which, of course, ONS were underestimating) by the residents' output.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low, as the earlier level of EU oversight now wouldn't be there, too. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but I do find it interesting how, for figures like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same, with one flowing into the other, so to speak.
An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
In a competition between which Military Industrial Complex runs out of materiel first, I think I’m going to be betting on the US/EU one rather than the Russian one.
Further - the US has quite a stockpile of Patriot missiles, they are in current production, and there are quite a few heading towards being time expired. Not to mention allies using them and buying more stock all the time.
The ones heading towards time expiry are use or lose - you don't want to be around a past-sell-by-date solid fuel rocket motor when it ignites.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Monbiot makes multiple points there, though ; budgets for monitoring at the EA have been reduced by 55% over the last ten years, prosecutions have gone down by a staggering. 98%.
This is because the Cameron administration effectively changed the entire model of monitoring to "self-reporting" and self-regulation, which must be near the root of it.
Self-regulation is an oxymoron. Don't let people mark their own homework should be one of the basic principles of government.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
R6 and R2 are becoming increasingly similar. It's probably just a reflection of my tastes, but I would like 6 Music to be a *bit* weirder and a bit less cosy with its core demo of Britpop Dads.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
One aspect of the “Benin Bronzes” story that hasn’t been much explored is “where did the bronze come from?” Turns out, the Rheinland. How did it get to Benin? From Portuguese slave traders who used it to pay for slaves- which Benin provided. How did the British get them? After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade.
"After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade."
Rubbish.
Also Benin supposedly banned the sale of slaves in the 16th century.
The Benin bronzes tbh seem to be one of the more straightforward* cases of something that should probably be returned to where it was taken from. But anyway their value (fairly obviously, surely) is not that of the intrinsic commodity value of the bronze, but the artistry of their creation.
We enjoy these reductio ad absurdam arguments on here, but I don’t think it works here.
*this does not mean it’s entirely straightforward. ‘Less complex’ maybe.
I for one won't rest until Stonehenge is ground down to a fine powder and transported back to Wales
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
Amol Rajan is one of the few presenters on Today that doesn't make me shout at the radio. I mostly listen to Magic. I like to think it's because I learn everything I need to know on here, but my wife says it's because I have become dumbed down.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
Nope, it's just BT using the latest buzz word to reflect what is actually just better network management with machinery self diagnosing issues.
And a lot of those BT jobs are going because they are currently on a massive infrastructure improvement project once it's done those people won't be needed.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
you wonder what the other 44000 are doing now that will not need doing in future. You can always see why maybe 10% could be culled but that is a big number.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Monbiot makes multiple points there, though ; budgets for monitoring at the EA have been reduced by 55% over the last ten years, prosecutions have gone down by a staggering. 98%.
This is because the Cameron administration effectively changed the entire model of monitoring to "self-reporting" and self-regulation, which must be near the root of it.
Self-regulation is an oxymoron. Don't let people mark their own homework should be one of the basic principles of government.
Indeed. This does tend to remind everyone of both the Thatcherite and New Labour culpability for what happened in 2008..
Much of the rest of Europe looks on in bafflement. Even in countries where quite a lot is privatised, as Richard says, proper regulation is much more well-functioning, and less idelogically hamstrung.
One aspect of the “Benin Bronzes” story that hasn’t been much explored is “where did the bronze come from?” Turns out, the Rheinland. How did it get to Benin? From Portuguese slave traders who used it to pay for slaves- which Benin provided. How did the British get them? After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade.
"After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade."
Rubbish.
Also Benin supposedly banned the sale of slaves in the 16th century.
The Benin bronzes tbh seem to be one of the more straightforward* cases of something that should probably be returned to where it was taken from. But anyway their value (fairly obviously, surely) is not that of the intrinsic commodity value of the bronze, but the artistry of their creation.
We enjoy these reductio ad absurdam arguments on here, but I don’t think it works here.
*this does not mean it’s entirely straightforward. ‘Less complex’ maybe.
I for one won't rest until Stonehenge is ground down to a fine powder and transported back to Wales
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity...
Justin is a bit thick. Amol Rajan is actually pretty good; he seems to do his prep, as he's quite sharp.
Yes, he’s really good. He was wasted on The One Show, I’m glad he’s moved onto something more demanding.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
We’re either Greatest Hits or Virgin Radio now when we’re driving.
Radio 2 I cannot really be doing with now. The music is just not for me.
The BBC can do what it wants and abandon a large demographic if it wants, even if they are liecense fee payers, to cater for a younger or more Niche audience. But that demographic will go elsewhere.
I'm inclined to agree with this take. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “This apology and plan just don’t go far enough. For years water companies have arrogantly dismissed the public’s fears of rivers, lakes and coastlines being damaged by sewage discharges.
“This announcement does nothing to match the billions water firms have paid out in dividends to overseas investors, or stop their CEOs being handed multimillion pound bonuses.”
If we don't want "overseas investors" claiming "billions in dividends" we need to rebalance our trade deficit by reducing domestic demand and investing more. Not sure I see Ed Davey arguing for that. If we don't we have to pay rent on the assets we have sold to cover our excess expenditure. If we restrict the rent we get less for the next tranche of assets we sell. These are the facts and Ed and other politicians need to come to grips with them.
Surely there is nothing left to sell other than the Royal's palaces.
Great locations for a bit of affordable housing too. Sandringham New Town or Highgrove Garden Village.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
You can call it what you want but this is first level automation removing jobs. Fast food outlets have done a similar thing on removing order takers and replacing them by terminals. And it will accelerate. This is good news as it increases productivity and that is something the UK needs. On the other hand is reiterates the question why do we need mass immigration ?
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
95% sounds very high, even if its a potential to solve rather than currently solving. In my personal user experience more like 10-20%.
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity...
Justin is a bit thick. Amol Rajan is actually pretty good; he seems to do his prep, as he's quite sharp.
Yes, he’s really good. He was wasted on The One Show, I’m glad he’s moved onto something more demanding.
Definitely won me over with his more serious stuff.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
And 7 million more people paying user fees, so why haven't they expanded the infrastructure? In any case, the capacity problem AIUI isn't created by shit but rainwater - the problem is that the shit and rainwater are combined and both end up in the rivers when it rains.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
R6 and R2 are becoming increasingly similar. It's probably just a reflection of my tastes, but I would like 6 Music to be a *bit* weirder and a bit less cosy with its core demo of Britpop Dads.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Exactly simple arithmetic
The classic example of this is in London, where the Bazalgette era infrastructure began to run out of capacity in the 90s.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
95% sounds very high, even if its a potential to solve rather than currently solving. In my personal user experience more like 10-20%.
Depends how long the AI has been running - it's a very iterative process with more questions added over time.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Exactly simple arithmetic
The classic example of this is in London, where the Bazalgette era infrastructure began to run out of capacity in the 90s.
Londo, perhaps unexpectedy seems to have less sewage discharge than elsewhere
Worst areas look to be the around the Pennines (Leeds, Manchester). Durham also very poor for it's population (Sunderland more discharges than Birmingham)
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
Kennedy is at 22?! Blimey. If he stays that short closer to the nominations I might invest in laying that. Brian Rose redux.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
95% sounds very high, even if its a potential to solve rather than currently solving. In my personal user experience more like 10-20%.
Depends how long the AI has been running - it's a very iterative process with more questions added over time.
Yes, if it’s working properly, the humans should be training it with more of the stuff that got escalated. You end up going from a Level 1 chatbot to a Level 2 chatbot, and then only need Level 3 humans.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
You can call it what you want but this is first level automation removing jobs. Fast food outlets have done a similar thing on removing order takers and replacing them by terminals. And it will accelerate. This is good news as it increases productivity and that is something the UK needs. On the other hand is reiterates the question why do we need mass immigration ?
If an IT consultant immigrates then they end up spending a lot of their pay in the local economy.
If you pay for an IT consultant living in another country then that's a service import, and that money is lost to the domestic economy.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
I have jumped ship from the BBC to LBC and Greatest Hits Radio not because the BBC have gone down market, but in the case of R4 their news content is so simperingly pro-Government and R2 sacked Wrighty and Ken replacing them with tosspots.
R4 is pro-government? (This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
We’re either Greatest Hits or Virgin Radio now when we’re driving.
Radio 2 I cannot really be doing with now. The music is just not for me.
The BBC can do what it wants and abandon a large demographic if it wants, even if they are liecense fee payers, to cater for a younger or more Niche audience. But that demographic will go elsewhere.
Spotify is also a godsend.
As for R4 being a govt mouthpiece that is absurd.
In the news bits of R4 you can sense a palpable fear of offending the government at times. It comes across as painful effort to be two-sided on topics where there’s a consensus the Tories have cocked up.
The rest of R4 is pretty lefty to be honest. I think across the BBC it’s the mainstream news bulletins where you feel the hand of government most strongly.
An interesting interpretation of recent events in Ukraine.
"Mykola Bielieskov @MBielieskov RU intensified 🚀 strikes after leaked grim JCS estimates of UA air defense capacity. RU aim is simple one - deplete UA interceptors stock&open avenues for RU piloted aviation. That’s why though UA air&missile defense performed well it’s not the time to fall into complacency."
Britain's latest package of defence assistance did include more air defence missiles, so hopefully Russia will run out of long-range missiles a long time before Ukraine runs out of air defence missiles.
The Patriot system missiles are horribly expensive, at nearly $5m a pop. But the Russian Kinzhal they're shooting down is double that.
And whilst it’s horrific for civilians to be having these Russian missiles hitting their homes, each one is one less missile being targeted at Ukrainian military resources.
It’s almost like a rubbish re-run of the blitz/fire bombing campaign where the enemy thinks hitting the civilian population will destroy the will to fight and forgetting that you probably need to stop the things that will destroy your own military as a priority.
Most service personnel have civilian family members. Many of the latter haven't been through military training and what it does to the mind.
I'm a civilian and if a missile ever lands on my house because a British administration is at war with a foreign one, I'm unlikely to consider that I've simply taken one for the team without thinking of what the war is about and where it might go.
What do you make of what Prigozhin has been saying? If references to mahogany desks give way to direct criticism of Putin, one of them may be for the chop. That will probably be Prigozhin but if it's Putin then his replacement ain't going to be no peacemaker.
Those are Putin's words coming out of Prigozhin's mouth to motivate the Frunze graduates on the General Staff to more urgency of action. VVP has a long history of pitting his minions against each other that way.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Exactly simple arithmetic
The classic example of this is in London, where the Bazalgette era infrastructure began to run out of capacity in the 90s.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
And 7 million more people paying user fees, so why haven't they expanded the infrastructure? In any case, the capacity problem AIUI isn't created by shit but rainwater - the problem is that the shit and rainwater are combined and both end up in the rivers when it rains.
Because the fees are being trousered by the water cos, the water cos and the constructors are tremendously inefficient, major infrastructure takes about 10 years to put in place and neither Lab or Con could be arsed doing anything for the last 30 odd years etc.
I could go on as Ive just finished working 3 years in the water sector including on the Tidewy project , bur Im off for an old fashioned liquid lunch and have a train to catch. Have a good day and hope you get back on your feet soon.
I agree with Mike! Trump is too short in the betting.
Kennedy Jnr and Manchin big lays in the Next President market at 22 and 65. Wouldnt be surprised if either shorten further first though so would leave some spare.
Kennedy is at 22?! Blimey. If he stays that short closer to the nominations I might invest in laying that. Brian Rose redux.
Bloomberg traded sub 4 if I remember correctly. I think it quite likely that some political consultants on both sides of the pond recommend fringe candidates to back down their betfair prices as a cost effective way of staying relevant and competing for attention to raise further funds.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
Nope, it's just BT using the latest buzz word to reflect what is actually just better network management with machinery self diagnosing issues.
And a lot of those BT jobs are going because they are currently on a massive infrastructure improvement project once it's done those people won't be needed.
Can confirm. Improvement in network automation != "AI".
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One aspect of the “Benin Bronzes” story that hasn’t been much explored is “where did the bronze come from?” Turns out, the Rheinland. How did it get to Benin? From Portuguese slave traders who used it to pay for slaves- which Benin provided. How did the British get them? After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade.
"After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade."
Rubbish.
Also Benin supposedly banned the sale of slaves in the 16th century.
The Benin bronzes tbh seem to be one of the more straightforward* cases of something that should probably be returned to where it was taken from. But anyway their value (fairly obviously, surely) is not that of the intrinsic commodity value of the bronze, but the artistry of their creation.
We enjoy these reductio ad absurdam arguments on here, but I don’t think it works here.
*this does not mean it’s entirely straightforward. ‘Less complex’ maybe.
I for one won't rest until Stonehenge is ground down to a fine powder and transported back to Wales
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
The one I've just been using is for a wine company - their robot says up front, to use the phrase "speak to human" at any time if one wishes.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
And 7 million more people paying user fees, so why haven't they expanded the infrastructure? In any case, the capacity problem AIUI isn't created by shit but rainwater - the problem is that the shit and rainwater are combined and both end up in the rivers when it rains.
On new housing projects, they are specifying separation of the rainwater and sewage. The problem is that in existing towns and cities it wasn't built that way.
A large part of the increase in population increase in cities is denisfication. In London, 19K people per square KM in the "dormitory" areas, vs 6K in the mid 19th. The pattern has been repeated in many other cities.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
One aspect of the “Benin Bronzes” story that hasn’t been much explored is “where did the bronze come from?” Turns out, the Rheinland. How did it get to Benin? From Portuguese slave traders who used it to pay for slaves- which Benin provided. How did the British get them? After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade.
"After a raid to suppress then stop said Slave Trade."
Rubbish.
Also Benin supposedly banned the sale of slaves in the 16th century.
The Benin bronzes tbh seem to be one of the more straightforward* cases of something that should probably be returned to where it was taken from. But anyway their value (fairly obviously, surely) is not that of the intrinsic commodity value of the bronze, but the artistry of their creation.
We enjoy these reductio ad absurdam arguments on here, but I don’t think it works here.
*this does not mean it’s entirely straightforward. ‘Less complex’ maybe.
I for one won't rest until Stonehenge is ground down to a fine powder and transported back to Wales
That's unhenged.
For the menhir, not the few.
It'd make the archaeologists feel more than a bit blue.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The cognitive dissonance, when it comes to the relationship between population and the requirement for housebuilding and infrastructure, is quite something to watch.
One thing you need a Thatcher for is turning the Ship of State*
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
As I am incredibly sad I have listened to Today each weekday morning since mid-teens and its evolution of presenters to its now rolling roster. I find Martha Kearney human but also disarmingly incisive in interviews, Mishal Hussein is suitably formal and stern in getting interviews done and Justin Webb seems to be balanced between being serious and uncomfortably fun. Amol Rajan is fresh but does tend to go on about his children too much - maybe he needs a Radio 2 programme as I seem to find that’s all they talk about there. Nick Robinson just needs to step away and host Manchester United Radio for the good of humanity.
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
There is a slightly odd aspect to how they cover this music too. When they cover painting it might be Vermeer or Rego; it will at least involve real talent and articulate comment. When they cover music is tends to be popular commercial trash to which (I suspect) a high % of their listeners are actively averse.
R4 Today has three hours every day to be as good, and agenda setting as the Economist. Its audience will increase if it has a go at being so.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but it's interesting how, for figure like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same.
Alternatively if you have 7 million more people crapping in to the same infrastructure you had 50 years ago it's more than likely to be a capacity issue
Quite. And very little new infrastructure due to the EU waterways directive, which the 'defanged' Environment Agency are still enforcing, even in their apparently toofless state.
But that increase in population has been over many decades.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
The recent (major) increases in population have been going on for about 20 years.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
Well, though, population growth seems to have slowed a lot in the last five years or so, according to that graph, whereas it's precisely in that period, in which we're talking about, where local river and sea complaints seem to have risen most.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
While it has slowed, it is still growing. Many of the underlying systems haven't expanded to match. So a reduction in the rate of population increase just slows down/puts off the point of crossover of demand vs capacity.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
What on earth has gone on with the sewage in recent years. Plenty of the infrastructure is victorian but the dumping of raw sewage seems to have increased massively in recent years. Has the infrastructure all suddenly broken down in the last 5 to 10 years or so ? Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
The Cameron administration, and in particular our Lady Truss, changed the rules and de-fanged the environment agency while in charge, around 2014-16.
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
I'm a leftie, I accept that argument as far as it goes, but it's insufficient. What, in a practical, physical sense, has changed with the infrastructure to make it operate so much more poorly? What needs to be fixed to reverse what has gone wrong in the last 5-10 years?
Any system, ancient or modern, will only work properly if it is maintained. The changes that Cameron and Truss made which removed the powers of the Environment Agency during the tail end of the Coalition meant there was no longer the pressure on the water companies to do maintanance and so they didn't.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
You're right that Truss is probably the main cause, but it's also interesting that it seems to have also got another step worse since 2016.
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low, as the earlier level of EU oversight now wouldn't be there, too. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but I do find it interesting how, for figures like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same, with one flowing into the other, so to speak.
My point being that even had we stayed within the EU it would have made no difference. The failing was cutting the scope and powers of the EA. They are the ones who provided all the data to the EU and enforced EU rulings. Neither of which they could do effectively after the changes of 2014/16.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
The tricky ones get escalated very slowly, after multiple "I don't understand that, can you please tell me what your problem is, or go to our Q&As" kind of responses. I had experience of this recently, it was infuriating. Although when I did get through to an actual person they were so unhelpful I'd have been better off speaking to a ZX81.
The one I've just been using is for a wine company - their robot says up front, to use the phrase "speak to human" at any time if one wishes.
As with nearly everything, the mentality of the specifiers of the system is the important criteria.
Are they motivated to getting a customer to an answer 99.9999% of the time? Or just fobbing them off until they get bored?
Comments
It’s almost like a rubbish re-run of the blitz/fire bombing campaign where the enemy thinks hitting the civilian population will destroy the will to fight and forgetting that you probably need to stop the things that will destroy your own military as a priority.
I must say I'm not a fan of Quentin Letts. He's not someone who's ever struck me as over-burdened with self-awareness, and is possibly the sort of individual that needs some kind of life-changing experience, to get him out of being stuck in various patterns.
And so should any trendy vicar types who start whingeing about the proles' conditions, or about the management of public resources, or anything else for that matter, because hey some of us went to boarding school [*], okay.
He sounds as thick as a brick and cocky with it. If something's acceptable it's not an issue. I wonder what Alicia thinks of him.
Edit - Worth adding of course that this does support the first part of your posting. When the Benin Bronzes were taken in 1897, the slave trade had been effectively extinct in Benin for more than 3 decades.
We need firm regulation of private monopolies. Instead we simply get guaranteed price rises and guaranteed profits. I cannot switch from Northumbria water yet I’ve had a 15% and a 7% increase the last two years.
I'm a civilian and if a missile ever lands on my house because a British administration is at war with a foreign one, I'm unlikely to consider that I've simply taken one for the team without thinking of what the war is about and where it might go.
What do you make of what Prigozhin has been saying? If references to mahogany desks give way to direct criticism of Putin, one of them may be for the chop. That will probably be Prigozhin but if it's Putin then his replacement ain't going to be no peacemaker.
Malc, I suspect, might argue that Scotland has been sold out a few times already!
Europe runs very effectively on privatised medicine. Many if not most EUropean countries have a far better health system than the UK and there is significant private involvement in that. But as it stands that won't work in the UK.
Why? Because in other countries that private input comes with strict controls, regulations and limits on profit. Tell a company they can provide private services but they can only make a maximum 5% profit on those services and most will do the sums and decide it is worth it. A steady profit of 5% it nothing to be sniffed at. Particularly long term. Their work is strictly regulated and the system, almost always, works.
But in the UK we have one main party opposed to any private involvement in health povision and another who thinks it should be a free for all with no regulation. The oft used and utterly idiotic 'light touch' argument.
This is the same across so many other aspects of public service provision. Private input is very much the best way to go as it avoids much of the problem of political expediency which characterised the nationalised services. But it only works if the people in Government have the power to regulate for the best interests of the public/customer. Something the current Tory party as the chamions of privatisation are unwilling or unable to do.
Surely something else has been going on - infrastructure that's worked for ~ 115 to 155 years doesn't suddenly all break at once after 120 to 160.
Note last night's attacks were largely cruise missiles. The KH-101s are well over $10m - and were probably shot down by stuff like IRIS-T, which uses missiles costing around €400k.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/18/radio-4-flagship-today-loses-800000-listeners-in-a-year-to-podcasts-and-rivals
Monbiot has been excellent on this, and in fact probably the key voice on it, for almost three years :
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/13/water-companies-britain-seas-sewage-fines-environment-agency
If you think regulation always tends to be a bad thing, and have private natural monopolies like Water, this tends to be the result.
More on Notre Dame Truss de l'Eau :
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/22/liz-truss-environment-agency-cuts-sewage-water-pollution
This is because the Cameron administration effectively changed the entire model of monitoring to "self-reporting" and self-regulation, which must be near the root of it.
This is where the Brexit cause argument fails. Even inside the EU the removal of the powers of the Environment Agency meant with the best will in the world there was no enforcement powers left even if the EU jumped up and down. Truss (primarily) is the main cause of the current issues.
AIUI, it's also a significant issue in Scotland as well, where the works are publicly-owned.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/calls-to-boost-monitoring-of-sewage-spills-into-scottish-rivers-amid-figures-showing-30-overspills-a-day-4042132
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-65618584
Dumped shit all over the voters.
@Channel4News
"I'm not going to apologise... what was done was done."
Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng refuses to apologise over his time in office alongside Liz Truss, and tells @cathynewman he would like to see lower taxes under Rishi Sunak.
https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1658893308285026304
Apart from the variance in presenters though there does seem to have been a shift away from “hard news” to a lot more coverage of “issues” which I suppose is inevitable as it’s something all pervading in society but the one thing that has really started pissing me off is the seeming need to have something about music every fucking day where you are lying there half-asleep, gently coming round to the day and then they put some banging music on to preview a story coming up later. stop it. Leave it to music stations. Twats.
(This a genuine question - I haven't listened to R4 for years, but it was never pro-government when I listened. It was never pro-government during the Labour years either, but it consistently attacked the government from the left. I'm surprised it's changed its tone.)
I also lament R2 sacking Ken but I couldn't stand Steve Wright!
R6, you may be mildly interested to know, is also shifting its most treasured presenters aside. I used to be constantly tuned to R6. It's still *good*, but no longer *great*.
Amol Rajan is actually pretty good; he seems to do his prep, as he's quite sharp.
BT plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs over the next seven years as it battles to reduce costs - and will replace around a fifth of them with artificial intelligence.
The telecoms giant said its total workforce including contractors will fall from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of the 2030 financial year - a reduction of about 42pc.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/18/ftse-100-markets-live-news-deutsche-bank-lawsuit-epstein/
And so it starts. Thats 11,000 jobs gone to AI
I think what's happened is that you have ideologues cutting regulation, and then you have the same ideologues seeing leaving Europe as an opportunity to keep regulations low, as the earlier level of EU oversight now wouldn't be there, too. Obviously if a different government comes in it can restore regulation at the national level, in more of a Lexiter argument, but I do find it interesting how, for figures like Truss, the two opportunities for lack of regulation seem to have been one and the same, with one flowing into the other, so to speak.
The ones heading towards time expiry are use or lose - you don't want to be around a past-sell-by-date solid fuel rocket motor when it ignites.
Protestors appeared on #TowerBridge at 8.08am. Officers were already on scene. At 8.20am, conditions were put in, and the road cleared.
We’ll continue to tackle serious disruption where it occurs.
https://twitter.com/MetPoliceEvents/status/1659102991037652994?s=20
And a lot of those BT jobs are going because they are currently on a massive infrastructure improvement project once it's done those people won't be needed.
What is happening is that the IT revolution is finally interconnecting systems properly. This is what I do, currently. So a lot of jobs in the "getting data from one system, hacking in Excel, pushing it into another system" category are finally going.
We are heading to a world, where in administration, 99% of operations will be human touch free. As it should be.
In banks for example - I bet you think that a trader trades on a computer and it's all sorted out by the machines? Nope - most places, lots of people in the chain, lots of manual stuff going on.
Where AI *is* being used is in fielding the first level of customer support questions - the chat bots you find online. They can solve 95% of customer problems on the spot. The tricky ones get escalated.
Much of the rest of Europe looks on in bafflement. Even in countries where quite a lot is privatised, as Richard says, proper regulation is much more well-functioning, and less idelogically hamstrung.
Obviously all these things play a part, but the multiply increased local reports of river and sea pollution have been primarily over the last decade. Over the last century there seemed to have been a relative but modest improvement, as I recall.
Radio 2 I cannot really be doing with now. The music is just not for me.
The BBC can do what it wants and abandon a large demographic if it wants, even if they are liecense fee payers, to cater for a younger or more Niche audience. But that demographic will go elsewhere.
Spotify is also a godsend.
As for R4 being a govt mouthpiece that is absurd.
Interestingly, the company setup to build the new infrastructure - https://www.tideway.london/corporate-info/ ...
Worst areas look to be the around the Pennines (Leeds, Manchester). Durham also very poor for it's population (Sunderland more discharges than Birmingham)
https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map
If you pay for an IT consultant living in another country then that's a service import, and that money is lost to the domestic economy.
When I spoke to some local planning officials, recently, they were almost afraid to talk about the requirements for infrastructure - apparently, suggesting that having x hundred thousand more people requires more stuff is a bit icky.
The rest of R4 is pretty lefty to be honest. I think across the BBC it’s the mainstream news bulletins where you feel the hand of government most strongly.
I could go on as Ive just finished working 3 years in the water sector including on the Tidewy project , bur Im off for an old fashioned liquid lunch and have a train to catch. Have a good day and hope you get back on your feet soon.
Buzzword Bingo is correct.
A large part of the increase in population increase in cities is denisfication. In London, 19K people per square KM in the "dormitory" areas, vs 6K in the mid 19th. The pattern has been repeated in many other cities.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation there.
There are some amusing minutes (from civil servants to each other) in the archives at Kew about her "obsession" with atmospheric pollution - CFCs, Sulphur Dioxide (acid rain) and CO2
What she did was to permanently change the Whitehall culture towards this.
We need someone to hammer the systems until it realises the only sane way to run a country is with a ratio of services to population demographics. The current system seems to assume that the population is static.
*Only known ship that leaks, primarily, from the top
R4 Today has three hours every day to be as good, and agenda setting as the Economist. Its audience will increase if it has a go at being so.
A classic example of this was the first round of attempts, by companies, to use Virtual Machines (VMs) for work. This is at the system where your physical computer is just a terminal connecting to a big, remote server farm. The machine you think you are working on, is actually a bit of software in that server farm.
Great for a number of reasons. Security, hardware upgrades etc.
But the first time round, the accountants realised that by not allowing the server farm to grow with the number of users, they could, apparently reduce costs. This meant that everyone using the system saw their VM run slower and slower. Until, finally, it became unusable.
Same resources, more and more people. The system struggles on....
Are they motivated to getting a customer to an answer 99.9999% of the time? Or just fobbing them off until they get bored?